Dear Jane Austen,

You are an amazing woman.  You have a marvelous wit and originality to your writing that no one else can quite reproduce.  I can read your books time and time again and each time notice some clever turn of phrase that never had manifest itself to me before.

Today, my dear friend, marks the 200th anniversary of the publishing of what is arguably your best-known novel, namely Pride and Prejudice.  Of all your works, I must confess that it is also my favorite.  There is something timeless about the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy that enables me to read it and view multiple adaptations, watching the same story unfold again and again without wearying of it in the slightest.

To me, few things hold more delight than Lizzy Bennet

falling in love with Fitzwilliam Darcy

So, many thanks to you, Jane.  For this  

and for all it inspired.  The world will ever laud the efforts of your pen.

I will ever be

you dearest friend

Lara

DIA TRES

Wednesday was the first day we actually went the whole day on a missionary schedule!  We got up at 6:30, exercised, and then studied. For four hours straight.

When I first realized our study schedule was supposed to go for four hours, my first thought was that there was no way I could study the scriptures for that long.  I mean, I love the scriptures, and I love Preach my Gospel, but four hours?

It didn't last long enough.  I loved every second, and I didn't want it to end.  I have never in my life sat down and studied for someone else, for how best to serve someone, and discussed the gospel and felt the guidance of the Spirit like I did that day. And the one hour of personal study is nowhere near sufficient for me to read and study all the things I want to read and study.

Then we had companion study/training, and then language study, which consisted of me butchering a lesson from Predicad mi Evangelio and attempting to read El Libro de Mormon in a proper Spanish accent. Even though Sister Moreno said I did very well, I'm not nearly as good enough as I wish I were (or as I should be after 5 years of Spanish.)

Then we sped through lunch and hit the road.  Our first plan was to visit some of the part-member families in our ward, which was met with meager enthusiasm and minimal success.  In spite of our rabid planning the day before, we didn't get a single lesson from any of them.

After that, we ran to the grocery store so I could stop mooching off my companion's food and actually get my own. (Honestly though, we shared food for the most part, which made things a lot less complicated.)

We went straight from there to help an older sister in our ward take apart and package her artificial Christmas tree.  It was FREEZING that day, so she gave us some herbal tea. Yum!

Then we went to dinner with another sister in the ward who has done an incredible amount of family history work.  She had a giant folder of names she had submitted to the temple.  It was amazing to talk to her and to hear her love and appreciation for being involved in such a divine work.

We then went to visit a recent convert named Christina and her also recent convert son Jonathan.  Christina was baptized almost a year ago, and she is extremely excited to be able to attend the temple.  She was a great example to me of missionary work.  She tells everyone she meets that she's LDS and says it with a wonderful pride and confidence, fully aware of the blessing the gospel is in her life.  I want to be more like that, and not shrink away from bearing my testimony because I don't understand everything perfectly.  She knows less than I do about the gospel but she shares what she does know with everyone she meets.  I love that.

We left Christina and went to visit Gona and Sirvan.  They are a young, recently married Muslim couple from Iran.  The sisters have been teaching them for almost 3 months now, and it's amazing how much they've learned and grown.  Sirvan had asked a question before about agency, and we explained to him how although God wants us to do what's right, we have the choice to do whatever we want while we're here on the earth. They had a few more questions about that, so we gave them the assignment to read from their Book of Mormon (in Persian!) 2 Nephi 2.

We returned home that night encouraged by the progress of Christina and Gona and Sirvan, but discouraged by our miniscule number of lessons.  We planned for a better day on Thursday, but I had learned by then that things rarely go as you plan. :)

DIA DOS

Tuesday was our P-day the first week, because we got to go to the temple! We rode with a few other sisters and met up with several elders there.

I just want to say that I LOVE the temple. I had already been humbled so much in my first day and it was a blessing to linger in the Lord's house and to feel His immense love for me. There is nowhere on earth like the temple. I could have stayed forever.

Then we went to a bookstore called This Is the Place. It's almost exactly like Deseret Book, and before this P-day trip, I hadn't even known it existed. So much for me thinking "I can only get that in Utah!" It's all here too!

Then we all went to the tunnels. I hadn't heard of these either, but I learned pretty quickly. In downtown Houston are a maze of underground tunnels with stores, restaurants, etc.  We ate lunch down there and Sister Moreno and I wound up exploring with Sister Wamsley and Sister Vea.  We didn't find much, but we did end up on the moon!

(Not exactly the most flattering picture I've ever had taken. Just ignore me.) Sister Wamsley is on the far left and Sister Moreno is in the middle. It was Sister Wamsley's last P-day ever--she went home on January 21st!

After our adventuring we went to the library for emailing (hahaha) and then to the Galleria for a few miutes. Mostly we just looked in the Texas souvenir shops. Elder and Sister Spencer, a senior couple who was with us, bought a Texas-shaped waffle iron. 

Sister Moreno and I then proceeded to get stuck in traffic, making us rather late to our dinner appointment at the Mennears'.  The Mennears live across the street from Daniel and are actually the ones who introduced him to the missionaries and played a huge part in his conversion.  They have a little girl named Sierra who is adorable and latched on to me right away. :)

Then we went to teach an investigator named Chaz with a couple from the ward. We taught the Plan of Salvation and even though I had no idea what I was doing for most of it, the Spirit was there so strongly and he clearly felt good about what we were teaching. He works on Sundays so we suggested that he pray for the opportunity to get off work and come to church to learn more about the gospel, and when he offered the closing prayer, he did just that!

After that we went home and fell into bed, since we'd gotten up extra early to make it to the temple on time. 

DIA UNO

I have way too much to say about this than can fit in one blog post. So I'll break it into chunks for you. 
Here's the email I wrote after the first day (sent to only myself, of course.)


Journal time has proved thus far to be rather limited. Who knew. 

I've had a wonderful first day and 3 hours as a mini-missionary.  I am still enormously grateful for the opportunity and in awe of the precise set of circumstances that led to it.

Sister Moreno Cordero is WONDERFUL WONDERFUL WONDERFUL. She has had incredible success, especially considering her calling was to speak Spanish and she has spent the last 5 months in an English-speaking area. She spoke little to no English when she first got here, and now she is teaching investigators and recent converts clearly and effectively in English. 

We had a pretty good day yesterday: we taught 2 lessons and visited 3 people in total.  We didn't have all the opportunities we wanted to have, but we did have a few unexpected ones pop up.

Here's what I've learned so far:

Don't give up on people. We visited last night a recent convert named Daniel who was baptized November 30th. The first few times Sister Moreno and her companion Sister Avery met with him, he was totally drunk (and had been drinking heavily for years.) Then they visited him again and saw on his wall a goal to stop drinking, with the last date he had had a drink being several days prior. They asked him about it and he told them he really wanted to stop drinking because he hated being drunk and wanted to be a better and more free person. So they continued to teach him and by the time they taught him the Word of Wisdom, he had completely quit drinking for several weeks with no intention or desire to start again. I was amazed as we visited with him by his incredibly strong testimony and the depth to which he had studied and understood the gospel. No one would have thought from first meeting him that he would turn out to be such a solid convert, but he is!

Always hope for and expect the best.  A lot of our plans yesterday went awry, but we still hoped that every person we wanted to visit would be there and be willing to accept our message. 

ALWAYS have a backup plan, and a backup for the backup. Even though a lot of the people we wanted to visit couldn't meet with us, we never sat around doing nothing. We sought out people to teach and found them one way or another. 

Teach children! The other lesson we taught was to a recent convert named Paula and her almost 13 year-old son Celestine. It was empowering for me to see how much Paula's example had impacted her son and how great his desire is to learn and know the gospel, to come closer to his Heavenly Father, and to be baptized. We also tried to visit a less active family named the Vermilyeas, and Sister Moreno explained their story to me: she and Sister Avery had been teaching them, trying to get them to come back to church, and they started to come.  They taught the lessons to their family and 9 year-old Billy wanted to be baptized. Seeing Billy's faith inspired his parents, and they continued to progress until Billy's father was able to baptize him. Since then, they've waned in their church activity, but we talked to Billy last night and he expressed a faith-filled desire to study the scriptures with his family. Sister Moreno told me that when they first started teaching Billy and he said he wanted to be baptized, the Primary President hadn't wanted him to be. She said she didn't want just another inactive kid who wouldn't come. One of the elders in that meeting had then said that they shouldn't deny a child the chance to be baptized and to receive the gift of the Spirit just because his parents didn't have the same faith he had. It's already been clear how much Billy's example has blessed and impacted his family, and if he continues to share that desire with his parents, they could be able to go and be sealed in the temple. 

Use the power of prayer. Missionaries pray A LOT, and it's definitely for a reason. I felt more in tune with the Spirit throughout the day than I usually do, probably as a combination of the virtue of what I was doing and also how often we prayed and called for Heavenly Father's guidance and help in our efforts.

A lot of funny things happen to missionaries. Our GPS is of questionable reliability and got us rather lost when we tried to walk from the church to the home of a less active sister. Two pass-along cards later, we finally headed back to our car to keep from going in yet another circle. Not to mention it was COLD outside.

OKAY WOW that was only from yesterday. I'm never going to be able to send comprehensible weekly emails from the field. 

Stay tuned for more info (and pictures! Because for once in my life I actually took pictures!)

Test Dive

Apparently I needed even more evidence that the Lord is in the details of my life, because He's done it again!  I am so blessed; there is no way this can be pure coincidence.


First let me tell you about Hermana Washburn.  She is a sister in the Houston South Mission (where I live) who has some pretty serious health problems and is staying with the mission president, companion-less. Since I still don't have a job, I have the opportunity to study with her and go visit invesitagtors and other missionaries.  She is wonderful, and she's fluent in Spanish, so I can study Predicad mi Evangelio and El Libro de Mormon with her.  It's great for me to get the experience and great for her to have another sister to study with!

But it gets better: Hermana Washburn's dad was in the bishopric of my YSA ward at BYU, so I know her whole family, I've been to her house, I've played with her family's new dog.  I knew that Brother Washburn's daughter was having health problems on her mission, and we had all been praying for her.  It's incredible that I now get to serve with her after all that.

President Ashton (our mission president) had me go to the missiona conference this morning (WITH ELDER BALLARD) as Hermana Washburn's companion. How many missionaries get to go as a "missionary" to a mission conference before they leave on their missions? It was incredible, and I felt the matchless power of the word of an apostle of the Lord.

(Can I just say, I LOVE Elder Ballard? He is so humble and manages to be bold and compassionate at the same time.  What an inspired man.)


As amazing as all this is, the coincidences go further.  A sister in the mission here has been training a visa waiter who's going to France.  Her visa finally came in, and she leaves on Monday.  The next sisters don't come in until the following Wednesday a week and a half later, so the mission president didn't know what he was going to do with the companion-less trainer.  Hermana Washburn told him about me, and the stake president called me up to invite me to serve a mini-mission for that week and a half.

Of course, I was delighted to accept.  I had been applying for jobs like mad and nothing had come up, and the minute I heard from the stake president, I realized this was probably why.  After talking to Hermana Washburn and President Ashton, I learned a little more about the sister I'll be serving with. Her name is Hermana Moreno, and she's from...
...wait for it...
SPAIN.

The sheer mathematical probability that I would have received my mission call to Spain and be waiting to leave in South Houston, without a job, at the exact time that a sister from Spain serving in the Houston South mission would be without a companion is infintesimal.


I CAN'T WAIT for the next week and a half serving with Hermana Moreno, getting to be a real missionary (I get set apart and everything) before I go to the MTC or to Spain.  I'm so excited and blessed to see the evidence of the Lord's hand in my life as I'm preparing to serve him for 18 months.

I cannot express how amazing and true the gospel is, and how very real Heavenly Father is and how very real Christ and His Atonement are.

I'll be sure to take pictures when I'm with Hermana Moreno so I can share the whole experience with you!  Espero que les guste esta semana y sientan contentas!

MY LIFE IS SO REMARKABLY FASCINATING!!!

(I hope you caught the sarcasm there.)

My life has been really weird lately. Rather than try to explain elocuently what's been going on, let's just do bullet points.  (These will be in chronologially order, by the way.)

Since I arrived in Texas I have:

• eaten a FOUR-COURSE meal.  I have never used that many plates or that many utensils IN MY LIFE.  I almost had to ask which fork to use.  My aunt makes the fanciest, most delicious food.
• gone through the temple for the first time. It was amazing and enlightening and touched my heart in a way that nothing else has, at least not for a very long time.
• missionary shopped. A lot, but not enough.  
• spent almost $200 on books (in conjunction with my mom, and it was from volunteering at a book sale--I couldn't have spent it on anything else.)
• tried to force my brother to dance with me.  I'm still working on that.
• made friends (we went to Les Mis!), only to have almost all of them go back to BYU without me. woohoo.
• re-read all 7 Harry Potter books.  All was well.
• read The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner. Which I HIGHLY recommend, by the way.
• attended 3 mission prep classes in my ward, which are MARVELOUS.
• spoke in Sacrament Meeting, helped teach Relief Society, and taught my first Gospel Essentials class.  Total Sundays ever in this ward: 5.
• applied for a job at every place in the city. Still no luck...
• badgered the Texas State Department of Safety to shreds over getting my visa paperwork done.  They are slow as Christmas, and I need it turned in!!!
• studied my scriptures and Preach My Gospel a ton.  Because I have nothing else to do (and honestly, nothing else I'd rather do.)

...and that's pretty much it.  I think.

I'm excited for the ways my life will change in the upcoming months, and I'm still so grateful to be able to go on a mission right now, at 19, which I never dreamed I would be able to do.