Just a quick hello this week...

Happy birthday Jon and Rebecca!!! Not a day over 25.  Shout out to Blob and his amazing technicolor nightmare of death! (I promise I will try to write you a letter...good luck on your giant nerd test!) and to LUZ thank you for writing....I´m glad I´ll be at the wedding in all my cardboard cutout glory (I remember how creepy those were at your sisters´ weddings!). And MADI Rice! You have a child. HOly. Shrapnel. He´s adorable- congrats!  I´m living in the BIble belt of Chile...isn´t the Bible belt the best? And BEEF....you are not Sister Beef anymore...wow, you left yesterday.  I left yesterday. Life is weird.

HUGE call to repentance today:  Tucker Smith! Where have you been for a year? (Jade Barben is in my zone....really tall lurpy Snow college Utah kid....just a peach...he says hello), Ashley Haven and Mikey and James and Noah Driggs and HAL and Mr. Bouchdial and Pen pal -repent! yes, you. Whew, so much repenting.

I´m going to be a hypocite and just write to the fam today but Katie, to kind of tranquilize me after the mission, I´ll be living in Salt Lake, but I want you to apply to EFY for me so I can be a counselor at the U....I can´t do it because I´m on a mish...but If you could look into the application process and clue me in, I´d love it.

Love you all! Go study your scriptures and help someone!

Que verguenza! Spiritual thought for the day that I learned: We can be less active while we are sitting in the pews on Sunday.  Are we listening? Are we repenting? Do we feel the Spirit?  Do we look for ways to help, lift, or build?  The Sabbath day is one of the most broken commandments I think.  It´s so much more than going to church.  We participate in a sacred ordinance every week.  Love you all!

Hermana E Bourne

 

Humility...

The time goes by WAY to fast out here....it´s disgusting.

SHOUT OUT OF THE CENTURY GOES TO.........KATIE! Happy Birthday tomorrow...you´re all grown up! Eat a butterball for me!  Speaking of butterballs......

MOM and SOPHIE....most. hilarious. package. ever. I´d forgotten about the poptart incident.....I died laughing.  For those of you who don´t know...I once gave Sophie a 2nd degree burn with a molten  poptart.  I recently received a package from her in the which was a burnt poptart with the note ¨I hope you enjoy your poptart¨ enclosed.  Such a good sense of humor Soph.

This week was a normal one in the mish.  Day after day of frustration and just trying to get this whole thing going.  Day after day of little miracles and seeing the hand of God working among His children.  Incredible things are happening here in Chile.  Just heard of an awesome member in Punta who is putting in his papers to serve and is going to be a phenominal instrument in the hands of God.  secret shoutout!

Wednesday, Prez gave the best conference about humility (NOT a strong point for me) and it helped me look over my life.     On my mission, I have been compelled to be humble.  My whole life, I have really liked the fact that in whatever situation I am in (social, educational, physical), I can usually do that which is required of me.  That led me to a dependence on (and pride in) my own abilities.  The mission has completely compelled that all away.  I am, day after day after day, put in situations where, left to my own devices, I will inevitably fail...there is no other option than to fall to my knees and ask Heavenly Father for HIS help and HIS guidance....which, wonderfully enough is ALWAYS better than my own abilities.

  I am the poster girl for that missionary Prez described who wanted in her homecoming talk to look really good in front of her ward...saying she baptized hundreds... sectors and children of converts were named after her... generations would remember her name with a smile.  I'm a huge idiot. While I still want to be a good and strong and noble servant of my Father in Heaven... I have come to a knowledge on the mish that its the secret, unnoticed, unhearalded things we do in this life that will count.  I learned a lot from a wonderful comp that said ´I do not care in the least if my converts remember my name as long as they are strong in the church their entire lives.´ I almost couldn´t believe her when she said that.  But now, I feel that way too.  I am here to nurture and to lift the hands that hang down.  I am here to be the hands of the Savior.  And while I will never get near His level...I can help and lift and nurture in small ways.  We all can.  That´s the beauty of it.

I read ¨The abundant life¨ by Elder Wirthlin this morning.  Go look it up and read it.  The key to our happiness and joy in this life is to drink deeply from the fountain of life (Christ, HIs gospel, and His teachings), love with all of our hearts, and serve others.  We really can create of our lives a masterpiece if we give it to God....if we don´t, we will only create of ourselves a smudge.  We help, we love, we are kind, and we forget ourselves...THAT is who I want to be.

Friends and family I love each and every single one of you.  Thank you for your influence, love, support, emails, and letters (secret call to repentence!)

Thanks for writing family and Richie this week.  I love you fam and I love you Richie...you´ve always been a light.  I think of you guys and think of Matthew 4 and 5. You are all examples to me. LOVE YOU!

Hermana Bourne

 

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

 

CHI-CHI- CHI-LE-LE-LE CHILE!!!!! 33 miners rescued!!!!!!!!

A balmy day at the Straits of Magellen

Lookin' fine, feelin' toasty in the Penquin sweater!!

An historic day for Chile!  The world watches as 33 miners emerge after two months!!

Hell-(o)

Bueno, shout outs first of all.  Paulina Dowdle and Breanne Shaw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Congrats on the eternal companions and Breanne, thank you for writing me! It was really great to hear from you and I couldn´t be more thrilled that you´re getting hitched.  You´re a fantastic person and he´s a very, very lucky guy.   Paulina...I am living in your motherland...write to me!!!!

**my address is

Hermana Bourne

Casilla 7-0

Osorno Chile

Well, cambios came out this morning and me and Hermana Herbert are staying together another cambio here in Radimadi. (ouch) I really, really love the sector and I´m so happy to see so many wonderful changes happening in the branch and with our investigators.  We meet in a house that was converted into a chapel and we build a fire to stay warm during the meetings....its all wood on the inside and I play the broken electric piano that doesn´t have a pedal (yesterday, I started playing the sacrament hymn and the piano has this ¨rock beat back up¨ that started playing the second I started.....really brought the spirit.... For some reason, Heavenly Father is blessing this sector with a lot of success recently...this week, we reached the standards of the mission for lessons with member and nuevitos which hasn´t happened for I think 2 years.  He is blessing us with a lot of people to teach and the members are starting to help out a lot more.  I honestly don´t think I´ve ever relied on the hand of the Lord like this in my life. Ever.  And I think for that, God is blessing us.

I have blatant and 100% confidence that this is where God wants me to be and who He wants me to be with.  I feel happiness to know that with every hard thing I do, my spiritual muscles grow, my capacity to serve grows, and my heart is softened.  Hard things are really hard to do (especially looking forward at them)...but I know that looking back, I will be and I am grateful. 

 Love you all! Thank you for writing to me and praying for me and being my friends....I really do love you all.

Hermana Bourne

 

Baptism!