How Great Thou Art!!!

Monday, January 27, 2014

I have so much to write! A lot has happened since the last time I wrote all of you.

Monday! We invited family B_____ to get baptized!!  And they accepted!  It was really beautiful!  We watched the video about Joseph Smith and after that the member family that we were with bore these really beautiful testimonies.  The moment was perfect and we invited them to be baptized on the 23 of Feburary!  The dad is the most excited about all of this.  His life has been a hard one.  He seems like one of those people that has been searching for truths like this all of his life.  He is one of those people that God can touch really easily because he has been broken.  His wife seems more hesitant but I think she is excited too.  Their daughter also accepted.  It was a really beautiful lesson and I was super excited!  We also did a temple tour with them on Saturday and it went great!  I love showing people here that baptism is so not enough.  I love showing them that God has more, that God has a plan for us and he is going to help us be happy!  Not just the kind of happy where we always have His spirit with us, but the kind of happy that lasts forever with our families!  The more I study this plan, the more I see that this plan could have only been made by the careful hands of our perfect God and Master Creator.

Tuesday M_____ also accepted a baptism date!!!  for this Sunday!!!  That makes four!!!  M____ has changed so much!  I wish there was a way to describe him but there really just is not.  He is so great! He used to be so crazy... let´s be honest he is still a little crazy but now it is a humble and a teachable crazy.  But we really need your prayers because now he is trying to quit smoking.  That would be the only thing that stops him from having his baptism.  He is really excited.  So many miracles have happened in his life.  He told us from the beginning that he is missing the "umbilical cord" that he had before with God.  His daughter has come back to see him more often, and he has found work.  He is doing so well!  It is just the smoking part.  Please pray for him this week!  We need all of the prayers we can get.  That is pretty much all we can do to help him now.  We also took M_____ to the temple on Saturday.  It was a little overwhelming to him but I don´t really blame him the missionaries that gave the tour piled on like 12 compromisos I think he felt a little overwhelmed.  He is funny because he really wants to know about the garment, and things like that and we keep telling him that he does not have to worry about it.  So I am not too worried that he was confused about the temple.  We can worry about those covenants later with him.  He is awesome and I know he will make it to the temple one day!

The rest of the week was pretty calm but we were obviously pretty happy.  My other favorite visit was I_____.  He is the sweet man in the hospital.  We had an awesome idea and went with Y_____. Oh my word that women is adorable!  I really love her!  She inspires me to face the world head on! She inspires me to do things with a force of faith and hope.  She made a decision with her job but continues to run around like a chicken with her head cut off to provide for her family.  She is an inspiration.  She wants to visit people with us.  Which is funny because she is not a member so we were smart.  I_____ is still as full of faith and love as he was last week.  He is so sweet!  He has another operation today and they are taking off his other foot.  But he is not sad -- he told us.  He continues in faith all of the way to the end.  He told us he was completely at peace.  Afterwards we started singing hymns with him.  We sang one and then my comp asked him what was his favorite. He told us "How Great Thou Art!"  That song could not be more fitting.  He has more respect and love for this God than almost anyone that I have ever seen.  So we started singing and this time, instead of just listening he sang with us.  It was one of the most beautiful moments ever!  We were all bawling.  The spirit was so strong!  Y______ left completely convinced!  It was really beautiful!  She told us that it really marked her.  Especially his prayer at the end.  It was really beautiful!  The way he talks to God is the way we all should talk to God!

Saturday was obviously a bummer!  I lost my "mommy!"  I was pretty bummed to see her go.  I thought that I would have liked to have a change but I was wrong.  I really enjoyed working with her! It was fun!  We got along great and we worked hard!  We were such good friends that we were basically sisters.  So I was pretty bummed to see her go.  She left to La Reina ... which is not too bad. She is still really close.  We visited all of the people that she wanted to visit before she left and I cried in almost every one.  I can´t imagine leaving P____'s house forever. That would be terrible!  Which is why it just won´t happen.... I have to come back here.  I can´t leave them forever.  I am going to miss my companion!  She was really good to me!  I don´t think I really explained her well enough.  She is and forever will be one of my best friends!  She was so patient with the whole range of emotions I go through in one day.  She changed me.

Ready for your lesson this week on love?  I love loving!  It works!  I have been praying for it and I feel it!  This week I was able to look at all of these people as Hermana Maciel had to say goodbye and I realize how much I love them!  They are so important to me!  God is teaching me!  He is slowly teaching me how to devote everything to Him!  I love being His student!  My love for Him increases everyday!  I love the book that talks about how when God chose to love us He chose to leave Himself vulnerable.  I thought about that a lot recently.  It hurts to say goodbye!  I wondered if it was really worth it.  But I know it is!  God has this plan to make us happy and it includes a lot of ups and downs because it includes people not things.  It includes people who are not perfect, who get sick or who make bad choices.  But for some reason He has found that that kind of happiness is what makes it all worth it!  That is why He works so hard to seal us together in the temple!  He wants us to have those relationships that bring so much love forever!!  I love showing people that!  And then to make it even better, we get to fall in love with a God who IS perfect!  Who NEVER makes bad decisions and who loves us with a perfect infinite love!  Loving Him is the true joy that makes all of this worth it!  And the power of His son who has the power to make us holy can make us holy enough to receive that kind of love!  What a marvelous plan!  I agree with my friend I_____: "How Great Thou Art!"

I love you all!  Thanks for your prayers!  I need them!  I am a blessed missionary but turns out a weak one too.  It is a good thing God still loves me so much.  No matter how crazy I am;)  I love you all so much!  You are what make me happy!  There is nothing that brings me more joy than remembering that you are mine forever!  What a blessing!

Hermana Webb

'Well, I am putting on Mormon aren't I?'

This week was great!  It was also a bummer.  This is going to show how spoiled I am, but we had a couple of days this week where we did not have a single lesson in a house.  I know that is a normal occurrence in Thailand, but it is not in Chile.  Usually we get into at least on house.   But at the end of the week when I thought I had a right to complain, my companion and I tried to think of the miracles that happened this week and we found that we really can´t complain because the miracles continue.

Let´s start of with this weeks funnies shall we?  He, he, he ... we have good ones this week.  We were contacting in the street and contacted this nice old man who did not understand accents very well. First of all, he thought I told him that we were prisoners sharing a message about Christ.  (misioneras, prisioneras) Once we got him straight on that, I started telling him about Joseph Smith.  I told him that when he went to the grove of trees to pray he saw God.  But naturally, this cute old man got the word orar (to pray) mixed up with orniar, which means go pee. He repeated what he thought I said, and said 'when Joseph went to urinate, he saw God?!!'  I thought he said pray so I said: SI!.... It is a good thing my companion was there to stop me and say "NO, ORAR" (pray)!  It was classic.  So the whole week we had an awkward image in our heads and making us laugh of Joseph going pee instead of praying.  Then yesterday, we were teaching these two brothers who are menos activos.  We teach them during their work.  They are conserjes.  We did this huge lesson on priesthood this last week and we were trying to do a review.  We started by talking about prophets.  We were trying to help them remember that prophets have the priesthood.  So my comp said 'what is the thing that only men have?'  It was so great because both of the brothers just look at each other and started laughing.  Then I totally lost it!  I put my head down on a desk thing and basically laughed for the whole lesson.  My comp tried to make it better by saying 'no I mean what power?'  But that just confused him more and S______ said: "well they have the power to make women pregnant!"  That made it even worse.  But wait...there is more!   A member passed by and told them that they needed to keep listening to us because the church was a fountain of beautiful really awesome women (then pointed at us).... I wanted to kill this member.  I tried to smooth it over by telling them that he said that because we believe families can be together forever and so we have a lot of hope in who we marry.  Then Hermana Maciel finished off her very blonde moment with looking at S_____ and said 'don´t you want a family forever?' It totally sounded like she was asking if he wanted a family forever with her! It was terrible!  But very funny!  We are so awkward!

First, our miracle was Y______! I love her so much!  She is still progressing really well.  She is trying to find a different job so she can go to church and spend at least a little time with her son. S he is so cute but I feel impatient.  I keep thinking that she should have found a job by now but she has not.  I told her about my impatient-ness and she laughed and said 'no, this is good.  I obviously have something more to learn.  It is all about progression right?'  I wanted to take off my name tag and pass it to her.  This is the women who when we first met her was not sure if she believed in God or not.  Now we continue to pray.  But, she did find a better job.  She is not working for the community and so she gets paid more and she does not have to work as much.  It also means that she can be with her son more.  We are still missing Sunday unfortunately.  I am trying to be more patient now because of her example. 

We went to visit this old man in the hospital this week.  It was homework from the bishop.  He had heard of this man that is a member that has been in the hospital for a long time and his family cannot come see him because they live in the south and work all week.  So we went to go see what was up. We found this cute little man who was very skinny, blind and with out both feet in this big dark hospital room.  They recently amputated his feet and he lost his site a long time ago. T o make things worse, he is far from his family and he recently found out that his daughter died of cancer.  If someone were to just look at that picture of his life, it would look so dark and with out hope. But that was this opposite of this cute little man!  He was absolutely full of love and hope for God.  He told us his story.  He told us how he found the church and how he served God and his family for his whole life.  He told us about his children and his grandchildren.  Then he looked at us and with eyes full of a deep love and obvious pain and said but, "I am happy!"  It really hit me because this man was not fake about it.  He knew his life was hard.  He knew that he had to fight all of his life and that things were not looking up, and yet he had an absolute faith in his Savior.  Mom sent me an article about hope that I really liked!  It says that hope is like a woman with her eyes wet with fresh tears but looking steadfastly ahead for the light that she knows is there. (I am quoting the article, Sara, I am not being corny!)   I really liked that because I could see it in this man.  It was a really sweet experience! My comp is worried he is kind of there to die.  I am going to be really bummed if that is what happens!  I have kind of fallen in love with the man.  

P_____´s family are still doing great!  They are so cute!  E_____ has this weird phobia of praying out loud.  He refuses to do it with anyone!  But he did it with his twins this week!  P_____ caught him teaching them how to pray!!  Sometimes I want to calm those crazy kids down because they can make it so hard for them to progress, but then other times, they are totally the key to that progress! Thank you P_____ and R______! 

M_______ also continues to progress! He wants to get baptized but he keeps telling us that he can´t because he is not ready for the covenants in the temple because he does not know what they are. We keep trying to tell him that getting baptized does not mean that he has to go to the temple, but he is not getting it.   He is a very funny man!  I wish I could explain him to you guys.  He is just one you have to meet... But he goes to church every week and we are visiting him twice a week now so he is really progressing.  When I asked him if we could visit him again on Saturday he said:  'Well, I am putting on Mormon aren't I?'  'I need to see you guys more often!'  He also asked me that if he gets baptized if he has to cry during his testimony.  He is classic. 

It was a great week!  I love being here!  I laugh, I get frustrated, I cry, I get super excited, and I find real progression!  I have been praying for a real love and I am finding it!  It grows every day!  God is so good at what He does!  He has a better plan!  It is so much better than just washing us clean!  With the covenants we have made it is more than just not sinning!  God has a plan to make us holy!  He has a plan to make us want only good and seek after it!  This plan is not to bug us or to give us limits, but it is to help us soar!  He really is the perfect teacher.  And, if we use all of the little things he has sent us He will change us!  I thought a lot about the sacrament this week.  We get it every week.  It is made to sanctify us.  Baptism cleansed us but now we have to change!  Thanks for everything family! I love you all so much! 

Thanks for the fun news of my nephew! I am so excited to come home to two! I love him already! 

Hermana Webb

A really beautiful step getting there . . .

How are you all!?  I am discovering that it is kind of a bummer that I cannot talk to you guys as much as I would like. I want to tell you all how very much I love you but I can´t do it as much as I would like. So please take all of the !!!!!!!!!! as so much excitement that my love that I am sending over email lasts for days;).  That way you should all feel love from Carlie/Hermana Webb once or twice a day! I love you all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had a cute moment this week! People think we are so great! Which is awesome but also a lot of responsibility!  We are always called angels and we get really beautiful moments when we think that we are not making an impact and then suddenly we realize how much of an impact we are making.  It happened this week with a sweet manos activo that we have been visiting.  She is adorable.  She is a little grandma who does not want to go back to church.  She always seemed kind of frustrated when we would come over and so I did not think we were doing anything.  We went over this week and she let us in and told us that she was heading out to work for two months in a orphanage.  She is this little grandma that totally does not have the physical strength to do it but is going to do it anyway because she wants to show love to these girls who never get it.  She was an orphan herself and so she knows the story well!  We were pretty bummed and told her that it could mean that this will be the last time that we get to be together.  We asked her who she would like to say the opening prayer and she said she would.  She started to cry as she thanked God for the angels that he had sent to her house.  It was really sweet.  We did not think we were doing anything for her.  She is the angel!  She was raised in many different homes, and never had real parents to love.  She lost her husband when she was super young and has suffered through much more!  Yet, she has stayed tender and loving!  God is good to us!  The words to that song continue to play in my head: "the only thing that's good in me is Jesus."  It is so true!

This week was another really great week.  The work continues to progress here in Chile.  It is slow but we are pushing;).  Our most exciting bits of news are P____ and E_____. I love them so much!!! Are you surprised?  We finally found a night when we got to go do a temple tour.  That is one of the perks of this mission; the temple is in our mission so we get to do temple tours.  They loved it!!  We asked them to not bring their kids so it ended up being this really sweet night out and they got to go just the two of them.  We told them we would meet them where the buses pick us up at 8:00 and by ten to, they had called us like three times worried they had gotten the time wrong.  I am going to send a picture of them but they were so fun!  They were dressed very fancy.  We went with them and another family in our ward.  E_____ is so cute! He does not talk very much but when he does, it is usually something beautiful.  He is struggling a lot but he continues to push forward.  We talked about who the Savior is for each of us and he just said "my brother!" Then when we talked about baptism, I asked him how he felt watching his daughters get baptized and he got emotional and told us that he cried during both.  P_____ has this dream of E_____ getting baptized first and then baptizing her.  He really liked that idea!  P____ is as cute as she can be!  She knew the answers to all of the questions and was holding her husbands hand the entire time!  They were this perfect couple! Then we went to the temple!  We told them that their family can be together forever!!  We told them that one day they can all enter in their white clothes and look at the mirrors and see their family forever and ever!  It was so beautiful!  It is awesome now because they know their goal!  It is not just baptism!   Baptism is awesome but the temple is our goal!  Families forever is where we want to be and baptism is just a really beautiful step getting there! 

The other family that I am really excited about is the familia B_____! They are so great! They are progressing really beautifully!  We went to thier house last night with the Bishop.  It was the first time we had ever left with him and he actually did a really good job.  He admits that it is hard for him to share the gospel which is funny because his wife is totally like grandpa and runs around with all of her little pass along cards.  It was a really beautiful lesson about the plan of salvation. At the end, we challanged them to be baptized!  And they accepted!!  They don´t have a date yet, because we did not feel like that was a very good idea but we are going to try to set a date next week!  I love teaching families!  I love that they have the possiblity of being together forever!! I  love testifying of that!  In fact, I think there are people that are tired of hearing about it but that is just too bad!  Because the chance of having a family forever is just to beautiful to pass up! 

That is it for this week.  I love you all so much as always!!  I have learened a lot in my scriptures from the end of Ether.  It is a sad ending to a civilization and I was thinking a lot about how Satan got them there.  Elder Holland used the quote "a journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step" and said that it can be used the other way around too.  satan used small and simple things to make the people terrible beasts ready to kill even children.  I am not saying that satan is going to make us killing machines if we ever feel prideful but what I am saying is I don´t think these people ever wanted to become what they had become. satan can lead us in directions that we never wanted to go!  God wants to lead us to where we can have the deepest desires of our hearts.  satan wants to fill us with so much anger, pride, or lust that we are blinded and cannot even really see what is right in front of us for what it really is.  While God wants to lift us higher and not just help us see here and now for what it is but He wants us to see the eternal perspective.  satan wants us to focus so much on ourselves that we lose the joy of what life can bring when we lose even the most basic human emotions that make us happy.  God wants to fill us with, not just love, but His love, a pure love, that can conquer any weakness or sin, ... it is so strong that with the binds of His love even death itself loses its sting.  satan does not care how we get there just as long as we end up miserable.  God has carefully created a personal path for each of us that leads through His only begotten sacrificed Son so we can get back to His loving arms.  Mom always says that for satan we are just a number, but God knows everything! He knows our names and how many hairs are on our head!  So the lesson is don´t let satan change things to the way he wants us to see them.  It ends up hurting.  God does not want us to hurt without purpose.  I love being a part of this church!  I love having the hope that God will do everything He promised me and preserve me from that awful monster of Hell .... how Nephi put it.  I am sorry to focus on satan.  I am not ... I am I am just grateful that my God is so good!  He will save us no matter how terrible things look!  Just like President Eyring said in the last conference, 'We can be happy in these crazy times -- we just have to keep loving God and our families!' That is not too hard for me to do!!!  You guys make me happy!  Thanks for everything!  Share the gospel with someone this week! The world needs it!

Hermana Webb

It is our turn to share it!

How are you all?  I am so great!  Life here in Apoquindo is pretty calm.  This week was great!  We have been really blessed with great investigators.

First Y_____.  I love her so much!  It does not matter if I feel tired and grumpy ... she turns my world around and helps reminds me that I am so blessed that I have been given so much that I should just be counting all of my blessings.  She has so much faith!  She is so happy and makes me so happy!  After the lesson, Y____ said a prayer on our knees.  It was so beautiful!  She is way too good to us!  I love her so much!  She just.... I don´t know, we just connect! She gets to me and makes me feel happy and have more energy and I love it!  She thanked God for the angels He had sent to her house and she told God she wanted to follow Him but needed a way to do it.  She is going to have to exercise a lot of faith but we are going to be right there with her!  I love her!

On New Years we ate dinner super late at a members house.  They are an awesome family!  That night we almost watched fire works.  We have a balcony and so we were outside to see them but all we could see were the colors of the fire works.  That is okay we really had fun with the poppers mom sent. 

M_____ is doing super well!  He makes me so happy!  He gave us a present this week and he had carefully taped flowers to every part of the present. He is so great! He finally understands why prophets are important.  He connected the priesthood with prophets this week and it was like a light bulb!  The other good news is he started believing in Satan this week.  We are making progress! We still have to help him understand that Jesus never sinned and we are resurrected, not reincarnated.  But I am serious - he has made a TON of progress. He makes me happy! 

The family B______ is doing really well too!  This week's lesson was awesome! They loved church last week and went again yesterday.  They are super sweet and were talking all about the different talks that they liked during sacrament meeting.  (Which were about Jesus!  - I was so proud!)  The lesson continued to go super well. I really had ganas to jump up and do a small dance on the ceiling.  I am sure my face looks so funny because I don´t hide emotion very well, but I was so excited.  We have some additional challenges that I soon discovered, but we'll work them through.

 

People always told me before the mission that I would feel the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.  I never believed them.... now I do.  It is crazy how many emotions I go through in one day.  That is the other difference.  I don´t usually have just good days or just bad days they are all mixed in together.

P____ and her family are doing great!  I love them so much!  Our "lessons" with them now are just us sitting and listening to their family night.  They each take turns giving it.  Last night V____ gave this beautiful lesson on repentance.  Where else could I have experiences like this!!?  I am so lucky!  I love this family so much!

I think that is about it!  I had an awesome conversation with my roommate about none other than love!  It was so beautiful!  I love love!  It makes everything work! Hermana R_____ said that every thing that she had intolerance for changed because God sent people that she began to develop love for.  It was so cool!  She said one of them was Chile!  She did not like people from Chile and this is the last place she wanted to go.  But now that she is here and knows the people she is in love.  It is the motivation for everything!  Everyone always asked how the Atonement can change our hearts, ... I believe it is love!  It is the only thing powerful enough because it is the only thing that can last forever.  Like dad said: because God is the source of it, it is also really powerful!  I am learning more about it every day!  Every thing God does is to help us learn and progress.  He wants us to be free and to love people the way we want to.  satan on the other hand does not.  he only wants to bind us!  It is so sad to watch people let him do it.  he just wants us miserable.  But, we don´t have to fear because God will always win, through the Atonement of His son (The most beautiful act of love that there is!) And, thanks to His merciful Atonement we can have access to that type of love and charity that lasts forever.  The kind that Moroni explains that is patient and kind and never compares and just wants what is good for others.  Not for attention but because of love ... no mas.  I love tasting that love!  As Lehi said, it really is the sweetest there is! 

I love you all so much!  I hope you know how absolutely happy you all make me!  I am so blessed with my family!  Do something with or for the missionaries this week!  The prophets are pretty serious about hastening this work!  Now is the time!  I am so excited!  God wants us to share the love and hope we feel!  We have been blessed enough to have it for so long that it is our turn to share it!  I love you all! 

Hermana Webb.