I’m kind of really freaking out because Sister Villatoro is leaving next week and I’m going to miss her a lot and I have NO idea who my next comp will be because there are only four sister missionaries in Belize now (they took out the two retention sisters)…. and I haven’t been in El Salvador for 7 months so I don’t know any of the new sister and Sis Villatoro and Ellis leave next week and only there is Sis Guzman in the other area so two new sisters have to come… AHHHH!!
I just wish Sis Villatoro could finish with me…
Technically we had ten people in church… but that stresses me out because then everyone gets excited but honestly we don’t teach people that much before they go to church so they still have a TON of challenges we have to take care of and I’m so STRESSED.
But I’ve also been thinking a lot about personal conversion… I still remember this part of the Laura Ingles Wilder stories where Laura tells her older sister Mary that she couldn’t STAND her before… but now she really likes her because although she was always good she was kind of good in an unbearable way before. Mary thought about it for a long time and said, “Really, Laura? Did you really want to hit me? It’s true… before I was always good because I wanted people to say that I was good… I was not really good though because I didn’t do it for the right reasons.”
It’s really true… we can behave good without really loving people on the inside–without really loving God or changing… Something else I learned one time when reading a Liahona was a story about a soldier who HATED the enemy soldiers that invaded his country.. after he learned the gospel he learned to forgive–but he realized he had not had charity until one day he felt it because he finally saw the enemy soldier who would not let him pass the borders as a child of God.
That’s what charity is, I realized, seeing people as God sees them.
That’s really hard to do.
Love you all. Thank you so much for all the letters and prayers. They mean a lot to me,
Sister Holladay