Letter # 65 - Week 68: He Was Like A Son To Me

January 6, 2020

Hola Everyone!

This week in bullet points:

-Went to a missionary meeting, got inspired to live to my full potential

-Threw up shortly after and then slept for 15 hours

-Sorry about this, it's kind of lame, here's Hermana Haws weekly:

"Wowee this week was a'poppin. Here's the scoop:

I caught a bug, which was bad enough to be super uncomfy but chill enough that I didn't need to stay indoors, so Tues-Thurs I das poppin my vitamin C and D, drinking peppermint tea, and scratching my nose off with 1 Ply toilet paper.

Right as I was starting to feel better my comp got sick too!! But hers was more of the stomach-rejecting-food type, so we stayed in Thurs night and Friday until 5pm.

There is this moral dilemma that missionaries with sick companions face, and it is how to use time effectively whilst your second half is recuperating. We have a 2 room apartment, as in there is a bedroom and then one other room that embodies all other functions of the apartment (kitchen, study room, living space, etc.), and while Sister Prue took a 5 hr nap, I spent my life in the same room, without technology, trying to be an effective missionary and fight the stir crazy. I survived, our apartment looks a lot cleaner, and Sister Prue is well once more, so all is well in Zion. 😁

Thursday night we missed a call from a man in our ward, and he left us a hard to decipher message. All we caught was, "son of (Insert old lady member name)... was a surprise... died yesterday ... lung cancer.... check on her?" Using the best deductive reasoning we could, we concluded that this member's son must have died from lung cancer and we had been asked to check up on her. Friday night we had a lesson next door, so we went over after to look her up. She let us right in, introduced us to her cat, and then opened up to us. With tears rolling down her cheeks and sobs shaking her small body, she told us about how her other cat had just died the other day from lung cancer. Don't get me wrong, it's still tragic (I love cats), but it definitely was not the tragedy we were emotionally prepared for. The next half hour was filled with stories from his childhood and pictures of past cats taken down from shelves and lovingly admired. It was one of the strangest and most surprising member visits of my life.

I fulfilled my dream of having a real conversation with a practicing jew!! Jewish culture is super cool (quote from Sister Prue: "it's ancient truth!" Amen, sister. Amen.) but so far all of them have avoided responding to me. BUT as we were walking down the street, I complimented this Russian woman, smoking a cigarette outside of her apartment, and we started chatting. Midway through, she asks us if we are *insert-word-that-is-a-title-for-Jew-descendants-from-Europe* and after a few "Come again?"'s, she said she had thought we were Jewish (thank you, dark winter skirts). We said we were Christian, but we always wanted to learn more about Jewish culture, and THE CONVERSATION CONTINUED. #miraclesofmiracles. We talked about tribes of Israel (I'm pretty sure some Russian names were shoved into the original 12...), and she told us about common practices and how there is discrimination sometimes between different Jewish lineages (#jewishpolitics?!) and it was one of the coolest things of my life. One of my favorite moments:

"We are (Insert Russian-influenced-Hebrew-title). We serve the temple." *Throws cigarette butt*

You had to be there to appreciate it.

Old, wow, this has gone on for a sec, BUT good things happened this week.

ALSO, God is a God of Abundance. You can think about that for a sec, I'll talk more about that next week. 😁"

Mosíah 2:41, Remember, remember

¡Os Amo!

-Hermana Prue