Сайн Байцгаана уу ах, эгч нараа! How are you all doing? How is your new year going?
So many crazy things happened this week so I'll try to summarize the best I can. Firstly, I have grown to love the people of Unur so much! Earlier this week, I prayed intently for help to develop more charity for the people here. I already loved them so much but your love always has room to grow. Over the course of the week, each member or investigator I reached out to touched my heart or served me so deeply that I will never forget the impact they had on my testimony. Now I feel like my love for these wonderful people is almost too much to contain haha. All the experiences were so personal that I can't quite explain them here but know that every single person is full of goodness and each is a beloved child of Heavenly Father. Each has such wonderful potential, and I've loved being here to watch our investigators slowly reach their divine potential and turn into better people as they have kept commitments and come to church. Missionary work has blessed my life so so much and it's so hard to explain the half of it!
Also, we had the opportunity to take our ready to be baptized investigator to another baptism this week! So she got to see what baptism is like and now she feels a little more prepared to be baptized on the 21st! She has such a solid testimony of the church and she is so patient with me when I try to teach her in my broken Mongolian haha. She also bought my comp and I cokes and drove us to and from the baptism. She also had the opportunity to serve by taking a sweet old grandma to the baptism with us too. She was put on the spot to serve and jumped right into action finding, helping, and assisting the old grandma the whole night. Overall, it was a neat experience and I learned about the importance of service. I really makes a difference in people's lives because it blesses everyone involved.
All our other investigators are doing great as well. We have been prepping two kids (9 and 11) for baptism in a few weeks and one more investigator with an amazing testimony is soooo close to being able to be put on date! And we contacted one of our new referals and she seems really interested in the Church which is awesome! I felt so much joy seeing so many of our investigators come to sacrament on Sunday too. As each one walked in, I felt so much more light and peace and joy. They brought the spirit to sacrament and their faith made them shine like stars. It was such a surreal experience!
Sister Burgess and I also had the opportunity to give talks in sacrament- with an hour notice (including travel time). I was pretty nervous since I had never given a talk in another language before, but after starting to plan it, I realized its just the same thing as teaching a lesson. You only have to teach it to 30 people instead of 1 haha. In all honestly though, Heavenly Father was blessing me so much with the Gift of Tongues as I spoke because I felt confident enough to go off script at so many points. I still made lots of mistakes and nobody understood me but I felt the Spirit strongly as I bore my testimony and taught about the importance of the sacrament. Afterwards, one sweet lady came up to me and said "I didn't understand your words, but I understood in my heart." It was so awesome!
I also got super sick this week. I'm counting my blessings that this was the first time my whole mission I 've been sick, but I also hope it never happens again. I think the horse meat I ate at a members house really messed up my system because I woke up 3 times that night ready to throw up everything in my body. The whole next day I was so nauseous, I had the worst headache, and the worst sore throat of my life. But getting to work and not focusing on the sickness helped a lot. We were still able to get everything done in the day and it distracted me from the pain. By the next day, I was feeling so much better. Since then, I've had a pretty bad cough and a sore throat but everything else is all better!
Also, my comp and I and two other Elders were all involved in a car/bus accident on Sunday. It honestly wasn't too bad for us, but the car that tried to cut our bus off was flung into a pole. Thankfully the driver of the car was alive and an ambulance was coming, but we couldn't stay longer to help because the bus driver and car driver were about to get into a fight and we figured it would be safer to slowly walk away.
English classes have been fun! We started up a kids class since a lot of our students have kids that they bring along because they have no one to watch them. So now we have an advanced speaking class, a beginner class, and a primary class. The little kids are so smart and remember words like crazy. We were teaching them about animals like alligators and giraffes and they remembered them so well.
The sad/exciting news of the week is that I just found out today that Sister Burgess is going to train a new sister next tranfer and I am getting a new trainer. She is Mongolian and speaks very little English, so I am going to be using a LOT of Mongolian soon. Hopefully we can both learn quickly and communicate well with one another. I'm also being sent to one of the farthest places in our mission - a smaller city in the countryside called Darkhan. I'm so excited but so sad that I won't be comps with Sister Burgess anymore. She was such an awesome example and leader to me. I'll also miss all four of our investigators baptisms coming up sadly. I'll miss Unur a lot but this next adventure will be so fun! I'll update you all next week on how it goes!
This week has honestly been one of my favorite weeks of the mission so far because I've had a lot of time to reflect on how the people and the mission have changed me. I am so thankful to be here, even in the moments where is super hard and I've lost my patience and I just want to quit. Even when I still struggle to understand people or struggle to communicate I feel so blessed and so changed by these experiences. One scripture that really helped me this week was 3 Nephi 18: 20 which says:
20 And whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you.
Many times this week, my prayers have been answered time and time again. I know that Heavenly Father WILL answer your prayers, so long as you are praying for the right things. Always seek to do good, and good will be given to you. I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week. Don't hesitate to reach out and ask questions you may have. I'd love to answer them!
Love,
Sister Potter
P.S. Sorry I lacked in the photo department this week - we were soooo busy but here's us on a really sketchy bus with green lights and us right after the bus accident 😊
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