This week was still a little slow.. we actually ended up finding one of our male investigators and it turns out that yes he is interested still, but that he started school and is still working like crazy and therefore pretty much has no time in his life. BUT another hermana investigator came to church and is way excited! We have another appointment with them on Wednesday and we are thinking we will have a baptism with her. She's hilarious and most of her questions are super random like "but if i kill someone and I had to kill them it's not a sin am I right?" or about if drunk people can feel the spirit.. But she's a good investigator and we are going to work hard with her.

Also best of the best of the best was last night. We went to go find a house of 2 cousins that we contacted in the streets. Turns out this house is more like a door for a whole bunch of apartments where students live.. so it turned out impossible to find them (tricky tricksters those 2) But it was SO COOL. Because we couldn't get in past the front door to start searching for them because it was locked.. so we were just waiting around and then 2 boys showed up who were moving in and asked us if we wanted to pass. We were like yes please. And then after asking them if they knew these contacts we were searching for we went to knock on the door that we thought was theirs (the cousins). It turned out it totally wasn't them, but that it was some other girl and she is so crazy golden I was going to cry. It's like after a few weeks of feeling like everything is falling through that at the end of the week the last hour of work God gave us someone that is totally definitely going to be baptized. Wow. We left pretty happy and it just reaffirmed my testimony that there is no such thing as a coincidence. We invited her to baptism in March and she accepted so easy and was like "it would be nice if we could go to church together though, can you pass by for me?" Uh yes. 

One of my favorite things we are doing right now as a mission is helping people learn about family search and family history. It has been so awesome to understand a little better the website and get other people started in finding their own ancestors! Hermana Claudia bore her testimony yesterday about how if we aren't doing our family history, we don't have our salvation.. pretty hard words, but it's true. God wants us to do this work for those who have already passed! And you really can feel the excitement and spirit of it right when you start.

SO MUCH FUNNY STUFF happened this week. From Hermana Flores (instead of Hermana Ramirez) on the birthday cake to that little old lady giving us Popsicle. One of my favorites was when we went out to go visit more of Hermana Maria's references. We were waiting at a door for the lady to come out and we kept knocking and shouting buenas tardes but nothing was happening.. then we heard "Buenas tardes!"... we knocked again and heard "VOY" which means I'm coming! and we were just laughing so hard because it was a talking bird! And hermana Ramirez jokingly responded "ah bueno, aqui le esperamos" hehehe aw man we just lose it sometimes laughing, but the funniest things happen with hermana Ramirez. 

I love this gospel and I am grateful for all of you and for God in my life. If there is one thing that I learned this week is that we do things out of Love for God. We can obey for all sorts of reasons, but nothing will ever ever help us to change if we don't do it out of love. For example Nephi, Laman and Lemuel all obeyed God and went to get the plates.. why was Nephi blessed more than his brothers? Because he loved God, he allowed the experience to change him. So applicable am I right?

I hope that you all have a wonderful week! 

Love

Hermana McNaught

We ate pozole which is Hermana Ramirez's favorite food (thanks to hermana Lilia)

We ate a cake on Thursday with the entire zone that said happy birthday hermana Flores... hahaha Hermana Lilia forgot my companions name. We laughed pretty hard

We had a surprise cake eating at Cintia  house on Tuesday! I was crazy impressed with being able to plan that without hermana Ramirez knowing. Everything turned out awesome. We planned it all in the day of divisions we had last week and in secret phone calls. We also ate m&m pancakes in the morning and the elders in the district gave her gifts which was super nice because one of them was a huge tub of ice cream which I can also benefit from :)

 We also contacted this little old lady on my comps birthday and shout out she gave us Popsicles for helping her with her bags and 2 references. my favorite was when she wanted to give us 2 more Popsicles of flavor mame and my comp said "well it is my birthday" hahaha. And the surprise cake in a family house!

Well the title says it all, this week was crazy with it's ups and downs and I have never felt so weird. There's a quote in PMG that goes something like "when you have tried your hardest, you might still feel disappointments, but you can be sure that God is happy with you when you feel the Spirit testifying of your words". Feeling like we were working super hard this week to do what we had to do to get everyone to church and to commit people to baptism and everything, but once Sunday rolls around nobody shows up... bummer. But we have decided that it's like a test. That God wants to see what we are going to do when we have lots of weeks where almost nobody comes to church or nobody is progressing. Are we going to give up and stop working, or are we going to keep on keeping on? There's a scripture in the book of mormon; Nephi says that every time he wants to rejoice and be happy he remembers he's a sinner and feels sad again. But then he remembers Christ and if he has confidence in him he CAN actually be happy. All we have to do is rely on Christ's atonement and we can be happy. We have the power to change and to change others.

We have 2 investigators who are siblings of an inactive member that we are visiting and they are doing good. This week we had a day of divisions or splits with 2 youth in the ward Cintia and Nayrobi from the family from the bakery. I went with Cintita and Hermana Ramirez with Nayrobi. It was fun because we contacted every person to get them excited about missionary work. Our new DL is now giving us "colors" to contact every day. The day of divisions was the color red so everyone that we saw who had something red we had to contact. But other than that, pretty much all of the appointments we had were not there and it was only a slightly productive day. BUT I felt a lot better when we all met up at the house of our investigator for the last lesson of the day and Cintia wanted to share an experience that she had during the lesson. She said during the day she had the question of whether she should go on a mission or not because she's about to turn 19. and during the day with me it helped her with my experience in choosing to serve a mission and what I had to do to receive an answer if I should go. After a week of a little discouragement or moments of feeling that maybe I wasn't doing a whole lot of good, it was super sweet to hear that at least for her I had made an impact this week. 

This week should be great though! It's hermana Ramirez's birthday tomorrow - shout out to McKayla Aunt Shar and Raven too! hope all of you have a fantastic week and that you pray and read your scriptures. God loves us, he sends us mini trials and big trials and wants us to move forward. It's all so that we can be better and make it back to him better than we were yesterday. No pain no gain I suppose. Can't wait to tell you next Monday about how awesome his coming week will be. 

Thanks for all of our prayers and support I love you all! 

Love
Hermana McNaught

Well first update first... Cut my hair and lets just say that it will officially be put up into a bun until the end of my mission haha. cost a whole $2 which should have been my first sign...  it's not so bad.... but it could be better.

This week was great! After a pretty wacked week last week things really turned around this week. First off, the very best of all, is that we finally got some of our investigators to church!  And what miracle, because they came on foot from super far away and all by themselves. The best moment of our week was teaching them and we invited them to baptism and first one looks at his friend and says "Well I don't know about you, but as for me, yeah". At first I was nervous because they are super funny and like to joke.. especially with my comp, so I was like Uhhhh do you really want this or do you just have a thing for hermana Ramirez?? But nope, they are awesome, and totally showed it yesterday by coming to church. We have been and are continuing to work hard to find new good people  It's like the quote in PME that says "nothing happens in missionary work until you find someone to teach". 

 On Friday this week hermana Ramirez and I had a really neat experience. We went to go give our first lesson to 2 girls whose mom is inactive. They are super interested and want to go to church, but their mom wasn't giving them permission. We told them we would come back in the afternoon to talk to their mom so that we could share a message with her too. Later, our next 2 lessons were other people who ended up telling us ALL of the problems they were facing. And then we went to meet with a recent convert before lunch  to help him with his family history because he was going to go to the temple that night! We met with him Thursday night to check if he was still planning on going, and he wasn't!! So we were there convincing him until he made up his mind to go. The next day Saturday when we showed up to help him with names, he told us that their wasn't any room on the bus to Tuxtla and that he wouldn't be able to go. He was very disappointed. At lunch Hermana Ramirez and I decided that we would have a special fast for all these people that we had talked to. The most amazing thing of all is that I feel like it really helped. He got to go to the temple, and sent us a text in the night thanking us for our help.. I practically cried it was so awesome. we were able to find the mom of the 2 girls whose mom is inactive, and like I already said, 2 other investigators have  baptism dates and ended up coming to church. That night I just realized how much God is really listening to us. Hermana Ramirez has taught me so much about prayer. Her prayers are so real, and I have been trying to follow her example. It works. If we just look we can find all the ways he is constantly supporting us. I love this work, it can be really really hard, but I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. Right when you think that things are too hard, God always reaches out. He never leaves us alone, and his tender mercies are always there waiting for us. We just have to look.

 

Pics: Saying goodbye to Elder Leon who officially got to his house! Elder Rivera(not it the picture) who is training someone from the states now is our DL (district leader). 

The ward secretary Carlos, who has helped us out SO much. Whether its with the cockroaches or just making us feel at home, he literally treats us like we're his daughters. Good people

But that's about all for this week! I love you all!

Well this week started off in intercambios with hermana Taylor and hermana Avendaño! I went to a different Ward with hermana Taylor for Monday night and Tuesday day! Super fun as always. My favorite was that for our contacts in the Street we played this game where you have to say a key Word in the contact. Like a random Word that you have to throw in there. Made for some pretty interesting and hilarious stuff.

Things started getting a Little weird from there.. first thing is that hermana Avendaño and hermana Ramírez (my companion) called us saying they were going to the clinic because my comp had foot pain.. so they went to the clinic and got some pain killer and got it checked out. We had to stay in the house on Wednesday to rest her foot. So we basically just studied, or watched mormon messages.

BUT Wednesday in the morning we had a big reunion with Elder Valenzuela of the 70. It was AWESOME!!! After I seriously felt like I could just conquer the missionary world. Wooh. So good.

We went out on Thursday though with Nayorobi! She is super great and helps us out a ton in lessons. We found 3 new investigators and 2 of them are super interested and are going to come to church this week! They're only 17 and 18, but we have an appointment with them again this week and we will be teaching them one of their moms as well. We also went and saw another investigator again who wants to get baptized and was at church, and taught her a Little more about the book of mormon. She has SOO many crazy questions that it's way hard to control the lesson, but overall it was pretty good. We are working with her, and if she gets married, she will totally be baptized.

That's pretty much as much work as we did this week, because when we were working with Nayrobi I pretty much felt like I was dying. So we got back to the house at night and called hermana George to ask if we could call the doctor. The next day we went to the clinic and I had another stomach infection so we stayed there over night until we got everything cleared up. It was pretty funny though. All of the leaders and assistants and president were in the temple, and we couldn't get a hold of anyone. Our district leader was calling everyone and we finally got a hold of someone but by the end of the conversation with our district leader they thought I was in the hospital and they were going to do an operation and were about to call the family.. Gosh that freaked me out, because I just imagined mom dying thinking that I was in a Mexican hospital. Just a clinic. But By Sunday we were good to go and went to church.

Best of all today we got the news that we won't be having any changes this transfer!!! yeah for 6 more weeks with hermana Ramírez!!

Hope you all have a great week!

Love

Hermana McNaught

Well hello hello hello otra vez

This week started off literally insane. After I wrote you all we went back to our house. In the evening before bed I went to go clean out the water tank. SURPRISE!!!! Out came 200 freaking cockroaches.. so that pretty much sums up my week. Fighting them and asking permission so that someone can enter our house and help us take care of the plague. Gross. If you can all just remember the movie the Mummy and when all 10000 of the bugs start leaving the pyramid and the guy gets eaten alive.... that's basically what happened to me. ok. yep. but it officially broke my companions fear of them. Now she kills them with me. Its a real bonding experience.

This week was super poderosa!! Seriously I love teaching with Hermana Ramírez! Sometimes I think we are just so on the same page that we are literally Reading each other's minds. Love it. First of all, had another lesson with our inactive member and it was awesome. We decided we were only going to talk about prayer. We had him share his testimony about prayer and as he really isn't praying now it got him thinking. The spirit was so strong and at the end of the lesson we invited him to pray again and for the first time in like 3 months he finally prayed at the end of the lesson again!!!! I was super happy.

Later, we found these 2 Young girls, whose mom is inactive and they were baptized in the catholic church.. don't really get how that happened... but it did. We have been teaching them this week and they have literally loved everything! They had awesome experiences praying and we showed them the DVD of the restoration, and I can't even tell you, the spirit was just there so strong. At the end one of the girls said the prayer and it went something like this "I really liked that video Heavenly Father, and I like how I feel and I just want this". Que poder (that power). We ended the lesson. The only thing is that if the mom doesn't go to church the girls may or may not have permission. So we are going to work with the mom, its just that she doesn't really want to listen... problems am I right??

Tapachula fun facts (just to copy Sister Lindsay)

Here every Young person is mamita or papita... Like no no mamita right now I don't have time for you.. (happens every day)

We drink every type of juice ever know to man, but coming up in February and march is mango season I'm pumped. And People here eat mangos "Green" like before they're ripe with salsa and salt. Tasty

Sorry That my updates are getting shorter and shorter, I think I'm going to start paying more attention to the big stuff that happens now..

pics! Hermana from the bakery gave us a rosca. It's famous for the day of the 3 kings the 6th of jan. Its when kids get there christmas presents. Inside of them there are 1 or 2 hidden baby Jesus. if you find the baby Jesus, you pay for the tamales! It was a miracle that she gave us one because they are super expensive.

Love the members here.

Our cockroaches. We sprayed alcohol and lit them on fire. We got a Little out of hand...

That's all folks!

Love you

Hermana McNaught

 

Well first thing to note this week is I'm officially dreaming in Spanish. But I'm pretty sure my brain makes up a bunch of words, because I had a dream about harry potter and I have no idea how you say lots of magical words in Spanish, but in my dream I knew them.. so there's that. Which is pretty crazy. And I also 90% of my dreams are teaching people about prophets or another subject of the gospel, Which is hilarious. My comp and I were talking about how when we don't have lives this is what happens.

But on to the good stuff! This week! We had a big zone fast and we were all going for the goal that we could somehow have 2 baptisms on Saturday. Right now we don't have investigators that are going to church, and since they have to go to church 5 times before they can be baptized, it seems as though that would be impossible! But we took a look at our old investigators and we found a family that went to church a bunch already but never got baptized. We went to go find them, found them, and have an appointment with them today! It should be interesting, and I'm pretty excited to see how it goes. 

Saturday we went to go eat with Hermana Maria, and as always she wanted to visit every single one of her neighbors with us. She is THE best member missionary in the whole world. 

New years eve was fun! We didn't do much crazy, but you can refer to my pics in a second to check out what went down, and the tamales chipilin con polloooo was super rico and I ate 3. Hope you all had a great New Years too!! Love you!

Hermana McNaught

Pics- Hermana Ramirez and I both complete months in the mission the same day because we entered the MTC on the 25th of the month! This day one of the ladies in the ward didn't have time to feed us, so she gave us money to go buy something, which never happens. And we had our own little party in the plaza for an hour.

Also new years eve a lady in the ward invited us to the hospital with her to give out tamales to the people waiting outside for their loved ones. Here new years is more of a family day which is pretty cool. Pretty much every holiday here is  a family day, not a day to leave with your friends. So it was fun to go teach or share small messages with the people who were a little sad to be without someone on a family holiday. 

Also instead of kissing on midnight they stuff 12 grapes in their mouths as they count down the seconds and make a wish on every one! We didn't have grapes so we just stuffed our mouths with sweet tarts. Fun times.

My life is just getting better and better, seriously!!! Missionary work is all sorts of crazy, but we are working hard to find people and keep track of them at the same time! I think it would be safe to say this week was my favorite in all my mission! We had TONS of activities. To start of we had a ward christmas dinner, which was really more like a party. And our new investigators showed up!!! It was awesome! think they really liked the activity! J was there too, and we are prepping him for baptism and he is super gung ho, but he needs interviews with president and everything. It was fun to watch all the people in the ward that I have really come to love sing and dance and show there talents in the ward Christmas dinner. I was just thinking about how much I seriously love this ward.

On Saturday we had another awesome activity with president George! J was supposed to have his interview with president George at that time, but he didn't show up. Later we found him and asked him what happened, and he said he got there 15 minutes late because the only way possible to get there was on foot all the way from the center of tapachula and he walked the whole way! So he missed his interview and now President George is back in Tuxtla. So we are just waiting the next possible time. But J is excited for baptism. 

AND!!!!!! probably the best Christmas present of my whole life. V was able to have his interview with president on Saturday and told us he would tell us what day he could have his baptism this week. Well, Sunday morning we got a call from him and he said that he wanted to get baptized in like 3 hours! SOOO we may have ditched out on relief society to make things look nice. It was a little crazy, but awesome. And Alejandra, his daughter, is SUPER happy. In Sunday School Gospel Principles, the missionaries always end up teaching the class because our ward mission leader is menos activo.. which is not awesome. But the class was really good. Only JA and V were there so we talked about baptism. I might have cried a little out of super joy that I feel for V. But I felt pretty good because A and V were crying too.. V told me that he feels like we're his daughters and he is just super happy for the angels that showed up at his door to soften his heart. Obviously we didn't do anything, but it feels really good to feel like you are doing your job as a missionary. And we are going to eat dinner at his house on Christmas as a district!!!!! We had to get all kinds of permission to do it, but yeah!! I'm way excited. Christmas is going to be great. Can't wait to see your beautiful faces.

Also, spiritual thought for you all because I just finished the book of mormon!! You should read it. There is just no other way to put it. I've got a pretty firm testimony that if we are reading the book, we won't go astray! I love love love how when Mormon is writing his son and the end of the book he talks a ton about love and charity. If we are living worthy of the Spirit, the spirit can give us these gifts of love and charity that we seek. We just have to be open to it and clean ourselves out and the Spirit really can do the rest. I love this gospel and my mission. Wow can NOT wait for Wednesday!!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

LOVE

Hermana McNaught