I love Radimadi!

If you went to Olympus you'll understand this shot...but Emily seems happy holding this "breathtaking" (Seinfeld reference) baby...

WHEW.  It hasn´t rained for like 2 months and I´m drying up!  Absolutely gorgeous! A giant call to repentence goes to all those dating my immediate family members who haven´t written me. But a giant shout out of love goes to Tiffany Andrews (you sound AMAZING...I´m praying for you slash happy birthday in Sept!), Blob....best emails ever, and my family....thank you thank you thank you!

People, I really love you all, but I officially won´t be writing any more handwritten letters home because I just don´t have time.  I´ll see you all in a matter of weeks anyways....baaaaaaah.  Lame.  It makes me nauseated to think of it.  Moving on.

I absolutely love Radimadi.  Why is it that we love the places where we give the most?  It should seem contradictory, but it´s not...it´s just how God works.  It is the smallest sector in the mission in the middle of cow fields, but I´d honestly be content to die here (aka...finish my mission).  We had district conference on Sunday and Prez and Elder Amado came and talked about La Union becoming a Stake!!! The prospects are very exciting, but there is still a LOT of work to be done (like getting more than 30 people active in the rama (branch)).  I just don´t want to learn a new sector and people and problems and everything.  I LOVE RADIMADI.  Which is funny because from the first day of my mission I did not want to come here (It was THAT sector).  But I´ve always loved a challenge and we are seeing beautiful progress.

We went out to campo on Saturday to help our Mission Leader move from his slanted, old house into a teeny-tiny one in the ¨city¨ and it was awesome.  To get to his house, we had to take a collectivo 10 minutes out into these fields and then walk 30 minutes on a dirt one to get to his house.  We got all the furniture and mattresses out......(oh man, a Dr Dre song that I used to ski to just came on and flashbacks of moguls and trees and powder crept into my mind....(cue the music) Soy un hijo de Dios! anyways)...we were moving everything out of the house when I went outside to ask Alexis something and saw him break the neck of the chicken that was in his arms with his bare hands and he began to brutally rip the feathers out of the still moving body.  Then he chopped it up and made soup out of it and fed it to us....it. was. awesome.  I love the campo.  He is really a great guy...he was going to be a catholic priest when the missionaries found him, he got baptized, served a mission, married in the temple, and moved out here.

We´re just getting ready for Halloween this week (my comps favorite holiday...of course!) and we bought big bags of little candies to hand out to little kids so we can contact their parents.  Bwah ha ha! Who said missionaries weren´t diabolical?  The people around me are looking at me weird becaue Ï´m humming the tune to soy un hijo de dios to avoid any worldy involvement ) Alas- I´m an hermana.

 

This weekend at conference, Elder Amado and Prez talked about Zion.  How it´s not a place we move to...but a place that we create starting with every one of ourselves.  We look at ourselves and the beams in OUR eyes and fix that.  Then we purify our hearts and that´s the part I can´t get out of my mind.  I´m reading the Bible and in Ezekial 36 I think it talks about God taking out our heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh.  I LOVE THAT.  I think Elder Renlund or someone gave a talk about it.  But the way we do it is Helaman 3:35.  We fast, we pray, and through the atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ, we are purified...we are firm in our faith.  I LOVE IT.  

I feel like that is how my mission has been...a refiner´s fire that has been slowly heating up for a year now and right now its at a degree that would´ve burned me a year ago.  It´s like when Shadrech and his buds got thrown in the furnace....they weren´t burned because the Savior was with them....I feel like I´m walking in fire alone a lot of the time here...but oddly enough, I don´t get burned....I probably smell like smoke...but I¨m being refined.  Enough with the fire analogies...you´re all probably cold enough with all that snow.

 

Well, I love you all.  Thank you for the prayers and the emails and packages and support.  I need all of that stuff I can get! Please pray for my investigators and the sector of Radimadi.  BE GOOD!

Hermana Bourne