How are you all doing? Thank you for all of your e-mails about your final weeks of summer. I hope you´re all super excited for school to start. I really can´t believe it´s that time of year again. It seems like just last week that I was hearing all about finals and being jealous of all of your trips coming up. Now all that is behind us already? Crazy! But anyways, thank you Grandma, Laurel, Clayton, Pam, Madison, Lexi, Cami, Dad, Mom, Ashley, and Amanda for your e-mails this week. It´s great to hear from my Texan relatives. Cami, what´s this about first place in a horse show? What kind of riding competitions do you do? Jumping? Dressage (sp?)? Tell me more! And thank you everyone for your words of counsel and support. I really feel so boosted up every Monday. It´s like Sunday is my day to recharge spiritually, and Monday is my day to be revitalized familywise. You´re the best family ever.
I feel really good today. Last night Hna. Tua´one and I finally managed to stay up until 10:30 (we felt like we´d been getting too much sleep by zonking out a half hour too early), and then we got up at 6:00 instead ot 6:30 to get some extra running in. It was exhausting, but at the same time I feel so much more refreshed today. Plus we went to the park to write letters and journal, instead of just staying home like we usually do. It´s amazing what a little difference like that can make. I feel like we actually DID something with our time, you know? And the park was gorgeous today with a bright blue sky, fluffy clouds, and flowering trees. Hna. Tua´one brought her little speakers and we listened to our usual Hilary Weeks Christmas CD, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. :)
I´m pretty satisfied with our past week. We worked SO HARD--I feel like harder than I´ve ever worked on the mission before. Our mission has been struggling lately, with frighteningly low numbers. President Madariaga asked us to focus our efforts on finding new people to teach, and that´s exactly what we did. I´m really really glad that my mission is a walking mission. I can imagine how finding new people must be seriously difficult when you´re riding a bike, or worse, driving a car. But when we´re walking every day, it´s so easy to greet people as we go or change our route according to the Spirit or run into interesting people. This week, no doubt because we were being better about being open to the promptings of the Spirit to find people, we had three people in as many days find US in the street and ask us about the church. That like never happens to us, yet it happened three days in a row! It was pretty cool. One of them was a young homeless guy who humbly asked us to talk with him about God. He seemed so hungry for words of hope and a better life. We had a nice lesson with him in a nearby park and gave him all the information he would need to find us and/or the Church again. It´ll be nearly impossible to regularly visit him, of course, but I feel like we really did what God intended for us to do--brighten someone´s day and perhaps start them on the path towards eternal life. The second person was a man who we´ve seen around the neighborhood before, but this week he finally stopped (he rides a bike) and asked more about what we do as missionaries. The last guy did basically the same thing, only he had some random question about where the Israelites´ promised land is on today´s map. He said he´s unsatisfied with every preacher he´s gone to, and he wanted to know if we knew anything about the Bible so he could maybe check out our church. I was very grateful for those maps in the back of the Bible so I could confidently answer his question. We´ll see if anything comes of that encounter.
We did another division this week. Hna. Tua´one went with Isa to one half of our area, and I went to the other half with a girl from our district named Lilian. She just returned from her mission to Salt Lake City four months ago, so she was VERY fun to work with. A) she knows English, B) she loves Utah, and C) she´s an excellent missionary. She´d actually been a missionary in Hna. Tua´one´s home stake, and she says she worked in the Holladay area, too. I was hoping to hear that she´d met some Springers, but she was mostly in Spanish branches so no such luck. Still, it was fun to talk about snow and Temple Square and all that fun stuff. As for our actual lessons, even when I´m not in charge on a division, I´ve been doing a lot better about taking charge in the lessons. I´m a lot more talkative now and a lot less afraid of being rejected. I´ve learned a lot this week with all of our finding that if someone is really a nice person, I can easily be their friend and get a first lesson with them. It´s the outright mean people that I still have problems with, but after being cursed at twice this week for being a "JANKI!" (= "Yankee"), I´m learning to just forget what the non-understanding people say to us. It´s still no fun to be rudely turned away, but it makes all the accepting people all the more wonderful to talk to. :)
After working SO HARD this week, we were expecting to be able to top off our excellent numbers with some great church attendance and quite a few baptisms planned for the end of August. Then...it rained. No, I´m just kidding. For ONCE no rain on Sunday. The weather was gorgeous. But, our investigators still failed us. Not a single one of them showed up. We were SO depressed. For so long we´d been thinking that only the rain was keeping these people from pulling through for us, but it turns out they just don´t really have true interest in coming. Last night and this morning we focused our study time on pondering what we can do better to have more success (as Dad is so fond of saying, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results."). We made the hard decision to drop a lot of people. With a lot of time and effort, I´m positive that we could get them to change their lives. But looking back on this Change, we spent too much time and effort on them when there are probably people out there right now praying to find the Truth. We prayed about our decision, and we feel that it´s best to just keep looking. We´ll keep visiting our investigators, of course, but we need to teach other people. Satan would have us use all of our energy doing "good" things, when there are AMAZING things to be done. Another thing, when I was studying I felt impressed to change our teaching tactics quite a bit. Usually we´re so desperate to get in a first lesson that we´re kind of afraid to mention baptism or the Restoration in the first visit because they´ll turn us away. But we´re not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, and I know that if we open up about that more, we´ll truly find the people who are ready to hear. Perhaps our numbers won´t be as great, but the quality of our lessons will be a hundred times better.
On a less sober note, I ate goat this week! It was weird. It looked and tasted a lot like beef, but it was a lot more tender and just felt foreign in my mouth. Plus I couldn´t stop thinking about all those cute little billy goats I pass on the streets every day. True I pass cows and chickens all day, too, but I think i´m more used to ignoring the fact that I´m eating cow when I chow down on a hamburger, or a chicken when I eat a drumstick. But to just be handed a hunk of meat and be told, "This is goat," it was impossible not to picture it with fur and a face. :) We had some pretty great "American" food this week, too, though. It was Elder Carter´s birthday this week and the youth made him pizza. Usually Paraguayan pizza is WEIRD, but they did a great job of replicating marinara sauce, using mozzarella cheese instead of queso Paraguayo (whatever that is), and putting pepperoni on it instead of just chunks of ham. Elder Carter ate like six slices, and he must have thanked the youth a thousand times for giving him a "taste of home." Hna. Tua´one and I ALMOST had the chance to eat at a really chuchi restaurant this week. We have a friend at a little restaurant called Miga de Pan (I think I´ve mentioned her before), and when we stopped at her place for the first time in months, she was like, "I was so hoping you´d stop by today! I wanted to invite you to my son´s birthday party!" We were so flattered, and really hopeful that her thinking about us meant that she wanted to hear our message (we can´t teach her in her restaurant and we´ve never had the chance to talk with her outside of it). We excitedly told her of course we´d come...and then we learned that the restaurant where the party was to be held is so far into Asunción that it´s not even in our MISSION let alone our zone. Bummer... But we´re still really flattered, and we´re gonna have to find a time to go talk with her and her family at her actual house. I have no doubt she´s going to join the church someday. She loves us missionaries too much and is really an amazing Christian woman.
To end this week´s e-mail, just a little insight I had this week--in the past I used to get kind of depressed thinking about the Last Days. The scriptures make it sound like everything´s going to be in chaos and there will just be wickedness EVERYWHERE and we´ll all just be cowering in our chapels hoping not to be destroyed. I used to get really sad, thinking that my kids won´t have the kind of happy childhood that I had. Then I thought about it, and I realized that yes they totally will. Most of the world is already in chaos with wickedness abounding and the righteous fearing for their lives--EXCEPT (pretty much) in Zion where the Church gathers together to uplift and aid and cheer. With the way the world is, I shouldn´t have had a happy childhood, either, but I did thanks to a righteous family and the Church´s support. As long as I stay righteous and strong in the gospel, my children will have an even BETTER childhood than mine. The future for the fold of God just keeps getting better and better. Nothing can bring us down unless we let it by letting go of what great things we already have.
Well, it´s time to go again. Thank you for everything! I LOVE YOU ALL! Write me!
---Hna. Springer
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