mahal po ako ito linggo. This week was great. It went by super super quick. After tomorrow, my district will be the oldest one in the zone! They are calling new Sister Training Leaders and ZL's tomorrow and chances are good they'll be from my district. We signed so many journals this week and i was a little sad. I've never cared so much about people i've known for such short a time. But you really learn to depend on your sister training leaders, and i got pretty close with ours.
We get our flight plans this Friday and that is just insane. I will be in the Philippines in 16 days! I seriously cannot wait. I already know who I'm sitting next to because one of the girls in another zone's dad is in charge of that i guess. So I get to sit by Sister Seastrand on the plane and that is SUCH a comfort to me. I am so glad. I'm pretty sure we will be flying to LA, then to Hong Kong, then to Manila. Gab- I get to see where you hail from! Land of the Chinas.
I learned a lot this week...just like every other week. I can teach most of the lessons in Tagalog, and can answer most questions! Broken Tagalog pero i'm working on it! I get better every day. I see Elder Gerkin like every three seconds now. I told him to keep an eye out for any Devlyn's while hes in Mexico City. Pretty sure he leaves Monday. My district has been sick all last week, and I was the second one to catch a cold...typical. No fever though! It's a huge bummer being sick in the MTC. You can't sleep all day. or at all, really. But i skipped gym yesterday to take a nap and i feel loads better. They don't really sell medicine here so i've been drinking airbornes hoping i'll get better soon! Thanks for all your love and prayers, I can feel them every day.
Ok so cool story of the week-
We do this thing called TRC every Saturday night from now on. LDS Philippino people volunteer to come in and we teach them a family home evening lesson. Our first lesson was a bit rocky because the girl spoke so dang fast! I caught like 70% of it, but it took forever long to process in my brain. So frustrating. But she said our tagalog was impressive for only being here 3 weeks. And she said my accent was really good, so i should work harder on learning vocab. I feel like my teachers think that too...Anyway, our second lesson was absolutely amazing. It was this sweet lola (grandma) from Cebu who had been living in Utah for a while. I started out the lesson with a prayer, then I started teaching about pananampalataya (that's the word for faith, can you believe that rediculousness?!) kay JesuCristo. And I kept trying to move on, but I couldn't talk about anything else. I really felt like that's all we should talk about. She started telling us a story about a sister who was from Argentina that had taught her in TRC a few months back. She said the sister had the hardest time understanding why she was speaking Tagalog, and was so frustrated in all the lessons. But in her last lesson, she bore testimony that her faith had been tried and she pushed through. She realized she didn't need to know why she was going there. All she needed to know was that she was called there as a representative of the Lord to teach the people of the Philippines. Of course I started crying. I've thought about that so many times. While she was telling me the story, I got such a distinct prompting from the Spirit to let her teach me. Every time we said anything, she had a scripture to share with us or a story about how to increase your faith in God's will. That next day, our Sunday devotional was by the previous Manila MTC presidents. I have never in my life felt so loved or noticed by my Heavenly Father. I know he loves us all individually. Those tender mercies need to be recognized because they happen all the time!
Love,
sister gaspar de alba
(Sorry no pictures; administrator (dad) couldn't figure it out today. Check back soon!)
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