Monday, July 18, 2022

I Only Have a Year Left :(

So I have officially proven that sending group emails from this phone doesn't work for some reason. It basically becomes a permanent pending email if I push send from the phone. But fortunately we've got a computer we can use at the church so it's not the end of the world, I just have to make sure I finish my email in the amount of time we spend there (that's the tricky part since as you guys know I'm rather long winded).

Some good stuff happened this week. I've been trying a new strategy with kids of making a reading chart for them so that they can color after reading the Book of Mormon to try and get them more excited about it. So far it has been a good idea with few fruits, but one girl took off with this method and I already had to draw her another reading chart. It makes me so happy when people actually read the Book of Mormon! I had my testimony of it reaffirmed this week as I was just reading it without looking for anything specific, and got some specific direction from God that I needed. That's the cool thing about reading a book that has the words of God in it, God literally speaks to you when you do.

We invited four people to get baptized and all of them said, "Uhhh..." We didn't get any official nos and we're hoping we can convert them into yeses this week after they spend some time praying and thinking about baptism.

I took a fun little trip to Santo Domingo to pee in a cup, get some blood extracted, and get some X rays. It was pretty fun because I got to go with all of the missionaries who came in to the country with me, five other sisters and four elders. We got Wendy's in the capital cuz there isn't a ton of American fast food anywhere in the country, and it was amazing. I've honestly never had that high of an opinion of Wendy's (please forgive me Irving) but either Dominicans do American fast food better than we do or I'm sufficiently burger deprived that the first one I ate suddenly became the best burger I've had in my life. I'm pretty sure the frosties here are actually way better though, and fries in the frosty was kind of magical.

I had a coconut. We painstakingly made a hole in it to let all the juice drain out, then put it in the freezer. The idea is that it cracks on its own in there, but it didn't. So plan b was to chuck it at the asphalt as hard as we possibly could, and it only took two tries to break it. Getting the coconut open was way more fun than actually eating it though. For how much I like coconut flavor, I was rather unimpressed with the actual rather bland fruit. It was a fun experience though. 

We always do our weekly planning on Sundays, and we had a FIRE weekly planning session yesterday. After looking back at the week, we were led by the Spirit to recognize several ways that we can improve. It wasn't even a bad week, but God really has some stuff in mind for us for this week. That planning session was honestly my favorite part of the week because we came out of it with so many plans on how to become better missionaries this week and do the work more effectively. But the thing is that we didn't make a plan or a goal without being really honest with ourselves. Up to now in my mission I keep making lofty goals. I wanna have faith. So if it looks like we could have eight people at sacrament meeting, let's set the goal of nine and move forward in faith. Not saying that having faith and seeking to challenge yourself are bad things. But it's also kinda rough when you work really hard and try to have a lot of faith and only get four because the goal of nine just wasn't that realistic. Another thing that's hard for me is going backwards in any way. If the goal was eight last week I don't want it to be lower this week and feel like I'm losing progress. So since I got here the goals have been continually ramping up until this week when we decided to be faithfully realistic. We made a lot of goals for how we can improve in finding (and not losing) people, visiting and using our members, and teaching better. And I am so excited about this week! A productive goal setting session feels amazing. And is not just applicable to missionaries, but actually to everyone.

Have an awesome week and make it awesomer by reading the Book of Mormon and setting some goals for yourself this week. I don't think I really knew this before the mission, but it's actually a myth that you have to wait til New Years to set goals. You can do it anytime you want. And if you make goals with intentional plans to achieve them, you're way more likely to do it. So just think about that and act on it if you feel like having a fuego week.

Hermana Cazier


Pics! Lots this week since I sent none last week. Although, my email literally didn't send last week so you guys don't actually know that.

Enjoy the randomness, several are from a photoshoot we randomly took on a roof because we were trying to ask the owner about renting the house but he wasn't there.














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