WWACPD

HELLO HELLO!! Howdy! I hope all y'all are doing well and life is good for y'all! I hope yall had an Easter centered on Christ and filled to the brim with Cadbury eggs and you weren't forced to eat any peeps. Anyway, this week was good! Very slow to be honest, not a lot happened, but some good miracles and some good days where we are learning to develop patience! Aaaaaand let's get into it. 

THINGS THAT MADE ME LAUGH:

• YO we had some GOOD quotes this week. Most of them from hermana Hermosilla. That woman y'all. She's a wild one. 

• She was explaining some service project she did and said "anyway so we were giving socks to the... sockless" and honestly it WRECKED me. The poor sockless. Hope they're doing good.

• "I was NOT there during that district council. My brain was salsa dancing the whole time" *does a salsa dance for us* - Hermana Hermosilla

• A lady in our ward made us lunch this week and she dropped it off in the morning and she was literally looking SO put together and so classy, and in that moment Hermana Gilbert decided she was going to be classy for the rest of her life. Which has led to A LOT of night time discussions of what classy people wear, what they do, what kinds of dates they go on, cars they drive anyway so any classy tips would be much appreciated. We decided we're going to make bracelets to go along with the WWJD What Would Jesus Do ones, that say WWACPD aka what would a classy person do. That also led to another good quote by the one and only Hermana Hermosilla which was "classy people probably don't eat two lunches... like I did"

• This is a daily occurrence, but the fact that it got caught in one quote made it memorable. We were finding people on Facebook and Hermana Gilbert goes "awe she's so nice!! ....... ope. She blocked me."

• Apparently Hermana Hermosilla's mom every year posts a Facebook post on Easter about how He is Risen (as all moms do) and Hermana Hermosilla goes "My mom hasn't posted her post yet! How am I supposed to know if He is risen?!?"

• One night, Hermana Gilbert was telling a long story about something that happened in her mission, and this story just had nothing to do with fish sticks. And yet, at the end Hermana Wilson said "dang, that story reallllyyyy made me crave some fish sticks right about now"

MILAGRITOS:

• This is a super random one, but I'm literally obsessed with my Book of Mormon. Obviously I'm obsessed with The Book of Mormon in general, but I love my copy of it. It's getting absolutely wrecked, there's post it notes just everywhere, and pretty much none of the verses are left unmarked. My my new favorite thing about it is that I carry it around all day in my hand, and always in the same way, so the words on the spine of it have faded a lot. BUT my hand is only so big, so only some of the words have faded, which means it's gone from saying El Libro de Mormón - Otro Testamento de Jesucristo, to " El Libro de Jesucristo" because the whole middle part has faded away. AND HOW COOL IS THAT!! Because it IS the Book of Jesus Christ. It's HIS book, about HIS life, and HIS teachings and HIS gospel. I get to read a book every day about someone that not only lived a perfect life, but someone who performed the greatest act of love known to man. And every day, I get to try and apply those teachings. Every day I get to try to be better, and love more. And I literally have pages and pages and pages of exactly how to do it, and testimonies of the reality of it. It's no wonder I love the people here so much, I get to read every day about love, personified. I'm so grateful for that. 

• We had a HUGE miracle this week!!! So spoiler alert, the church records here are a little bit janky, but mostly because a while ago phone numbers weren't really a thing and also addresses here are the biggest mess in the world. So finding less active members is kind of a nightmare because we have SO many names of people and little to no information about them. So sometimes we scroll through our list of people and see if there is anyone we could possibly contact. And several weeks ago, we reached out to this one lady, and turns out it was not that lady, but it was her son, and he hasn't been to church in like 10 years, and after talking with him for a while, he wants to come back to church and get closer to God. Well, our mission president has a HUGE focus on temples and their importance, and so he has two missionaries who serve as the temple sisters, and give tours of the outside of the temple and explain the history and significance of it. Well, our friend Gabriel wanted to take a tour, and I won't go into the details but it was a mess and it wasn't gonna happen but he showed up anyway and it was a whole thing, and then miracles happened and God did His thing, and Gabriel was able to take a tour of the temple, and he LOVED it. It was the highlight of my whole week, seriously so amazing. Yay for temples!!

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT- 

This spiritual thought is yet another quote from Hermana Hermosilla, this one that made me laugh a bit and then really made me think. We were sitting talking about the gospel on Easter night, as missionaries do, and we were talking about the atonement and how incredible of a concept it is, and how Jesus just loves us so much. And Hermana Hermosilla goes "man, I just love Jesus. He died for us." And Hermana Gilbert said "Yep. And He lives for us too." And Hermana Hermosilla said "oh yeah. Sometimes I forget that part." And woah. I don't know why that hit me so hard, but it did. So many people in the world remember Christ on the cross. That's the Christ they remember. But if you think about it, in that time, someone being hung on a cross was an ordinary moment. Sad, and hard to watch, for sure. But other than that, not too out of the ordinary. But because of His sacrifice before, and His resurrection after, that "ordinary" moment was a miracle. The greatest act of love this world (and all the other worlds) have ever seen. In Acts 10:38, where it says "He went about doing good". Are we living our lives in a way that that sentence can be said about us? Do we go about doing good? Do we go about loving, everyone? Do we RUN (everyone go watch the church's Easter video it makes me cry) to share the good news of the gospel? Do we forgive others, even if it takes a while to do so? Do we love our neighbor? Are we a light to others around us? If not, how do we fix that? By turning to Christ of course! One of my new favorite words in Spanish is acercarse, which means "to get yourself closer" (kinda) so are we acercarse-ing ourselves (that's not at all how you use that word so Spanish speakers please forgive me) to Christ? Are we reading about Him, studying about Him, becoming like Him? If you are, great! If you're not, 1. You're absolutely doing better than you think you are and 2. You can keep trying! You got it! 

ANYWAY love you all!! I hope your week is phenomenal and you enjoy the spring and the warmth! Until next week! ¡LOS AMO!

- Hermana Allen