Montreal Missionary

9/2/2014 #4 Mission Letter

Bonjour ma famille et mes amies!

This has been such an uplifting week. I feel like I was spiritually feed all week. Can I just say I love the French language, even though sometimes the grammar is hard and the pronunciation even harder! I feel like I have grown so much. When I first got my call, and I found out it was pretty much exactly where I wanted to go- part of me thought that when I was in here and the times got tough that I was going to ask God why he didn't just send me English speaking (and I have wondered it a time or two, and I think I found out the answer this week...
1) I asked for it! So when I moan and groan I have to realize that I asked to go French speaking and 2) I think that without having to learn a language I wouldn't have had to depend as much as I have on the Lord. When going into a lesson and I don't know how I'm going to share an experience I have leaned that if you put your trust in the Lord, put in your best effort, that he will do the rest. I've had words come to my mind and phrases that I hadn't thought of before...it truly is amazing! One experience is when we were teaching John Luc (Aka Frere Rodrigez) and me and Soeur Willis prepared but we just didn't know exactly what we were going to say and we got into the lesson and it went amazing! For the most part, I understood what he was saying. I was able to respond and it was a great lesson. I know that he isn't a real investigator, but something that I've learned is that it doesn't matter who you're teaching, if your teaching truth the spirit is still there.

It can be very stressful at times, especially thinking that in two weeks from today I'll be on a plane headed for Montreal! The more I learn, the more I realize that I need to learn, but it's coming...slowly. But it's amazing at the progress that everyone here is making. It's even more amazing to see how the Spirit guides us and opens our minds. I think a big thing for me has been learning that everyone has different strengths. This week we had a sub for one of our teachers and we had to do a door approach and it went well. The following day we had to teach them one of the commandments. Soeur Willis and I were given Obedience (kinda a broad but hard topic),and given about 10 minutes to prepare a lesson that we did not feel like we knew. We asked the teacher which room he would be in and he replied that we would all be in the same room and watching each other teach. It was terrifying! It's one thing to teach in front of your teacher but a whole other thing to teach in front of your peers-all who have more experiences at French than me. We got in the room, and two by two the others taught and when it came to our turn(last), I'm not gonna lie, we felt nervous before most lessons but we were really feeling it this time. But when we started teaching about it and promising him blessing about being obedient and following the commandment of keeping the sabbath day holy it all just fell into place and we were able to ask him questions and be very personal. Now, in no way were we perfec. In fact, about the farthest thing from it. But afterwards the other groups evaluated us and told us about our strengths and our weaknesses, and through it I realized that Soeur Willis and I are very personal and really try to engage the investigator. Throughout each group, it was cool to see how each person had strengths and that it was hard to compare because we were each good at different things. It's like life, we have all been given talents, and how can you compare yourself to another because everybody's great at different things. But something that we all have in common is that we're children of God and n matter what, he loves us and we can turn to him for guidance. No matter who you are, what you've done or where you're from, he loves us all the same.

Love

Soeur Rawlings