hey everyone!
last week our normal internet spot kind of
pooped out so we didn't have time to look for a new one and do mails, so i only
had a few minutes to send a quick note. hopefully nobody cried too much.
anyway, here i am another monday afternoon sending out my email to tell you all
i'm alive and stuff.
so i gotta be 100% honest here--these past two
weeks have been BRUTAL. let me elaborate. as a missionary, we plan out every
hour of every day. where we're going to go, who we're going to see, what we're
going to do. that way we (in theory) can effectively use our time. so we have a
plan A, which is ideal, but because we try to be prepared, we make a plan B
just in case. well lemme tell ya. these past two weeks i feel like every day we
had to go through plans a,b,c, d,....aaaaaaaaalll the way to z!! guhhh. every
day i felt like we were pulling our hair out trying to meet with our
investigators, trying to find new investigators, and trying to motivate our
members. it has been...exhausting...and demoralizing. and yet, we have been
really trying hard to be obedient and prayerful and fasting a lot a lot. it's
times like this where at the end of the day, despite your best efforts, you
feel like a total waste of space. blah!! we have been trying really hard lately
to find new investigators to refresh our pool a little bit, because most of the
ones we have now aren't moving forward (again, despite our best efforts). we've
been trying to work with our members to get them motivated to prepare their
friends to meet with us, but...it's been like...hmm what would a good analogy
be? it's been like trying to drag a dead horse over the rocky mountains.
anyway, in the meantime, we've had to resort to our own efforts for finding new
investigators. which means that although it's like a last resort, we've been
doing A LOT of door-to-door tracting. a lot. ha! let's move on to a new
paragraph to tell a funny story about tracting.
so last weekend, we had some mini-missionaries
with us (aka young adults preparing to serve a mission come with us for a day
to get a taste of what the mission is like. poor them they came during our
slump). so i took two with me and soeur chapman took one with her and we did a
split for the day. anyway, so i took my two minis with me and we started doing
tracting. the FIRST house we go to--so this is their very first tracting
experience, right--it's this old papi and i'm like hey how's it goin' and he
comes out and starts yelling at us in rapid tahitian like "blaaah aren't
you guys tired of coming around here all the time? we don't want you here
that's why we put the gate up! if you come back again i'm going to let my dogs
loose on you!" etc. etc. other colorful things were added and i was just
like ok papi have a good day and turned around and walked away. those poor
lil mini missionaries! hahaha. so sad. but so funny at the same time. one of
them was like "oh man i wanted to cry when he was yelling at us!" i
guess the fact that i was able to laugh about it just shows that i'm a seasoned
soldier? haha.
anyway, maybe that story will give you a
little taste of the past two weeks. but it hasn't been all bad, of course. i
know that times like this that forge our character and our faith, so i'm just
trying to keep the perspective that there is SOMETHING that i'm supposed to
learn from all of this. either that or God wants me to go prematurely bald from
pulling out my hair. there was one day where it had been a really long, hot
afternoon of rejection over and over, and i was seriously just at the point of
throwing down my helmet and dying on the side of the dirt road. i said a
pathetic little prayer in my head, "Heavenly Father? I can't keep doing
this. I need to see at least a little pinpoint of light at the end of this
tunnel." We go to the next house. We see the person inside, and we're
calling out to them, but they purposely ignore us (i guess that's better than
getting threatened by an old papi, right?). We move on. And i'm on the verge of
giving up, but there's one more house in the area so we're like ok we'll go. and
you know what? they welcomed us in and listened to us. there was no miracle
conversion or anything, but we were able to invite them to listen to our
message and they accepted. i don't really know what will happen with them, but
i realized that that was my little ray of light in the darkness. after so many
rejection, there was at least ONE person that listened to us.
ok this is getting too long and my companion
is getting bored, so i'm gonna wrap this up. i love you all and think you're
great!
love,
soeur hansen
