The Patience of Having 9 Months

Week Thirty-nine!

This week there is going to be a big marking point in my mission.  On Wednesday I complete 9 Months in the mission. The Half Way Mark.  It has been pretty stressful, knowing that I am now older than half the mission is really weird and knowing that it has been nine months since I have gotten in the mission is also really weird.  It really doesn’t seem that long at all, like maybe six at the most but really it feels like it has been four.  As I sat at breakfast today I was thinking a lot about the things that I have done since I have been here and how much I have improved.

It is a real blessing to be training Hna Pfister in these days because before it was really hard for me to think of how far I have actually come in the mission but she makes the same comments about me that I was making about my trainer when I got in and how much I wanted to get to this point when I first started.  I wasn’t able to see all of this myself.

But now I am at this point where I can, and now I have new goals to do even better.  This cambio is all about the patience.  As everyone knows, nobody likes to grow in their patience.   Because the way God does it is that he is like, hey, to be more patient I’m going to put a lot of things in your way to make you angry so you can look back on it in the next part of your life and say hey at least it’s not as bad as that one time.

As I was reading in Alma 26 and studying how Ammon combated his afflictions in the work of the Lord I was really struck by the end of verse 27 where it says "Sufrid con paciencia vuestras aflicciones, y os daré éxito" which basically means, hey, don’t get angry and everything will work out, but in scripture talk.  That lead me to think of the life of Joseph Smith and his trails and how in Doctrinas y Convenios 121 yeah, he was pretty beat down and sick of the suffering, but towards the end of his life in Section 127 verse 2 he explains how he felt after everything by saying "como Pablo, siento deseos de gloriarme en la tribulatión, porque hasta hoy el Dios de mis padres me ha librado de todo ello"

So yeah, like I lost my train of thought because Oasis is playing in the Internet and I love this song.  SO I guess I will just leave it at that.  When we grow in patience we are blessed.

Sorry there are no pictures this week I forgot my cord, so next week you will get all the pictures from when we went to the zoo