Wednesday, January 29, 2014

January 29, 2014

Здравейте пак майка,

Guess who got travel plans? Hint: me. We got them earlier this week. It was so exciting. I have to be in the travel office at 2:30 AM Tuesday morning. I left the itinerary in my room but I will get back on to let you know all my flight info. I fly all by my wee little self to Dallas, then to New York, where I will pick up my visa for Macedonia and stay there a day and work with the sisters there!!! How awesome is that! I'm my group's travel leader, ha ha. Then the next day I fly to VIENNA and then straight into Skopje. I get there on the 6th.

This morning was our last visit to the temple for a year and a half!!! It was so sad. We did sealings though, which was awesome and I'd never done before. We started packing when we got back, and tomorrow we have in-field orientation all day and then I think on Sunday we have our departure devotional. Sister Lefler leaves the day before me, also at the crack of nothing o'clock but not quite as early as I'll have to get up. I'll be in a tri-panionship with the two new croatian sisters for a day. The only other one in our zone who is traveling alone is Elder Frahm, who's going to Leeds, England, Slovak-speaking. I told Sister Lefler a million times how it stinks I won't see any of them while I'm on my mission! All of them except for me and Elder Frahm will get to see each other at conferences and stuff. 

A lot of cool stuff has happened but I always remember after I send you an email. Last week three elders in my class paid one of my teachers $60 to eat a banana with the peel. It's kind of weird because all of our teachers are more or less the same age as us. Two of my teachers, Brother Huish and Sister Tate, got married. I was talking to Brother Huish in the classroom yesterday about my mission, including how anxious/nervous I am to meet my companion, and he said, "I'm not gonna lie, you and her are pretty different. We were talking about it the other day. But when I went into Turkey" (he was one of the first missionaries when Turkey opened, he went there part way through his mission in Bulgaria and then went back to Bulgaria afterwards) "the four of us were all so different, but we are such good friends. We had a great companionship."

Deciding to come on a mission was seriously the best decision of my life. It was God who brought me here and God who will lead me here.


Love,
Lauren

Thursday, January 23, 2014

January 22, 2014

Hello Everyone!

Our friend from Vanuatu left yesterday. She came and found me as I was about to get in the shower right after gym and told me she was going. We hugged and she told me, "Thank you for encouraging and supporting me. I love you." I told her I was so glad to have met her and wished her luck. She started to walk away and then turned back to say, "You are my eternal sister." She said the whole thing with a lot better English than normal.

This morning we went to the temple again. We made friends with this lady who works in the clothing rental area, who has a daughter serving in the same mission as Sister Lefler (Adriatic North). Apparently she'd also talked to my will-be companion (whose name is Sister Schofield), because she already knew everything about Macedonia when I told her, and this morning when we went in she grabbed my hand and said she'd told Sister Schofield she'd met me. "I told her you were cool! She says hi and that she's excited and waiting for you. She's been shuffled around so much, I think she'll feel like her mission has officially started once you get there." I told her about how I had started my mission papers in June, and it had taken so long to get them in because of doctors messing up my records and stuff, and how if I'd have gotten them in on time we could've been in the MTC at the same time as one another. "I wonder why the Lord wanted it that way," I told her. She gave kind of the same theory I'd thought of myself, "Maybe something will happen or you'll meet someone or move on your way in or out, or her way in or out, who knows."

The temple is such a good place to be. I was thinking today while we were there for an endowment ceremony. Before I had ever been to the temple I remember hearing about people learning things at the temple, and now that I've gone to the temple myself I see what they mean. The Spirit of the Lord is in such abundance there. I've been able to think deeply about ideas I've received in the temple that I would not have thought of otherwise. The scriptures make more sense to me now. Next Wednesday will be the last time we'll be able to go for a year and a half almost, which makes me so sad. Anyway, after the endowment ceremony we (some of the others from our zone who were in our same session) ate in the temple cafeteria. Easily the best food we get all week. Me and Sister Lefler split a huge waffle and I ate some real eggs. 

We should get our travel plans soon, and I'll be able to email you again and let you know when exactly I leave. 

Well, no one's really "replaced" the Polskis, but we did get two new Croatian sisters and one Slovene elder. They're cool and I like them. I have heard from Sister Stratton and one of the Polish elders, too. Sister Stratton sent us the coolest email this morning, though. She has Celiac disease and always has to be really careful about what she eats. Her last two weeks here were really rough because she'd been accidentally ingesting wheat and felt really sick. She normally brings her own piece of bread for sacrament and just has to remember where on the plate it is so she can eat it. She said one week in Poland she forgot to bring bread, but she really felt like she needed to take the sacrament that week and just prayed that it wouldn't make her sick. She ate it and was completely and totally fine. She was super happy, and decided to see if she could eat other things without feeling nauseous. Basically she's now been eating pizza, kebabs, and chocolate muffins out her eyeballs and has been completely normal. The subject line of her email was,"I'M HEALED!!!!!!!!!" What a miracle. It really is amazing and everyone in our zone thought I was being sarcastic at first when I looked up from her letter and said, "Sister Stratton has been cured of Celiac disease." I wanted to copy and paste a scripture, Alma 38:5, which is about the Lord healing us of our afflictions if we have faith, but the computer is being dumb. That story helped my faith so much. And receiving so many letters from the people I love every week, it was just awesome this morning with everyone sharing their news. One of the new sisters said her friend emailed her and said she'd started praying again, after eleven years of not doing so.

I have to go soon but I wanted to tell you something funny/sad. So, at the MTC they hire actors and actresses to talk to the missionaries about the church. They told us all on the first day that they wouldn't entrust real investigators' salvation to us, but I guess three elders in our zone didn't get the memo. They came in our classroom yesterday and started energetically telling us about how "a guy who's girlfriend sent him to the MTC to learn about the church" had talked to them and that they'd been able to get through to him and set up an appointment with him. None of us yet have had the heart to tell them he isn't real.

обичам тебе!
Сестра Ридъл

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Missionary Pictures--Yay!!

January 8, 2014

There's us at the temple on our Sunday walk, and the second one includes some of the Polskis who are gone now.



Sunday, January 12, 2014

January 8, 2014



January 8,

I'm trying to think of what news to tell you, but it hasn't been a full week since I wrote last. Our P-day changed since it's a new year and we have a new schedule. I am so anxious to get to Macedonia. Scared, yes, but anxious.
I gave the closing prayer at Sunday devotional, and Sister Stratton had given it at the mission conference earlier that day, so for both meetings I sat up on the stand. So that was cool. 

I think I haven't told you yet about the crazy people that live on our floor of the residence. They stay up really late and make a lot of noise. Mostly screeching in foreign tongues.  We did make friends with this one girl from Vanuatu (I think I'm spelling that right), which she told us is an island near Australia. A lot of people have all their friends write them a goodbye note in a little book or something when they leave, and we met her a few weeks ago when she knocked on our door and asked us to sign hers, even though she won't be leaving until the end of the month and even though we'd never spoken to her before. She is really sweet. Her English isn't very good but her pronunciation is great. She said her native languages are French and something else. She'll be serving in South Provo when she leaves. I can't spell or pronounce her last name though. We feel pretty bad for her because she's always having problems with her companions. That first night we talked to her, she told us, "When we came in on the plane, it was so cold! We thought we are sick! But no, it's just the weather." She showed us all her gospel references in her language and told us she missed speaking it, and that she wished we could visit her there. I did actually find her island on a map when I was waiting for Sister Lefler in the health clinic one day. It was just a black speck. We run into her still from time to time and say hello.

I would write more but nothing eventful has happened.

I love you, and here's my favorite scripture lately:

Ether 12:4
Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with asurety bhope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, whichchope cometh of dfaith, maketh an eanchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding infgood works, being led to gglorify God.

с любов,
Сестра Ридъл

Friday, January 3, 2014

January 3, 2014

January 3, 2014

Hello everyone!


This morning we got up early and went over to the temple to help clean it. We spent three hours just cleaning lockers. When we got there the lady said we were redoing the work that some previous missionaries were supposed to have done, but did a bad job. I was pretty confused because they looked clean to me. But then some of the cleaning tools they gave us in addition to rags and soap included toothpicks and q-tips. I'm not kidding. By the time we were done the lockers were immaculate. It kind of reminded me of this scripture as we were doing it:
Isaiah 55:8-9
For my athoughts are not byour thoughts, neither are yourcways my dways, saith the Lord.
 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my awaysbhigher than your ways, and my cthoughts than your thoughts.
Sister Stratton is leaving on Monday with all the other Polskis and we are so sad! I'm going to miss her so much but we're of course going to write each other. Sister Lefler apparently is a sky-diving fan and asked me and Sister Stratton to join her post-mission, so we said we would. 

They seriously are the best companions ever. The other night we were sitting in our residence and I started telling them how apprehensive I was about serving in Macedonia where there were so few members (2, + 6 missionaries will be 8 once I'm there), where the gospel is so new to everyone, where so much is expected of me and my companion, who won't know the language very well. (Since she's in Serbia she's speaking Serbian, which is only similar to Bulgarian.)  Sister Stratton said to me, "It speaks so much to the truth of this gospel that there are over 80,000 teenagers out there right now, giving up their lives for this." I'm not sure if it was then, because Sister Lefler had been telling us she'd been stressing about her language a lot during her lessons, but we committed to each other that for each of our next lessons, we would focus on following the Spirit rather than worrying about our grammar or anything. Sister Stratton later said, "They tell us that the most righteous were saved for the last days, and not to be prideful, but that it us. And when we chose sides, we weren't the ones like, 'Hmm, I don't know, I think God's plan is a better bargain for me,' we were the ones like, 'Yes, God is who I'm going to follow. Please come with us, please be on our side.' We have been fighting the war of good and evil for millenia, and look at us, we are still fighting." My next lesson(s) were during TRCs again and I took their advice, prayed, and it was the best lesson of mine so far. And this time a bunch of volunteers came so I was able to be on my own again. The first group I taught was three return missionaries who had gone to Bulgaria, including the one who'd originally told me that I was probably going to Macedonia. How cool is that? Nate Garrett is his name. I was really nervous when I went in because I had been expecting to teach the guy I always had previously. They all advised me to speak as much of the language as possible, and to "forget about English, forget that you speak it." The real Bulgarian guy that I taught said to me, "That's what I had to do when I was learning English. And I just asked all my companions to correct me a lot, because when I served in Chicago I thought I knew English, and then found out that I didn't." They were like, "You just have to put your foot down and always speak your language, and you will grow so much, so quickly."   I told the people I taught and I'm telling you that God is helping me with the language.  At the MTC they tell us to pray for the gift of tongues, and that if we work our hardest at the language that God will help the missionaries and investigators understand each other. One of my teachers, Brother Hammond, said it would probably manifest itself in ways we weren't expecting. I know that God answers our prayers, and that when we do work hard and try to follow Him, He will bless us so much. He wants us to have success and be happy in this life. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen. I really enjoyed sharing my testimony with them as well. This is a very purposeful, good, and satisfying work.  Oh yeah, guess what? I memorized the missionary purpose in Bulgarian this week. I know this is repetitive, but the Lord is the driving force behind this work. He wants so badly for His children to come back to Him. As we express thanks and are grateful to Him, He blesses us even more. He loves us. I was working on memorizing the purpose in English, and when I said it out loud the first time I felt the Spirit pang in my heart. I think He wants us to understand how sacred and important what we're doing is. I even feel a little weird sharing that emotion with you, because it was such a tender emotion. I think God is really just boosting my confidence, in my abilities, and in Him, in His power, in the truthfulness of His church.  I am so happy here. I hope you are happy. 

D&C 6:32
Verily, verily, I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, where two or three are gathered together in my name, asatouching bone thing, behold, there will I be in the cmidst of them—even so am I in the dmidst of you.

til later
сестра ридъл