First of all we had changes!! I was so happy to stay for my third change here in this ward named The Conce, and I have a new companion!! And she´s my first gringa companion! Haha her name is Hermana Jones, and she went to BYU before the mission, is really cool and also did cross country so we´ve been going on runs in the morning in our exercise time. It has been funny because I have realized that I am now at the point where it feels more comfortable talking just speaking in Spanish, and so this week has been full of some good spanglish conversations. The first day it was hilarious because we were talking in English and then passed by the house of a member and I talked for about 30 seconds in English to the member without realizing it and that she was just like ummmm.... ey don andurstan...
This week I really began to learn about the importance of the spirit. As missionaries there is no goal to force information or convince people that what we believe is correct, rather to help them understand God´s eternal truths. The spirit gives us feelings of is comfort, gives us feelings of assurance of what is correct or incorrect, and gives us the desire to change who we are and we are doing. God´s eternal truths can only be understood by listening to the Spirit, so if I as a missionary am not listening to what the Spirit guides me to do or say, I can have no success.
It´s sometimes hard to know if what I am saying are really my words or the words of the Spirit, but this week I had an experience where I learned pretty clearly what it meant to be guided, or not be guided. A girl was asking a bunch of doctrinal questions, in the mission it is called "Bible bashing" because she was pulling out a bunch of things out of context to contend with the Restoration of Jesus Christ. I mistakenly thought that if I tried to convince her with other scriptures I could convince her that she was wrong, and was teaching just from my personal knowledge and getting heated up as I explained, I was contending too!! She then asked me a question that really stumped me. I had no idea what the answer was, and my mind just went blank. How weird I thought, normally the answer just pops in my head I´m able to teach cleary and simply. But then it all came down on me that I had no answer because the Spirit had left me, and luckily my companion saved it and gave the most simple and pure response that the Spirit was able to testify to her more powerfully than anything I could ever said. Let me remind you that my companion can´t roll her Rs, and what she said wasn´t anything magnificent but what it did was it brought the Spirit. It was a huge lesson to me that the Spirit doesn´t speak to us with a voice of thunder, rather than with simple thoughts that come to our head about what feels good, what feels right. After that lesson I felt horrible, and from that moment I vowed to never do anything like that again! Libre soyyy! Let it gooo, let it gooo
Also something funny that happened this week was that it started POURING rain, like serious thunderstorm and we needed to catch a bus that was just leaving and didn´t see us so we ran through mini-lake puddles literally sprinting until it stopped to drop people off and we thought oh Good it will wait for us, and then it started leaving again so you can just imagine two little gringa americans in dresses in the pouring rain running for our lives for this bus. And then I tripped and fell in the mud. And it never stopped. Good times!
I love you all!! Have a good week!
Hermana Bernal
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