I'm A Believer!

¡HOLA!

¡FELIZ PASCUA AYER! I hope that your Easter was good! Dad I was impressed that you knew that Pascua was Easter in spanish since it took like a good two weeks of me hearing it every day to figure it out! How is everything going? Thanks for all the emails and updates on everything this week. It sounds like you all had a great Easter!

This week was really great! Here they have huevos of pascua which are hollow chocolate eggs with kinda like nerd things inside and apparently it is a tradition to go around whacking each other on the butt... yeah I am not really sure but luckily as a missionary I am exempt from that game! :)

Funny story of the week. We were talking with Guillermo who is one of our recent converts and he was telling us how he met his wife. Apparently he was driving by her house one day with his cousin and saw her through a window and said that he wanted to talk to her. His cousin told him that he would have to talk to her father, who was a police officer, first to get permission. So one day he went to her house and found her dad sitting on the porch cleaning his gun (classic situation even in Argentina apparently). When he told her dad that he wanted to talk to his daughter, her dad responded, "I don´t want you two going around dating for 8 months or so. So if you want to talk to her you have to marry her." Guillermo´s response, "¡Bueno!" Ha ha they were married 3 months later in which they only saw each other twice, he was 25 and she was 16. Oh my when he was telling us that story I couldn´t stop laughing. It made me think of all the BYU/LDS jokes that I´ve always heard, so I guess he was always meant to be a member!

This week I really realized just how much as missionaries we really are representatives of Christ at all times! My companion and I were walking down the road this week heading to our lunch appointment and I was actually teaching her the word butterfly (why I remember that I don´t know), when a man road past us. He then turned down a road in front of us and called to us to turn down that road. Since it was broad daylight and there were people around we walked over to him. He started off by telling us that he had turned down the road because he didn´t want his wife to see us because she doesn´t like the missionaries but then he looked at us with the most sincere look I´ve ever seen and said, "But I´m a believer". It was one of the coolest experiences. He told us that he had recently lost his job and that he has 11 kids that he is trying to take care of, one of which has recently taken up robbing people and all that he wanted to ask of us was if we could pray for him and his family. I honestly felt so humbled and inadequate to respond to his request but of course we said that we would and are going to try and find him later this week to teach. This experience coupled with the fact that I had to prepare a talk this week on receiving revelation through prayer has made me think a lot about the power of prayer. There is a talk, shoot and right now I don´t even remember who by, that talks about how incredible it is that we get to talk personally with God, the creator of worlds without end, who is all powerful. Yet he wants to talk to us individually and personally and give us direction in our lives. How could we not want to pray?! I´ve thought a lot about how prayer is not a way to change the will of God but a way that we can ask for the blessings that God already has waiting for us.

Before my mission I worried a lot about whether promptings that I felt were just my own thoughts and not the spirit. But Elder Bednar gave a talk at the MTC where he said that if you have the spirit and I would add striving to do the Lord´s will, then your thoughts and desires will be the same as his. I love this scripture in D&C 46:30 where I talks about praying with the spirit and following the will of God.

Another quick story. Yesterday we were at a family´s house giving a lesson and then at the end a member who was with us was like, "Hna Scanlon, will you sing a song for us in English?" Oh my.... just add this to things that I would never normally do but will do as a missionary. Yup, so you bet I got up there in front of everyone and sang a song... Funny part was that the only song that I could remember in english was I am a Child of God. It was fine but let´s just say that I am really glad that the spirit was there to help strengthen me and make me not sound so bad...

Ok well I had better go. I love you all and am so grateful to be a forever family!

Think about you often, pray for you always and love you forever!

Hna Scanlon

P.S. yes the title of this email does make me start to sing that song from Shrek... :)