I am so glad it is el Dia de Preparacion because it has been an incredibly loooong week. I just want to start out by saying, I love you guys. Every single person who reads these emails or supports me on my journey at all... Thank you so much for getting me here. This is the single best decision I have ever made in my life.
I won't lie... This past week was rough. I learned a lot, I definitely grew a lot, but it was absurdly hard and so emotional for completely unknown reasons. To start, everybody in the CCM got sick. Except me, luckily. But Hermana Chugg got hit pretty bad and had to spend a day in the casa. Apparently when the CCM first opened in July a lot of people got sick from the food, but this was just a little contagious virus that had nothing to do with the food. I should know. I eat everything and it is all pretty darn good.
This week was all about families. I gained so much love and respect for my own family and have been thinking about them all so much and the wonderful influence they have been in my life. I absolutely adore you all. Thank you for everything you have done for me.
Today we got to go to the Mexico City Temple grounds. It was by far the most incredible experience we have had here to date. The temple itself is under internal construction for the next year and a half so we got to go to the Visitor's Center and take a tour. Luckily, the tour was in English and lead by missionaries, one who was in her first week and one who goes home this week. It was incredible to see the difference in them. I am so incredibly honored to be a missionary. In fact, one of the best parts of the day was just being out in public and wearing a name tag. I forgot I was a missionary until I looked down. Everytime Hermana Chugg and I see two missionaries walking alone around the CCM we´re always like ´´aww, Missionaries!´´ and then we come abck to earth and realize that we´re all missionaries. It´s a very weird experience.
The spirit was so strong on the temple grounds. It made me so excited to share this Gospel with real people in the real world. Being in the CCM is like being in High School and getting out into the field is like moving out of your parent´s house for the first time. That´s the closest thing I can think to relate to relate it to. So to know that we only have one more P-day before we leave is very exciting. And stressful.
Now I want to share an experience we had on Sunday... Our Sacrament meeting with our district is in a classroom. We use the stereotypical stake center chairs (that are tan and for some reason always have crayon all over them) and we sit in three rows of them in a classroom made of tile. The sacrament is blessed on the teacher´s desk and we speak by standing in front of a white board at a makeshift podium. It´s a very interesting experience. The walls are thin and we are in a building closest to the edge of the compound right next to a mountain with hundreds and hundreds of houses built up the side of it. (I should stop calling the CCM a compound... but that really is what it feels like). One of the houses plays electronic dance music all the time... It´s unreal. And it is so loud that you could hear it from the opposite end of the CCM. And just to give you some perspective, the CCM is 90 acres big. So we had Sacrament Meeting with ´Sandstorm´and Benny Benassi songs blaring through the walls. And can I just say, it was one of the most spiritual Sacrament Meetings I've been able to experience. The spirit was powerful enough to tune out the music and after a while, we could barely hear it. We all got up to bare our testimonies, being feeble from the end of a 24-hour fast and trying not to be too distracted by the music, and we just all felt such a sense of joy that we were in the world, but not of it. I think we all felt the strongly for the first time in our lives. It was beautiful.
I´ll leave you with a spiritual thought and some pictures...
If every single blessing comes from the Lord, why are we ever disobedient?! Because we become prideful. We think we can receive blessings on our own, but we can´t. We can´t outsmart God. One thing I´ve learned from reading the scriptures is that time and time again disciples of Christ are blessed for their obedience and the prideful are always chastised (and generally destroyed...). This revelation brought new light to the scripture in Doctrina y Convenios that says
´´there is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundation of this world upon which all blessings are predicated- And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.´´
(D y C 130:20-21)
Photos!
1. Hermana Chugg and I on the bus to the Temple!2. The amazing Mexico City Temple!
3. The beautiful statue of Christ
4. My friend Hermana Williams! She´s from Salt Lake and we want to be roommates when we get back. She is the cutest.
5. My artsy side here at the CCM. (Everyone told me that my Holy Ghost looked like a tooth so I made a legend.
6. The best photo ever of the temple and a ghetto sign.
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