One more day and I’ll have finished 11 months in the mission… That’s kind of weird to say…
This week was pretty normal, as far as you can get with a companion who’s dying (finishing, for those of you that don’t know mission slang). He’s spent some time packing and preparing himself to leave, so I’ve got some funny pictures of him as he took all his stuff out and put it back so it was all nice and orderly! It’s like when you clean your room and find a whole bunch of cool stuff that you forgot about!
But anyway, this week we didn’t really see anything very interesting as far as pictures go. I have a few from our district (without the Hermanas, anyway), eating 2.5 liters (about 0.6 gallons) of ice cream…
But this week we’ve seen a couple of miracles and it’s been pretty cool to see the hand of God in our lives. Here are some of the more recent ones:
We were looking for a person we received as a reference and ended up teaching one of his neighbors, Abraham. He was just chilling in his house with his family, and his son in the other room had some crazy music from the jungles of Peru playing really loud in the background. So we taught Abraham about the Restoration of the Gospel, and right when we got to the part about Joseph Smith’s first vision — the part, as any missionary knows, that brings the Spirit more strongly than any other — the music in the background disappeared for the entire story! And when we moved on to the rest of the lesson the music came back, but you could barely hear it! It was really cool!
About a week ago we went to visit a less-active sister in the area, named Haydé, that hadn’t come to church for a while because her whole family has a lot of problems with their house: the people that live near her weren’t letting them have any water for a long time, and they had to build two other houses for her family, to name a few of the things. But we went to visit her and helped her remember that she needs the help of her Heavenly Father if she’s actually going to overcome these problems, and in the end not only she came to church but the rest of her family that also haven’t been coming for a while! And they came this week, too! It’s a good feeling to know that when we teach with the Spirit we can actually touch people!
This happened a little while back, but I didn’t mention it. Last week I sent some of my pictures from our service project when we were mining the hill. Anyway, to do this we have to use a few interesting tools, like a barreta, which is basically a giant solid-steel spike that you thrust into the rock to break it, and a comba, which is a massive hammer. Here is a picture of my companion holding it up. We had to take this picture quick because it weighs about 20 pounds!
Anyway, I was using the comba and I was trying to break a giant rock that we’d managed to cut out of the hill with the barretas. The rock was, obviously, very hard, and in one particular swing the comba actually rebounded off the rock and would have nailed me in the head if I hadn’t had some divine intervention! I don’t really know how (Because the comba was so heavy that I didn’t have any strength left in my arms to stop it after the rebound!), but the comba stopped just before it would have hit me! (I decided to stop for a little while after that…!)
But anyway, that’s how my week’s been! Hopefully it’ll all keep being good until my companion dies, too! (He’s really excited! Only 1 week!)
— Elder Schroeder