What a week this has been. It's amazing how quickly time flies. I'm almost finished with my capacitacion....seriously I can't believe it. I'm just a little bit stressed out about cambios in the next couple of weeks, but like Hermana Rios always says... "yeah, pues, ni modo" haha. (Basically means yeah, whatever haha).
But anyways, this week. My technological curse seems to be rubbing off on my companion...she called her family on Skype this last Tuesday and had even more problems than me! (Mother's day in Bolivia is different than here in the US and that is why she called later) It was kinda rough, but she was able to talk to them and it ended up working out. It's amazing how encouraging it is to be able to talk to our families! I am SO grateful for my family and all of their love and support...you guys are seriously the BEST. :)
Another interesting thing that happened this week is that we were able to find a man that was baptized about a year ago, but had practically disappeared off the face of the earth. Turns out that he and his family had encountered some difficulties and had moved houses and a whole bunch of things had been happening. But when we went into their house they had a Libro de Mormon sitting on their coffee table with a whole load of Liahonas...and in his prayer at the end of our first lesson he said that he had been praying that someone would come and visit him, and we came. It was so neat to hear how the Lord had guided us to this man who so badly needed our visit. Hopefully we can help him overcome these rough parts of his life and help his wife and daughter accept the Gospel in their lives as well!
The big event of this week, though, was the BAPTISM we had on Saturday. It was such a beautiful service and Ana B. was basically beaming the whole time. BUUUTTT...it was quite the adventure to get to that point. I will never forget that day haha...for more than one reason!
We started off the day by heading to the church building to clean out and fill up the baptismal font. We went early because we were supposed to have a service activity with the Elders to help someone build a bathroom for their house, but first off, the keys weren't at the house of the first counsellor like they usually are, so we had to travel to the bishop's house and back...which took us like 20 minutes, then when we got to the church building, the baptismal font was still full from the baptism Elder Lauder and Elder Miranda had had last weekend....grrr haha. So we had to go around looking for where in the world we could find the switch that would empty the font...so that took about another half hour. Once we finally figured out how that worked, we had to wait for the font to empty! So we started cleaning the building and getting the room all ready for the baptism. By the time we were supposed to be heading to the service project the font was still like an hour and a half of wait time from being empty...so we had to track down the elders, tell them where the house was for the service project, then go back to the chapel and clean and wait some more. Once 11.30 rolled around, and we'd run out of things to clean and organize, we decided to make the process a little faster. So I got a bucket from the cleaning closet and started carting buckets and buckets and buckets of water to the bathroom haha. Goodness water sure can be heavy!!
After about 20 minutes of that the font was finally empty. We cleaned it and started letting it fill up. The elders came and our ward mission leader and we had correlacion missional. When that was over, the font still had a long way to go before it was filled. We decided to leave the water flowing, go to lunch and come back. Elder Miranda said it'd be fine because there's a drain outside the font that the water would go into so that it wouldn't overflow. Sooooo yeah. We went to the Stake Presidents house and had a wonderful lunch. By the time we got back to the church building, it'd been about an hour and a half.....when we opened the door to the building we had a wonderful, wet surprise waiting for us...a baptismal font completely full AND half of the hallway and classrooms with a good portion of water. When we saw it, we ran and turned off the water, then went to work trying to sweep the water out of the chapel. We were pretty much laughing the whole time...because there wasn't really anything else we could do, and it was just so funny! Thankfully the whole building is tile, so there wasn't any damage done, just a lot of work haha :)
Finally, after everything was dry again, we locked up the chapel, headed to the one appointment we could make it to for the day, and headed back to the chapel for the baptism. It went splendidly. The whole family of the girl getting baptized was there, as well as a good number of ward members (which is quite unusual for this ward). The bishop and Elder Miranda shared a message, we took pictures, had the baptism, and had a couple musical numbers from the Young Women and Hermana Rios and I. It was really neat. She shared her testimony at the end and the spirit was so strong. Nobody had brought anything for a refreshment, so Hermana Rios and I ran to a nearby corner market thing and bought some soda and cracker/cookie things. Thankfully there was enough for everyone. It was such a crazy, wonderful experience, and the most important part was that Ana B. felt the Spirit and had a good time. :)
From this experience I learned that a lot of times in our lives things don't work out the way we want or expect them to, but what matters is how we react. The Lord lets unexpected things happen in our lives, and it's up to us to decide how we'll react. I love how in the scriptures it talks about the example of Nephi...that he and his people lived "after the manner of happiness". It doesn't say that they were happy only when good things were happening, but that their entire manner of living was happy. I hope that when things go differently in your lives than you expected that you can think about the example of Nephi and his people and try to live "after the manner of happiness" no matter your circumstances.
Sure do love you all! Hope you have a wonderful week!
Love,
Hermana Garner
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