Week Forty-Eight: Following Christ

Area: Arvin Spanish Group

Companion: Hermana White

This week has been really good. We have been working hard down here in Arvin and teaching everyone that we see. It has been really fun getting ready for Christmas during these past couple of weeks. I feel like I have been seeing the influence of Christ during this last little bit in great abundance!

This week, we had a lesson with one of our investigators about tithing and fasting. It was all going pretty well and he agreed to live both of the laws. When we started explaining about fast offerings, Hermana White accidentally said something about giving away the money that we eat. It wasn't any stranger than any of the other mistakes that we make in Spanish, but Hermana White and I looked at each other and started laughing. Once we started, we couldn't stop for a couple of minutes. I am sure that our investigator and our member thought that we were going crazy, but they were patient while we got ourselves together. In the end, it turned out to be a pretty good lesson.

The Navarro Family. They are super cute!

Things have been winding down to the end of Hermana White's mission. Next week, she will be going home and I will get a new companion. That being said, she went on the departing missionary temple trip last Friday and I went with Hermana Luquette and Hermana Badger to live the trio life for a couple of hours. It was a really strange experience! I think that we spend a lot of time as missionaries working to get ourselves used to life in a two person companionship that when we change to working in something other than that, it totally throws us off. Despite the strangeness, it was really fun. We spent a couple of hours working in their area, which happens to be the only Hermana area in the entire mission that I have not served in. It was super cool to spend some time looking around and talking to people there.

We have been working a lot with our recent converts to try and help them to work on their family history. With one in particular, we have been going over a lot to try and help her to find a name to take to the temple. She was able to find some family information about her grandmother, so we went over to help her to set up an account on family search and to print out the name. When we got there, we discovered that she didn't have a computer, so we had to try and use her phone to set it all up. The screen wasn't big enough to let us see all of the web page and all of the instructions were in Spanish, so we were struggling a little bit. To make it all worse, her birth information was inputted wrong in the church records, so we had to find out how to work with that. About every ten minutes, we would have a break through and get a little bit closer to putting in the name. Finally, after two hours, we were able to get her a name to take to the temple. At the end, she told us that we have to learn how to do things step by step, but sometimes they are the steps of an ant. I am a little worried to have to use technology again someday!

Our district. It's a little hermana heavy!

This week, we have been showing a lot of people the new Christmas video from the church. I have been thinking a lot about the example of Jesus Christ. We can all learn so much from studying the life of Christ and doing the things that he did. I am so grateful for the opportunity to change and become better every day of my life through Jesus Christ and to be able to serve the Lord literally all day long, every day. It is such a blessing to be a missionary!

Well, that is just about it for the week. I hope that you all are doing good things and that Christmas preparations are going well for you. I love you all so much. Have a good week!

Hermana Blau

The dusty air in Arvin every time the weather changes. Scary!