Email March 29, 2014

Hola mi familia!!

Another week and in the words of the Croods...STILL ALIVE!!! 

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! For the care package. I think I got it on either Tuesday or Wednesday. All of the other Hermanas were jealous of my super AWESOME family! I loved all the little treats and laughed so hard at all the little quotes. It was amazing! Oh! I gave out the bubbles to the Hermanas, when they realized what they were they screamed a little bit and then there was much rejoicing....yaaay.....I also made sure to tell them that the bunnies were from Madre Parslow and they all say Gracias! 

Congrats to Camille on her game! That´s awesome! Way to be lil´ sis! 

Thank you to everyone for taking care of my darling dog, sorry for the thief tendencies... I have no idea where he gets it from. 

Thank you for all of your notes throughout the week, they really helped and I love hearing from you all. 

 

Okay, so yes my apartment has a full kitchen. There´s a companionship to each room, thank goodness, you can barely fit two beds into one room. The smoke detector finally got new batteries....after a week and lots and lots of beeping. Cortney, you asked about the girls in my district so I´ll tell you a little about them. 

   First, there´s my companion, she´s still super awesome and great. She´s a very on time person and very dedicated to the Lord´s work. We still get along great!

   Then there´s Hermana Powell, she´s this super sweet girl from a farm in Indiana. She´s really innocent and says the funniest little things at the most random moments without meaning to. She's apparently the Mom of our district cause she´s 21. Her companion is Hermana Bullock. She´s canadian, although you´d never guess it. She´s the oldest in our district and has been given the honorary title of Abuela by Hermana Ramirez because she´s the oldest out of us all. Abuela is Grandmother in spanish. She´s usually our entertainment in the morning while we´re all getting ready cause she sings in the shower. It´s fantastic actually cause her voice is amazing! 

   Hermana Wells is my age and from Cedar Hills, Utah. She´s super sweet and is the kind of girl that would probably have been voted most likely to succeed. She was a soccer player and spent a couple of semesters at BYU Hawaii after graduating. Her companion is Hermana Ramirez. This woman is outgoing, blunt, forward, and as sassy as they come. She wrote the book on attitude. She´s really sweet and is actually our entertainment throughout the day. She´s hilarious. She´s from Salt Lake City. 

The Empty Sea is Great!! Once we got into a set schedule and was done with all of the introduction stuff, things got much easier and fun! 

Our lesson with Gabriela were great! My companion and I actually were the most successful with her. She was having trouble praying and had really just asked to meet with us because she was curious about our church and why we were all so crazy. We were able to get her to pray and believe that she could change. We had our last lesson with her on Wednesday which was super sad because she was making so much progress! Funny thing though, we got another teacher on Thursday named Hermana Bair, guess who walked in...Gabriela! Yeah, okay, we all knew she was a teacher but it´s so much fun to get to know her as herself instead of just as an investigator. She´s amazing. She helps us with the language so much! Not to mention she´s hilarious...even if most of us don´t know what she´s saying 90% of the time. I took a picture of something called my Perspective Rock and will hopefully be able to send it to you. Thursday she had us all run outside in the rain to find a small rock. When we got back she had us try to see things with the rock held up to our eye. Naturally you can see very little. She then had us throw the rock on the ground and look at it. The rock represents obstacles and it was about perspectives. When you´re mainly looking at your obstacle it seems huge but when you look at it from a distance with the big picture in mind it becomes very small. It was a good lesson and reminder.

 

On Sunday we got our Hellfire! and Damnation! talk. It was pretty good actually. The speaker called people (in general) out on flirting and not being in the MTC worthily. He also said that in the MTC right now there are 1,840 missionaries! Whoa! He also said that the best missionaries in the field are sisters...pfft, no doubt. He mentioned that the prophet lowered the age for missionaries because all of us will need to be stronger for what lies ahead in our futures. 

My favorite part of Sunday though was watching a devotional done by Elder Bednar a couple of years ago. It´s something you ONLY missionaries get to see and it´s called The Character of Christ. It. Was. AMAZING! He said, You are in the right place at the right time in your life. You are exactly where the Lord wants you to be. He also said that each missionary is assigned to a mission by an apostle, who we sustained as a prophet, seer, and revelator. We are never sent somewhere we weren´t meant to be. That being said, he also reminded all of us that, You´re mission is not about you. He said, The character of Christ is to turn out with love and service when others would turn in. Christ always turned out to others when something awful happened to him. Ugh! How I wish you all could hear it! It was amazing! Two of my favorite things he said were, That Natural Man is like the Cookie Monster (then he gave the best Cookie Monster impression ever) and that we all need to make sure we are converted to Christ, not to the church, not to the programs, not to the people, no even to our leaders but to Christ. The other thing I loved was when he was talking about turning out when we want to turn in and he said, When you find yourself, you won´t be looking for it, because you will have turned out to others. Wow, talk about powerful!

I love you all! I miss you! Thank you so much for being amazing! Please forward this to Grandma and let her know I loved hearing from her, that I loved the card, and that I love her and Grandpa!

Oh! Please send me a pic of the family or pictures in general, everyone has been asking me for them!

Thank you! I love you! Hasta luego!

Hermana Parslow