Dear family and friends,
What a strange week.
My companion right now is Irma Morrison. We get along just great. We have about everything in common. It is like serving a mission with someone like Claire as my mission companion (so we laugh a lot...). We work together to try to better our teaching and we work hard trying to find those people who have been prepared. On P-days we have fun and last week we bought matching nautical themed grandma style nightgowns. So I think you can picture how good of friends we have already become. I feel super blessed to have gone from Irma De Almeida (who I didn´t think anyone would compare), to another soul friend companion. Let me tell you a few facts about Irma Morrison... She is from a family of 10 kids! What the? Ya 10. And she is 1 of only 2 girls. She is from Oregon (so we have a lot of northwest pride as we stomp through the rain here). She can do a really good lisp voice. We are the exact same height (so in this country..giants). So basically we get along just great. Thats why this week it was especially hard to receive some bad news from her family.
Her father passed away this past thursday. He died of a heart attack. He was 61 years old. It was completely unexpected he was healthy and never had any medical problems before.
You can imagine that the world came crashing down on this little Island in the middle of the ocean. Here we are thousands of miles away from her family and she hears the worst news that one can here while being on a mission, someone you loved has passed away. Normally when something like this happens the mission president would come strait over and tell us. But we are here. On an Island. In the middle of the Ocean. He couldn´t get a flight out soon enough, so our zone leader had to tell her. When they came to tell us, the feeling was surreal. All of a sudden a flood of emotion came over me and I felt that familiar feeling again. He´s gone. Her dad is gone.
We took the rest of the day a little easy. She called her mom. I insisted that we buy brownie mix and bake it immediately ( P.S. Brownie mix is approx. the equivalent of 7 US dollars for one box. a BIG deal for us missionaries). We took it in strides. But here is the thing. We are missionaries. We are on a mission. There is a work to do. Irma Morrison knows it too. She really gets it. There is not a doubt in her mind that she is staying here (much to my selfish relief..).
So here I am. On an Island with one of my new best friends and her Dad passes away unexpectedly. Coincidence? No. That is the lesson for the week.
God has a wiser purpose behind everything. He has a plan. It is real. He loves and watches over each and everyone of us. I know for a fact that Irma Morrison and I are companions at this moment, in this place for a reason. She is teaching me things and I can honestly say that through the experiences in my life, I am able to be an instrument in the Lord´s hands, I am here to bake brownies, to sit and stare at a wall with here while she thinks for a minute, to laugh through tears about funny things that Dad´s do, to cry, to mourn, and to pick it all up, wake up the next morning and get back to work. She is teaching me lessons that I had never learned. She is strong and I am grateful to be here with her.
She has a testimony of the Plan of Salvation. That truly her family can be together forever and that without a shadow of a doubt she will see her Dad again. He is with her. He is now called to a mission elsewhere for a season. She is where she is supposed to be, and she is grateful.
This week put it all into perspective. We are here to tell people about the reality of these eternal truths, the Plan of Salvation has been revealed to us through Prophets and Scripture. We can share the answers to the questions of the soul. So the work moves forward. We work. We pray. We try to help these people. And we are blessed along the way through these life shaping experiences.
I love you all a lot a lot. I miss you and I am praying for you.
Love,
Lizzie
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