.: Week 16 Tender Mercy Week

Week 16

Dear Friends and Especially my beautiful Fam,

Hello everyone! :) How are we all doing this week? I hope everyone had a good one, like always its beautiful here--very hot day in Makati. A wonderful day to wish a Happy Birthday week to my best friend Brock :) I hope you have a GREAT day!

Well...This week was a pretty good one, some long days and some really awesome days too. We are getting out of the rainy season--so that means it is hot all day everyday. Can't decide what I like better, buckets of rain or piercing hot sun :) But anyway, I can't wait to tell you all about the week--it started out with teaching Sister Amalia about temples. She is a referral from her daughter Anna from the ward, and we have actually been teaching her ever since I came to the area. She is super religious, believes in God--so our lessons to her are just a nice message about Christ. But recently her husband passed away, which was super sad for her--we went to his funeral. But this week we felt like we needed to visit with her about temples and how we can be with our families FOR ETERNITY. As we started to teach her you could see her start to really listen to our message. Her daughter also testified that temples really are the way that we can see our loved ones again. :) And honestly it was just a way cool lesson for Sister Amalia AND she came to church on Sunday! :) So that was a way awesome way to start out the week.

Another cool lesson was with Brother King--and this was a "sit back and listen to how awesome your companion is at teaching" moment. Brother King is super interested in the Book of Mormon. My companion Sister Dolor has been through a lot in her life--a lot of different trials. As I listened to her testify about how she knows the Book of Mormon is true was honestly one of the highlights of my week. It just made me realize, you know in life there is a lot that we as individuals have to go through, and I have learned that more from listening to Sister Dolor. Sometimes we need to take a step out of ourselves and be humble--I think I learn a lot more that way :) I also really love how Brother King has this desire to REALLY know if the Book of Mormon is true.

We had a really awesome lesson with an investigator named Gladyss, she is a member referral. I love member referrals--help the missionaries out and give them some haha :) Anyway, we watched the First Vision video with her, I think it really helps to visualize it. But after we asked her what she thought, and she was like--"He really did that?" and it was kind of just this "aha" moment for me that, wow Joseph Smith really did restore the church on the earth. Sometimes I forget how amazing that is, that Joseph Smith--bata pa siya--received an answer to a prayer and became a prophet :)

We had a few hard days this week, just full of rejection after rejection. And it was honestly a hard couple of days for me. Our backup, backup plan even cancelled on us....I had never experienced absolutely everyone saying no before. I know there are people that have it much harder in that aspect of a mission. I just was feeling a little discouraged, but as I was walking home on Saturday I kind of had this thought of 1 Nephi 16:29 going over and over in my head, "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass." And I was thinking about that scripture, and how I had completely failed to realize the little tender mercies or the small things that that happened that day. And I feel like so often in our busy lives we don't really take the time to enjoy the little things that happen :)

Tender mercies are SO real :) and we need to take a minute to remember the small things the Lord does for us araw-araw.

Have an awesome week :)

Love,

Sister Zarbock