5 January 2014

Kia Ora, Dear Loved Ones!

WHAT A WEEK!  If it's not hot its cold.  It's always rain or shine.  And I mean that both figuratively and literally. 

There are some lesson you have to learn the hard way.....
SO, my trainer is wonderful but strict.  We ran out of food the other day and she wouldn't let us go to the store to get more.  You have an hour for every meal and there is more than enough time to go and get food but apparently you only do that on p-day.  As a result of our poor budgeting and planing we ate some really "fantastic" food combinations this week.  Let's just say there was a lot of (leftover holiday) candy and butter involved.... because that's about all we had.  I will allow you to imagine how you will, how we survived on that alone for days. I am still not proud of myself for the things I ate out of sheer desperation.... which reminds me, we created a new word the other day- hangry, its what happens when you are angry as a result of being hungry.
On Tuesday we went to Hamilton (3 hour drive) to have the first time ever Mission Conference!!!!  That means that EVERYONE in the Mission got together (some people had to travel 8 hours to meet us!) and got to hear from our fearless leader, President Rudd. It was great to see my MTC companion and roommates.  Turns out sister missionaries are very dramatic.  Not to go into too much detail, there have been a lot of cat fights between some of the sisters, high school mentality and boy crazed crushes on Elders..... oh boyy!  Those silly city sisters.  We are out in the country and have bigger things to worry about, like how the 40 bug bites on my feet are now 60 and how to better coordinate our dance moves and singing at the end of a hard day.  But the Mission Conference was good.  We made a goal for the New Year to have 1,016 baptism this year! Which means 86 baptisms a month, which means each companionship needs one baptism a month, which means we we had a very, very large fast yesterday.
I find that as I observe how weird some people are in NZ I am also discovering how weird Americans are as well..... I don't know if I mentioned this in the last letter or not but everyone parks their cars on their front laws or on the grass on the sidewalk. I always find myself walking carefully around the grass as if i am afraid to touch it.  Here, grass is for walking on, and that's a hard thing to understand, it always seemed so fragile in the states.
We have this investigator, her name is Joanna. and oooooooh how we love Joanna!  She's Maori and lives with her partner who is a less active member. We invited her to be baptized and she said YES! she has the sweetest spirit you could possibly imagine but she is struggling with depression, smoking, and drinking. She tried to kill herself 3 times before but has had some remarkable experiences that have made her realize that she needs to be alive still. What's hard is that there are times when we teach her and her partner and her partner's cousin decides to sit in on our lessons.  He goes through 8 bottles of beer in 40 minutes and rambles on and on about science and how humans are evil and how he wants aliens to save him and take him from this dark hole that is earth..... Meanwhile, we are trying to have a very thoughtful and deep conversation with Joanna and her partner Phillip (you can't reach someone when he is so heavily drunk, so we had no choice but to ignore him).
Phillip and Joanna don't have the highest education and struggle a bit with reading, even simple words.  The cousin mocks them every time they begin to read or we ask them questions about their reading. I have never before seen such a heartless & cruel encounter such as this!  Phillip and Joanna keep their heads down and try to remain engaged in our lesson and do not respond to the cousin (nicknamed Satan).  I was getting boiling angry, which I know is wrong because the spirit cannot be with me when I am mad.  It was like watching a helpless old man getting lashed with an invisible whip, which cannot be stopped but it's effects are clear.  Without rambling on I ended up asking Careel if he loved his cousin and wanted to help him, to which he began to ramble on more about how evil man is and how we are all worthless humans without any hope or love...... its hard to explain but there was no spirit there and you could feel things getting bad. I will never forget the simple word my companion said: "STOP". That one word has never meant so much or has ever before been said so powerfully.  And he did stop and he left.
Enough about that deep ol' stuff. Joanna has quit smoking!! We brought a garbage bag to their house and made them give us all of their smokes and coffee. In exchange we gave them a brand new bag of Milo (great drink, comparable to hot chocolate). Then we threw the bag in a trash can down the road we don't even want to be around that stuff more than we have to and we certainly weren't letting that get into our car.
The biggest lesson I have learned this week is that we are all at different spiritual levels. Everyone. Someone old and gray-haired may be only an infant spiritually. They say even as a missionary you start off like a baby and then grow and develop throughout your journey. Yet, no matter what your age I believe there is something wise in the small and simple things. Our beliefs are simple.  And so should our teaching be simple. Sometimes I think I am really wise and go off during a lesson about some great point I am trying to make. Something my companions have taught me is that even though we may have a lot of great things to say it will not matter if they are not understood. We must teach for understanding. And in order to teach for understanding it must be simple. I believe that the most powerful lessons are those that are short and simple. --------Refer to the parable of the sower.... it shows how great understanding is! ------------
This week I am trying to become more simple and teach each person I meet according to their own understanding.
So this letter is a very, very bad example of how I am trying to be more simple.
Ha,
Oh happy dayyy!
Sister Moore
p.s. LOVED that I had so many emails in my inbox today!  I only got to see a few of them, so if I didn't respond I haven't read them yet :( sorry.

Man is not evil. But there are times when he is not himself. If you are looking with your spiritual eyes you could see that every time he opened up another beer can it was when he was starting to let us in and hear us. There were brief moments of sincerity where we saw him, but mostly it felt like we were talking to someone else.