Dear Family,
This week was great! We worked really
hard, and I am super psyched to go home in a few minutes and sleep! I
don´t think I´ll actually have much time to sleep though, because we set an
appointment today at 5 so our p-day ends earlier than usual and I still have to
wash my clothes and clean the house. Oh, and I started translating my
patriarchal blessing into Spanish this morning and I want to finish that—highly
recommendable, by the way, for anyone who can translate their patriarchal
blessing into another language. It´s the second time I´ve done it in the
mission and it´s helped me to understand it a lot better.
Elder Esparza is awesome. He´s from the
state of Mexico, and supposedly I´m supposed to be finishing his period of
training, but he´s seriously a stud and he teaches and contacts really well and
I don´t feel like I have too much that I need to train him on. Another
awesome thing about him is that he speaks a ton of English! He speaks
more English (just from classes in high school) than I spoke Spanish at the
point that I left the MTC. So that’s been fun.
We got goose egged on our investigators in
church this week. :( That´s never fun. But, we did set a really solid
baptismal date for the 22nd, so we´re psyched about that. The sister´s
name is Marisol and she has two little kids and her husband is working right
now in Texas. The not so good news this week is with the other sister
that we´re teaching, Dionila, who has her two sons and her husband who passed
away a few years ago. She's reading the Book of Mormon and praying, and
she´s received answers, but she's got this huge mental block against
baptism. Also, she and her older son work at least every other Sunday, so
they haven´t been able to make it to church since almost a month ago.
But, we´re going to keep working with them, and hopefully with a lot of prayer
and faith, they´ll be able to keep progressing.
Our p-days (should) go like this: (just
like any other day), wake up at 6:30, be studying by 8. We leave the
house between 11 and 12, and then go to do haircuts, go to the ciber, and go to
the store. I don´t think we´ll be able to hike the Piedra de Huixtla
because supposedly it takes a good bit of time and we leave to proselyte at 6
by the latest.
I love being a missionary, but I am tired all
of the time. That is the normal for me
now. :) The trick is not letting it become just a routine, but always
remembering how excited we were when we got our call, the whole time in the
MTC, when we got to the field, when we had our first baptism, etc. It´s
easy to lose sight of how incredible the mission is sometimes, because like I
told Jacob a few weeks ago, there´s no choir singing "Called to
Serve" when we crawl out of bed exhausted at 6:30, when we leave our
apartment, or when we get rejected an entire afternoon. You have to be
able to find the real joy that is really here, but is not the "glory"
of it all.
I do have a request for a care package or for
Christmas. A few weeks ago, President
asked us to turn in our MP3 players. So now, I am without music (just my
set of discs of hymns). What a lot of elders have is a DVD with music on
it (we all have little DVD players that can play music from discs). So,
what would be awesome would be to have music again. EFY music, Joseph: A
Nashville Tribute, Jenny Phillips, and all the stuff like that that I had on my
MP3 player that I no longer have would be awesome.
My time is already gone, but I just want to say
that I miss you guys a ton, seriously. If I had to choose one thing about
my mission that was the hardest, it would be that I have such limited
communication and such little time to talk to and think about all of you.
But, President has told us that the way to avoid homesickness is diligence in the
work and I'm really holding on to that promise and working as hard as I can,
because I really miss you all. Please know that you´re always in my prayers and
that I really love each one of you so much. I hope that those of you that
are sick can get better quickly and that things go well for you guys in this
coming week.
Con amor,
Elder Nickerl
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