Happy New Year!

  This week is New Year´s! I can´t believe that it´s almost 2015. I will be spending this whole year in the mission. That's so crazy to think about. Also, Happy Birthday Mom! How awesome is it that I get to email on your birthday?! So this last week was Christmas! Skyping on Christmas was...strange. I´m not even sure how to put it. Hna. Rodas told me that it was super weird for her to hear me speak in so much English. Haa maybe that's a good sign! I´m glad to hear that I´m not missing any snow back in Minnesota. This last week has been way hot here, as summer is just about to be in full swing! Hna. Rodas and I literally pray for rain! Haa it's so great because we just laugh all the time at the weather and our ridiculous tan lines.

    So what did we do for Christmas? Christmas Eve we had to be in our pension by 6 pm because it was dangerous for us to be out in the streets so we made tomales and watched Monsters University in Spanish with English subtitles. Maybe one day I won´t need those :) It was a super calm night. Oh, I also kind of got sick on Christmas Eve for a few days, but I´m all better now so no worries! A family invited us over to spend Christmas Eve with them, but we couldn´t go because they don´t have a car to bring us back to our pension. On Christmas we got to skype and then it was back to work! The work of the Lord never rests! We had a Christmas miracle...we taught a lesson!! We were looking for this lady we had been trying to find earlier this week and we found her daughter. She let us in and we were able to teach her a lesson. What a blessing. 

 

   Something that´s really funny here is that people have so much trouble with my name. People always say it´s too confusing or too hard and I even had someone ask me if I had another name...haa. There was this elder that just returned from his mission to Brazil in our ward and when we shook his hand he went, "Hna. Rodas." then he shook my hand, looked at my nametag...and walked away...things like that always give us a pretty good laugh. 

 

    Another miracle happened this week... yesterday actually! At chruch...I understood almost everything!! Best day of my life! Haa we had lunch after church with this lady who also works in the mission home and I remember my first day hearing her speak and thinking "I did not learn anything in the MTC" and then I understood almost everything she was saying during lunch! What a blessing. We've been working with members and less actives this week about setting goals for the new year. I never realized how amazing goals really are until the mission. If we set goals to do better, to be better, and to work harder, we are so much more likely to become the person that God knows that we can become. Goals help us reach our full potential and are so, so important. I encourage everyone to set goals for this new year and not just to set them, but to work towards them diligently so you can look back at the end of this year and are satisfied with what you achieved. 

 

    One thing that I´ve learned this week is how to be happy despite your circumstances. I think this is one of the most valuable lessons we can learn in life. One of Satan´s biggest tools is discouragement. When we are discouraged, we can´t feel the spirit, and then we start to lose faith. Heavenly Father believes in you. Christ is on your side helping you along the way. One of my favorite quotes from preach my gospel says, All that is unfair about life can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It is because of Christ that we can have hope. Because of Him that we have all of the blessings of the gospel in our lives. He is the Gift.

Happy New Year!

Hermana Feldermann