"AAAAAAAAMEN!!!" *bites his brother* - Santino

Dang this week was so so good. It was a fun week filled with proof that God is the creator of all things happy, and that life is just exactly what you make it. We're all gonna have trials. So let's be miserable for a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, and then learn how to mix that misery with the Savior's atonement, which creates? JOY!! And never stop seeing the good in everything and everyone. This world is so good if you choose to see it as such. 

MILAGRITOS:

• This was one of my favorite weeks I've had on my mission so far. After being in the mission field for over a year now, I think I figured it out this week. This week we worked HARD. Because? My perspective changed. I started praying to love the work, to love talking to people, to strangers. To actually want to do the work. And ya know what? It's almost like God exists or something, cause boy howdy did I receive an answer to my prayers. I went to bed every night this week practically beaming cause of all the work we did and the people we met and the spirit I felt. And I woke up every morning not wanting to do anything, and by the end of the day was just FILLED with joy and goodness and rainbows and butterflies bursting out of my eyeballs. Did my circumstances change this week from last week or the week before? Not really at all. In fact, being in this area is really quite monotonous. But God helped me see the good, and meet some good people and teach some good truths. Every Sunday we have a call with our zone and we get to share one miracle that happened that week, and to be honest, we really couldn't think of any big ones. But I thought of a hundred million small ones that God showed me this week. I think up until this week I've been happy when the circumstances were good, and kinda eh. When the circumstances we sub par. But this week the circumstances were sup par, but DANG was I really truly joyful. Gah. I love my life. 

• Guys. I got to DC, and it was cold. Then I lived through DC winter. Then I got to Uruguay, and it was just starting to get cold. So then I lived through Uruguay winter. And this week? I got a sunburn. After a whole year of living in winter, I got sunburned. We call that a mighty miracle folks. I almost cried of happiness. 

• This week we focused on finding people, and we were able to find some good happy lovely God loving and not God loving people. We visited about a hundred million houses, and because we're not allowed to go door knocking, we look for members who are inactive, and usually the address is just like, the whole street, so we end up door knocking ahaha which is actually really effective because people like to help us and then we worm in a conversation about the gospel. Well, this week we saw about a hundred million miracles from that. We were trying to find this one house, and the neighbors were leading us on a wild goose chase. They said "she lives in that house" and then we go to that house and that person points to a different house and says she lives there and so on and so forth. So for one member in specific, we did this fun hide and seek game for about 5 houses, until we started talking to some random dude that looked like Santa Claus and his name was Ariel. Really cool dude. But we ask him if he knows Susana and he says he has no idea but we keep talking and he says he wants to learn more and he's been to our church it was way good! Then out of nowhere we hear a lady screaming from the bathroom "IS THAT THE HERMANAS?? DONT LEAVE DONT LEAVE DONT LEAVE" and I was kinda terrified cause, what? And also we were in a sketchy part of town, but turns out it's a member of the church who lives there, and not at all the member we were looking for. So we talked to her for a long while and she said she had been waiting for us to visit for a long time (I don't have any idea how, her address in our records is on the other side of the city) and we got to invite her to church and she wants to go to the temple now! Woo woo!! Go Nancy! 

• We were doing this fun "look for people that may or may not exist" game again, and I noticed that there was a person in our records who hadn't been taught in a long while, so his info was gonna be deleted in 4 days. (Cause if you don't teach someone for a while their info deletes cause like, privacy and stuff idk) anyway so we found him, and he is downright the most interesting man I've ever met. And not like "what the heck??" Interesting like most of the crazy people I've met on my mission haha. More like, I want to sit down and talk to him for 17 days straight. He's so cool. He speaks fluent English (he didn't prove it to me but he told me so I guess I'll trust him), in his house he has one fork, one plate, one bowl, etc, he has an outfit for every occasion, and the rest of his house is FILLED with books and rocks and minerals from all over the world. When he's bored he flies to a different country, for like 2 days visits the touristy sights, and then finds some random tiny village or town and just lives there for 3 months, and gets a job and makes friends with the people and becomes one of them and then leaves. He told us the reason he likes English is cause there's another Sebastian (that's his name) inside of him that thinks differently and he wants to get to know that Sebastian more so he learns more English every day. He also told us that he feels like there's two Sebastians (apparently there's more than two if there's an English one and a Spanish one too but whatever) one is faithful sebastian, and one is logical science sebastian. And they're constantly fighting, which is why he hasn't talked to the missionaries in a while. But I explained to me that in my opinion, they don't have to fight. If we have a God that loves us, which tbh can't be proved by science but it makes a whole lot of sense the more you know about science, then religion makes sense. If we have a God who loves us, of course He's going to bless us with things like prophets and apostles and the word of God and scriptures and Jesus Christ as our Savior and a plan for each of us individually and beautiful nature such as science. So I let him know that he needs to figure out if he has a God who loves him, and if he does, then this all makes sense and is logical and is orderly. And if he doesn't, well, science Sebastian wins I guess. He kinda jaw dropped at that one and said he's never thought of that before, so I was kinda glad to be able to share it. He then texted us later he wanted to meet with us again ahaha so I guess we did a good thing. 

• We are trying to help our friend stop smoking, and to say that the missionaries have tried everything with this woman would be an understatement. But me and hna Rios came up with a plan with a lot of prayer, a lot of study, and a lot of faith. And before we left the house to go to her house, hna Rios asked if we could say a prayer on our knees to as for a little extra help with this lesson. Now we pray every single time we leave the house, but this one was different. There we were, on our knees on our freezing cold, low-key dirty cause we haven't swept in a while, floor, talking to God and asking for His help. And the spirit was THERE. I felt it so incredibly strong right there in that moment. God lives. And God loves. So much. And we'll see in the coming days and weeks how well our plan is working, but for me, that moment was a miracle no matter what happens with our friend. 

JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAs of the week:

• The family that we're teaching (that a few of them got baptized last week) used go to go to another church, and so every time anyone ends a talk or a prayer with "amen" every one of those kids screams "AAAAAMEN" and some of the people in the ward do not like it, but it brings me wild amounts of joy every time. Especially when one of them isn't paying attention so there's an AMEN like a full 15 seconds late. It's awesome. 

• The bishops wife telling me the only thing she knew in English was "squeeze me" and I was so dead cause why the heck does she know the words squeeze me?? Anyway, turns out she was trying to say excuse me. But I like squeeze me a whole lot better. 

things that did NOT make me JAJAJAJA:

• we have a maggot infestation in our house.

SHPIRITUAL SHPEEL:

On Saturday, we had 3 lessons. All three with women, who are mothers of 5 or more children, who have raised other children who are not their own, who have dealt with big huge consequences of other people's actions, who have had lives more difficult than I can imagine, who have firm testimonies in God and in Jesus Christ, and who all live here in Canelones, Uruguay. For totally different reasons, each one of them started talking about the people here in Canelones, and what they thought of them. One of them spent an hour telling us about all the beautiful experiences where people were kind to her. Like a man who paid 10 pesos for her for a medication cause she didn't have any change, a lady who kept 3000 pesos in cash in her store until she came back 3 weeks later so that she could give it to her, people helping her children and grandchildren, just story after story after story of the goodness of the people here in Canelones Uruguay. The next lesson we went to, the lady said that the people in some areas of Canelones are good, and other parts they're terrible, horrible people. That if we had the choice we should leave, but if we wanted, we could find good people everywhere. "I guess". The people are kinda just average at best. The third lady quite literally argued with me when I told her I loved it here in Canelones, that the people were so good and so kind and so faithful. She told me that everyone here is horrible, drug selling, abusing, egotistical, downright bad people. 

And at the end of the day I thought about it and it really hit me. Every one of these ladies has shared a part of their story with me. They've all seen some horrible things, gone through some terrible trials, and been near the breaking point at several times in their lives. And they also have all had deeply profound experiences with God, with His gospel, and in the grace of our Savior's atonement. They all have very different lives, but the more I thought about it, the more their lives were weirdly similar. 

So what's the difference? Well, it is their choices. The way they choose to see life. All three of the women are powerful, strong, and incredible women who I adore, but they have very different outtakes on life. In thinking of my three friends, I thought of the talk Three Sisters, by Deiter F. Uchtdorf. I would LOVE to copy and paste the whole talk here, cause it really is that phenomenal, but I'm gonna invite yall to read it for yourselves (It's in October 2017). For now, I loved this quote from it "Even when you stumble, even when you turn away from Him, God loves you. If you are feeling lost, abandoned, or forgotten—fear not. The Good Shepherd will find you. He will lift you upon His shoulders. And He will carry you home. My dear sisters, please let these divine truths sink deeply into your hearts. And you will find that there are many reasons not to be sad, for you have an eternal destiny to fulfill. The beloved Savior of the world gave His life so that you could choose to make that destiny a reality. You have taken upon you His name; you are His disciples. And because of Him, you can clothe yourselves with robes of eternal glory." 

Let's all choose JOY. The Savior of the world died so that we could. So let's find joy in our own lives, and choose to see the best in other people so that they have one more reason to find joy, not one more excuse to be sad. "Men are that they might have joy" So maybe let's go fulfill our purpose here a little better. See the good in others. Each and every person is simply doing their best. They probably know their faults and flaws far too well, so help them see the good about themselves that they never noticed before. ¿¿Lo harán?? 

Bueno, I have talked far too much. Sorry about that one. HAVE A GREAT WEEK!! LOOK FOR THE GOOD AND SAY AMEN A LIL LOUDER THIS WEEK!! 

- hermana allen