I know I am not writing anything great here. Last week I did not even post the blog links on Facebook or Twitter. Right now, I don't have anything on preparedness to share, because I am working on other things.
At the same time, keeping in the habit of posting something seems important for discipline, and also, doing this has been kind of good because it is bringing up a lot of memories from my mission. It's been a while.
Twenty years ago, I was in Fresno with Sister L. I do not remember the exact dates of when the regular transfer happened and when my transfer happened, but I remember the circumstances.
I did not get along well with Sister L. She was a widow, so much older, and stubborn and set in her ways. I heard things about her from other sisters that made me dread working with her, which I should not have listened to. The most frustrating thing about her was that if she did not want to listen to you, she would shut you out.
She was native Chinese whose family had moved to Thailand. So, English was her third language, and she actually didn't speak Laotian at all, though Lao and Thai are similar enough that she could generally communicate with missionaries and members and investigators. However, if you were saying something she did not want to hear, it did not matter what language you were speaking in, she did not understand you. Since we disagreed about a lot of things, this was frustrating.
The mission president had wanted to separate us because she couldn't drive at night, and I couldn't drive at all. I really had my hopes up for a transfer, but it didn't happen, and I realized that I had to be able to work with her. I had to make myself love her. So I worked at that, and prayed for it, and then they had special mid-month transfers that sent me to Modesto. It was necessary that I love her, but I only had to do so for a few days.
The thing is, I had pride there. She had her good points too, and I had a hard time seeing those, getting hung up on my frustration with her. There could very well have been things that I should have done then and missed out on because of my pride.
I mention this because I had two different times when the Spirit was strong during times that we spent with people, and I felt it, but other people didn't it, and that showed me that just because the Spirit is there doesn't mean that everyone is partaking. In both cases, pride was involved.
One time was with Sister L. We were reading the Book of Mormon with an older couple, and it felt important to do that. The Book of Mormon is chapter five, so I will write more about that in the next post, but it felt like the right thing to do, and I thought it went well. The husband was an old military man, and tough, but I knew he was touched, and I thought we were sharing something special. Then, after we left, Sister L started complaining in the car that we had treated this man like a little boy, just reading.
I know it did more good than a lesson would have done, and they were already members so we weren't trying to teach them for baptism; we were trying to help them be stronger members, and The Book of Mormon is good for that. For her, I guess it seemed like something anyone could do, and why would he want to just sit reading with the missionaries? She was very rigid though, and that was something she admitted later, in that she had kind of tried to be a robot. Departure from the norm was not comfortable for her. She did learn to be better about that, but she needed to do it with someone other than me, where I was so different in terms of being intuitive and organic, and so similar in terms of being stubborn.
This is already pretty long, so I am going to save the other incident for Chapter 6. Based on the chapter title, it looks like it will fit.
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