Hermana Beck's Weekly Email - Sing Your Way Home

We're in the thick of summer time here in North Chile, and the sun is INTENSE. And I got fleas 🤡 so I spent a great deal of time this week being hot, sweaty, and itchy. Summer time also means that a lot of our friends are out of town for vacations, and those who aren't out of town can't be bothered to listen to us. Even the members! It made the work feel pretty discouraging and I definitely wallowed in it for a while. It's easy to wallow in a place like Hospicio. I have to share this quote my Uncle Stevie sent me from an article about Chile: “Considered Iquique’s backyard, Alto Hospicio is one of the poorest cities in Chile, widely known as a place to abandon pets and dump trash.” ...yeah. Anyway, once I was done wallowing, I got annoyed with the way we were handling things and decided to change it. It's no surprise that by changing my mindset and choosing to work harder, things started looking up. 

Friday we headed to Iquique for a combined zone conference with the Iquique missionaries! Our Zone Leader asked if I could lead the missionaries in singing a couple hymns while we waited for President Wu to arrive and I accepted, but President Wu was running very late and we ended up singing a solid 12 hymns- it was awesome. I just chose all my favorite songs and had a whole choir of missionaries at my disposal. Alto Hospicio was also responsible for providing a special musical number, and that responsibility slipped through the hands of three different lazy missionary leaders before resting on my shoulders the day before conference. I had a group of us sing "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide" and we were only able to run through it one time before performing. It was a musician's worst nightmare, but I think it went okay-ish. During zone conference I also taught a quick workshop on Spiritual Preparation Through Personal Study, and at the end of the whole conference I said the closing prayer. I was busy.

This weekend our friend Edmundo was baptized! When I first got here Edmundo had a baptismal date for December, but he was also on our "dejar de enseñar" (drop) list. He wasn't coming to church, and he strongly dislikes reading so progress in the BoM was nonexistent. Rather than dropping him, we decided to push his date to the beginning of January and see what happened. What happened, is that he started reading the Book of Mormon on his own and everything changed! Reading made him want to come to church every sunday, practice his prayers, and above all be baptized. Right before his scheduled baptism it came out that he had a smoking habit he needed to take care of, so we postponed his baptism again. That day, he stopped smoking and hasn't touched a cigarrete since! Every time we passed by his house (unannounced) he was sitting on his porch reading the Book of Mormon. The changes I saw in Edmundo were inspiring. Best of all, his baptism went relatively smoothly as far as baptisms go😅 I led all the music, and now the branch presidency has me leading the music in sacrament meeting from here on out too.

     

In other news:

- Last monday I tried Mate for the first time. It tasted like spicy dirt grass, because that's what it is. You fill a special mug with chopped...grass? And add boiling water to one corner and then drink it from a special straw that keeps the grass out. It's supposed to give you crazy amounts of energy, so much so that we have a rule in our mission that you're not allowed to drink it past 11am to prevent sleepless nights. It did not have that effect on me, I was sleepy the whole rest of the day. And it was nasty. 

- The people we have on date for baptism right now are: Carla, a busy mom with two kids- she needs to be able to come to church in order to keep her date! Diego G- a teenager who's story is very sad, but he's 100% on track to be baptized so I'm happy for him! Jimmy (of Jimmy and Rossy from Bolivia) to be honest I'm not sure if Jimmy knows he has a baptismal date. During that conversation he was saying "sí" to everything we said, so we threw in the invitation to be baptized and he said yes to that too🤷‍♀️. And lastly Marina, she comes to church more than any of the members in our branch and with her testimony she could've been baptized ages ago, but she needs to either marry or separate from her partner first. Her partner is a cancer (for lack of a less-blunt term) and he's been out of the country for a month with no indication of when he'll come back. I hope he never comes back.

- The other day we locked ourselves out of our house. We panicked for about 5 seconds before remembering that none of windows in our house lock, and there's a big window just a couple inches away from the front door. So I slid it open, stuck my hand in and unlocked the door from the inside, all in about 3 seconds. So that's...comforting🫠

 

I'm grateful that my week was filled with music. I miss being surrounded by people who love music/singing as much as I do, so I'll leave you with this cute primary hymn:

Sing Your Way Home 

 Sing your way home 

 at the close of the day.

 Sing your way home;

 drive the shadows away. 

 Smile ev’ry mile,

 for wherever you roam

 It will brighten your road,

 it will lighten your load 

 If you sing your way home.

🤍/Hermana Beck