Idk yuh 10/11/23

 ¡Hola everyone!

I've officially been a missionary for a whole month! Which is actually so wild. Time has definitely started to speed up, this past week felt more like a month than a year so that's something! But I really have loved being a missionary, and I can already tell the next 17 months are gonna fly by!

Spanish is hard but it's definitely coming! It's funny looking back at my first weeks here and how I literally understood nothing. My first Sunday I remember sitting in church and just having no idea what was going on, but this last Sunday I could actually understand a majority of what people said! God is too good!!

Some highlights+, photos from this week:

• The earthquake alarm went off at like 11 one night and we had to evacuate. No one actually felt an earthquake, and we were outside for like less than 5 minutes but that was a party 

• Hna Karren (in 0.5) after we found out we're stl's through an email, it was all in spanish so we had to look up what hermanas capacitadoras meant

• The cute stl's before us, they're leaving this week which is soo sad. But they've been the biggest blessing!!

• Us everyday by the end of our night class

• For our service activity we had to empty all of the garbages. One house had a whole, moldy, fly covered cake in there that Hna Karren and I had clean up 🤮 

Spiritual thought:

This week I read the talk, "The Love of God '' by D. Todd Christopherson, and literally could have highlighted the entire thing. It's so good! But one of my favorite lines from it was,

• Ours is not a religion of rationalization nor a religion of perfectionism but a religion of redemption—redemption through Jesus Christ.

I definitely needed that this week, I love being a missionary but it’s freaking hard sometimes. Life is hard. And holding yourself to the impossibly high standard of perfection only makes things harder. As I’ve focused on turning to perfection in Christ, rather than the perfectionism of the world, it’s been so much easier to have hope that things will get better. 

Here in the CMM they have what’s called speak your language, or SYL to help us learn Spanish. 

1. Try first in the language, using what you know

1. Ask permission to speak English

2. Find out how to say it in Spanish

3. Write it down

4. Study and apply

They know that we're not gonna be perfect at speaking Spanish, but that the best way to learn is to try and speak it. I think the rest of life is the same way, God knows we're not going to be perfect, we're all learning. But if we try our best with what we already know, pray and ask him for help. Write down the answers we receive, and then apply what we've learned for next time, we can be perfected in Christ!

I love and miss you all so much!!

• Hermana Milne 🫶