My Garden of Eden

Another lovely week here at the CCM!

 I'm growing more in love with Mexico as the days go by. The food continues to be awesome. We had tamales this week, huevos rancheros, puff pastries, flan on top of chocolate cake which apparently is called chocoflan. That cake changed my life. Probably one of the most delicious things I´ve ever had. I love trying all this new food. I also forgot to mention last week that my companionship was called to be our Zone Sister Trainer Leaders. It seems like an intense job except for the fact that we have four sisters to watch over, two of which our leaving today for the field. So we are watching over a grand total of two! sisters. However we might get more today, we're not sure.

I've alwso been making a lot of fun new friends! We especially love talking to the natives that are here. Probably some of the most hillarious english I have ever heard. While in the clinic one day waiting for one of our companions to talk to the doctor, Hermana Baumgart and I started to talk to some Mexican elders that were there. We talked in spanish and I asked them how their english was coming along (they all learn a little bit while here) and one of them said "meh uh guh te thu bahrwoom?" I look really confused so he said "puedo usar al baño?" He was trying to say may I go to the bathroom! I had to hold back my laughter as I tried to teach him the right way to phonetically say it. It wasn't much of a success, but it was way fun. My spanish is acctually coming along fairly well, and they told us they could acctually understand us. Yes!

I've also started to play a ton of soccer recently, and I'm getting to the point were if I kick it, it will mostly go where I want it to go. Hooray! I'm really starting to love it. I even headed it the other day (in the right direction I might add) and I was told it looked cool. It better have looked cool, because it really hurt (but of course I didn't tell anyone that).

So last time I mentioned our investigator Rogelio, well our lessons progressed and we told him that for him to be baptized he needed to be married. We told him to talk to his girlfriend and report back to us. He did and he said the soonest he could get married was a week but his pregnant girldfriend wanted a week and a half. I had been expecting a few months! So I said, what if we give you two weeks? He thought that was funny and said "dos para uno!" like a salesman, muy gracioso. We all laughed and I challenged him to be married in two weeks and baptized on October the 10th. He said yes. My feelings that day were off the charts. I couldn't hold my happiness in. If this is the feeling and more i'll get when teaching an investigator I can not wait to get out in the mission feild. Also, Rogelio became our new Maestro, and yesterday he told us that Rogelio was a realy person with a real family whom he had taught on his mission. He showed us pictures of there wedding and their baptism and it made me want to cry.

Yes this work is amazing, but it is hard work. I'm excited for Chile to become my Garden of Eden. Last Sunday in Releif Soceity the Mission President's wife spoke to us about being thrust into the lone and dreary world many times in our life, but having those experiences become our Garden of Eden. The first week here, after leaving my garden of a home, it felt like a wilderness and it was scary. But now as I am growing more comfortable and happy, the CCM has become my new Garden of Eden. However when I leave I will again be thrust into the wilderness, to learn and to grow more. This is God's plan for us. He sent us down ways and paths that we don't want to follow or seem hard, but it will be for our good and our experience, and we will grow the way he wants us to grow. She also likened this to a fruit tree. Heavenly Father will cut us down and purge us (we were purged of our worldy and material things when coming here) so we can grow the correct way. Also, when a tree is purged of lesser fruits, more of the tree's energy can go into making the better fruits bigger. It is the same with our spiritual lives. When we purge the distractions, we can send our energy to the most important place, the gospel. And our fruit of faith and knowledge and testimony will grow to sizes we never knew they could.

I love mexico, I love missionary work, I love my savior and I love God!

I love you all!

Hermana Richardson