Hola familia!
Loved your emails this week- it's amazing how I can feel love literally oozing from them. It's wonderful.
So this week was a little weird. Our mission, along with the Oakland mission in california are testing some pilot programs to work out the kinks before they are implemented in the missions all over the world. I'm sure the church has tons of those all over, but it's kind of exciting to get to be a part of the newness! The unfortunate part is that there are DEFINITE kinks. The first program is about how we can implement family history into our finding. Seemed like the idea and tools would be great resources for the English missionaries, not so much for the Spanish. We can barely get people interested in their own salvation let alone their ancestors salvation. So...we're just hanging in there for the next 10 years until the material makes it into Spanish. Then we'll think about it :)
The second was about stress. We all had to take one of those self-eval tests to figure out where our stress levels were and it put us in a category of: green, yellow, orange, or red. As you could guess, green= healthily dealing with stress and red=call the mission president asap because you are breaking down. My companions were both GREENS and as I was taking the test I was like, "wow, I'm so going to be a green, so low stress right now..." So to my blessed heart's surprise I was ORANGE. hahaha I guess I live at a rather high level of stress. After we took the test we had a little rundown about how stressed we are and had to talk about what stressed us, and then the leaders of those who took the test had a follow up meeting with President. The whole thing kind of backfired for us and we walked away SUPER STRESSED. It's like you go through missionary life just doing what we do and when hard times come along you just kind of deal the best you can and keep going. This test sort of stopped us in the middle and held a sign with a big arrow pointing to us that said: "LOOK HOW STRESSED YOU ARE!" and then kind of left us hanging...so suddenly everybody was like, "wow, I'm actually really stressed..." Needless to say there were breakdowns in our apartment all week. None by me, luckily, I think my naturally anxious self is more or less accustomed to intense internal stress haha, but it's supposed to help new missionaries cope with stress. My comps and I did several evaluations this week: the stressors we can eliminate, cope, and reduce, how we can do that, etc. So I did what should have been done long ago- turned over the driving responsibilities to Hna Farley! YEAH! Driving has always always caused me a LOT of anxiety and so I was more than happy to extend that invitation. Kind of hard letting go of the control...I've realized as an oldest child that I really am an OLDEST CHILD through and through, so being in control and in charge is my thing, but it's been so nice. I've felt like I've been on vacation the past few days- I've been the driver since transfer #2 and it's just great NOT driving :) ALSO, you will love this. We do those relaxation exercises ALL THE TIME. The woman on there, Shannon, is probably like the best thing that ever happened to us. I've got the whole apartment of missionaries asking to listen to "Shannon" during meal times hahaha...if only she knew! Thanks for sending those!
As for the other stuff of the week- we paired up with the elders in our ward and the english elders around here and went to an open air flea market to snag people and get them really excited about being baptized! It was like 107. There was like nobody there. hahaha lots of sweating and not a lot of new investigators. It was kind of a fun idea, we had this HUGE board that attracted zero attention and all got a little sun, but it was a good try :)
So a member of our ward is having a baby tomorrow (a scheduled c-section) and we were chatting with her this week, you know, the pre-baby chat, and she had not thought of a single name! We were like WHAT?! (stressed as usual) and she was like, "When I had my last baby the missionaries just picked out a name and little Daisy Michelle here was their choice, so why don't ya'll come up with some names for me?" (if she spoke english, she'd talk like that I'm sure.) We were all like, "is this a JOKE?!" Firstly: Daisy Michelle? Secondly, you left that up to the missionaries?" Not a joke.Very serious. So we went all missionary on her and chose Sariah (sa-ree-ah) as in, mother of Nefi. Or Nephi as you Americans would say, haha. She seemed to like it- I'd feel pretty honored if their was a little hispanic child wandering around with a name we picked out, haha! Also, she has no one to accompany her tomorrow...her husband is working and her sister is watching her 3 little kids and she doesn't really know many people at church and has no friends, so she asked us if we could go with her to HAVE HER BABY tomorrow. I'm going to put that on the list with "Can you come to jail and help me bail out my husband?" of crazy things I never thought I'd do on the mission. So unless we can find a member who doesn't have small kids or work tomorrow, 5 am tomorrow we are at the hospital helping a woman have a baby. What is not to love about missionary work?! I really love that we can actually be OF SERVICE to people. It's nice :)
As far as spreading the good word this week, we actually have some progressing investigators! YEAH! It's kind of rare. Like, people CAME TO CHURCH because they WANTED to. Our Peruvian family is on the rocks...the rocky rocks of separation, which makes the teaching situation VERY awkward. They are kind of avoiding us, but still coming to church, so we're just hoping that we can figure out a way to help them. It's all so sad- a lot of lying and misunderstanding. I am just CONVINCED that relationships of any substance need serious amounts of Atonement to work. Our favorite Honduran man is doing great- he came to church and is loving reading the Book of Mormon. He kept giving us super LAME excuses on sunday mornings for not coming to church. He's been unemployed for a few weeks so we promised him that if he came to church that he would find a job...and what do you know, the man that gave him a ride all but hooked him up with a job. THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE. Blessings of church attendance! So we're pretty excited about his progress. Gospel Principles class was about baptism and he basically said to the class he wanted to be baptized. I'm pretty sure my jaw was hanging open. I know in some missions baptisms are like mosquitoes and it's no big, but in my experience it's a pretty big deal, so we're STOKED.
I feel it in my bones that I have just a few days left in Chesterfield and I'm off to other grand missionary adventures next week. I'll find out for sure Sunday what is going to go down, but if you can just toss me into your prayers that would be great. You know the relationship I have with change (i.e. hate it but get bored without it and get really anxious if I don't know about it) and President kind of suggested a possible change in my future that is pretty different from what I've been doing, which pretty much blew my mind, but may not happen, in which case would all be very anti-climactic. SO...moral of the story, missionary work as usual in whatever tongue the Lord asks me to speak is exactly what I'm here for, so I'm flexible and care free in all my stress :) Just pray that God tells president EXACTLY what needs to go down in this transfer...
I love you all so much! Sorry I didn't have time to respond to you all individually, I'm going to try and crank out some serious letters today. Sin embargo, I'm so happy to hear from everyone and hear how things are going in everyone's lives. Maybe it's the quality-timer in me, but a letter or an email feels like a pretty big display of love! And love from people I love is just about the greatest thing ever.
Hermana Sinclair
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