Soy una profesh door toquer (toker?)

That's been our sentance for the last week here in Hermosillo... My companion loves to make fun of my spanglish when I talk to her, so I've been trying to be creative. I've learned over the course of my mission that I love making people laugh. I'm not too great at it still, nothing on dad's level, of course, but I'm trying. There are few things that make me happier than when I can make someone else happy, laugh and joke with them, especially my companions and other missionaries. 

I cannot express how much I love being a missionary. I am going to miss this so much, but I can't think about that! Haha :P

These last few weeks have been excellent! I love being with Hermana Concidine. We have a blast, work hard, and learn so much together. We're both fairly strong personalities, but with the time we have in the mission it's perfect because we call each other out on things we need to improve on and then we work on them, and become even more united. I feel like I've progressed so much as a person in these last few months, and every day brings more advances. It's incredible how literally everything that passes in our lives contributes to who we are and choose to become, and the way we accept these occurances or changes is essential. 

This week we had a couple really awesome experiences, but I'd like to share just one. I've had the opportunity to meet one of the coolest people in the world a few weeks ago. She just got home a few weeks ago from the mission (she served in the same mission in DF as Elder Dalley... shout out!), and she's been accompanying us a lot. Her story is incredible. She was this teenager agnostic who didn't believe in anything or anyone when she met the missionaries. She accompanied us the other day to a lesson we had with this spunky university literature professor (I pick my investigators good, y'all :P), who is also an incredibly fascinating person. The professor was talking about how for the longest time she didn't believe in anything, until she recognized the necesity of believing in something. It's something I've seen time and time again. As humans, it is absolutely essential that we believe in something. It's wired into us, and everyone is the same, whether or not they admit it. I remember a letter from Elder Morell over in Hong Kong forever ago that talked about how everyone over there says that they believe in themselves. Even if we just believe in ourselves, we have to believe in something. Hope is a vital part of the human experience. As this professor tried to explain us her concept of God, she struggled. We tried to teach her, help her out, explain God to her. As we left the lesson, I asked this RM if she had any advice, how we could get through to this investigator. What she said has had me thinking all week. 

More than anything, one of the greatest human necesities is to understand what God is. We see expressions of diety in every culture of the world to some extent. People struggle to understand what or who is this higher power, and what significance it has. One of the greatest misconceptions about God is that He is Something, not Someone. But he is not a espirit, or a prescence, or a power. He is a person. He has a body. He loves, he feels, he acts. When we begin to understand God, truly understand who He is, we begin to understand His plan, why He works the way He does, and our purpose in all of this. What people never seem to get is that we do not create God, He creates us. We do not define who He is or what He does. We do not put parameters or limits on Him. We are His creations and part of His world. He is not our creation, and nor does He exist in the world of our created perceptions. He is apart. He in indepentent, and it is so essential to try to percieve Him, to understand Him independantly of how we would like to define Him. We cannot define God to make our world more comfortable, nor can we un-make Him into not existing. He is indepentant of our desires, nevertheless is completely involved in our everyday lives, working and worrying with a love that passes all understanding. Despite the fact that we cannot define Him, that our most important job is only to seek to understand Him and follow His will, He is an essential part of us, and we are an essential part of Him. 

So I invite everyone this week to think about God. Not about who you would like Him to be, or how you would define Him, but about how He really is. And why that knowledge would be so important in our lives. If you don't know who God is, how He is, then study. Pray. Search. As my darling mother always taught me, those who seek for beauty and truth find it. 

Be truth seekers. Peace.

Hermana Day

PS Long awaited photos to come