This week was incredibly strange! It was another 7 days swept into the pile of SO MUCH WORK with so little fruits, but it is the way it is! I have a lot of faith that Hermana Mota and I will see the fruits soon enough. We really are working hard. Every day was so exhausting! These 3-week vacation things kind of throw the norm of missionary work off! But all is well. We tried really hard to teach the investigators we had, but everything fell through! So Thursday we decided we were going to just dedicate the majority of our time to finding new people! We knocked 213 doors. Before, knocking 10 doors would get us at least 3 potential people that we would plan to return to. We knocked 213 doors and not a single person (not a single one) wanted anything to do with us! I am not exaggerating! It was the strangest thing. And needless to say a little difficult. Our feet were soaked and frozen in the snow and oooohhh it was so cold with a bitter wind too... NEVERTHELESS, the gospel is true and Jesus Christ lives.
Also this weekend was Carnival de Magallanes! And all of Punta Arenas goes! It's so cool! And we had to go to centro to pick up some invitations for an awesome devotional we are going to do in two weeks and so we got to see the setups for it all and a lot of the streets were blocked off and there were lights being strung everywhere! It was so awesome! I was filled with this huge nostalgia of Disneyland parades! We didn't go to the carnival obviously, but it was cool to see the prep of it. I don't have much time to talk about that, but it's super awesome and cold because it's all outside for saturday night and all of Sunday. There were fireworks last night!
Also last night we were trying to find some menos activos from a program called el rescate in some narrow groups of streets called ''Los Rios'' and three dogs popped out of nowhere and my companion was a little further down the street and was able to run away. I turned around to go the other way and there were FOUR more huge dogs on the other side. Holy cow, people here always talk about almost being eaten by dogs and I never really believed them, but I know what they mean! It was one of the scariest feelings of my life. I was surrounded! And my companion was trying to find rocks to throw at them and I had no rocks in my pockets (you always carry rocks in your pockets here and last night I didn't). Oh it was so scary! And guess what happened. Dun Dun Dun!!!!! BANDIGO WILSON! My faithful Husky stray that had followed me around for a month and then disappeared SHOWED UP literally at my side! Oh you have no idea how scary this experience was but how AWESOME it turned out to be. I think I am going to bring Bandigo Wilson home with me. Or at least I think I have officially decided to own a husky when I'm older. This dog is literally a hero.
Oooh well this week ws really tough. Six months came along way sooner than I thought it would. I thought I would be further as a missionary at this point than I feel I am. I felt a pit of no progress. I don't know it's kind of tough to keep up a happy positive spirit after 3 weeks of what seems like almost nothing changing! I kept smiling and smiling and laughing and having snow ball fights with Hermana Mota so that we could at least enjoy the cold, but boy, it just gets tough sometimes! I felt like the time passed unfairly fast up to this point and that these three weeks passed too fast with how I felt with nothing to show for it! But I told myself I wasn't going to let it get to me! I prayed for Heavenly Father to bring peace to my heart. And in my personal studies I opened up a Liahona issue of a conference address. I turned to a talk by President Monson titled, ''Consider the Blessings''
He started his talk by saying, "This conference marks 49 years since I was sustained, it's a long time, but time seems very short since I stood at the pulpit and gave my first testimony.'' Time passes short for even the prophet! Well, anyway, he talked about stepping back and considering the blessings, which I knew I needed to do, but it really just wasn't hitting the spot for peace!
But I kept reading and the last bit of the talk he started talking about a Jumbotron. I was thinking great... Okay I'll just read another talk after this. But what happened in this Jumbotron story is the Jumbotron wasn't working for the youth temple celebration. As they were looking at the schedule before the start of the actual celebration they knew it was going to be beyond them, ''but we knew we had one of the greatest strengths on the floor below --3,000 youth.'' So they drew upon their faith and all of them prayed and the Jumbotron was fixed.
That made me think, ''Maybe I should ask my family to pray for me.'' But then I realized, you already are. I remembered all those family prayers of my entire life in home and how we always prayed for the missionaries and then when we had someone in the mission from our family, we prayed for them! I felt the power of your prayers, my dear family. And my heart was filled with peace. Your support and prayers are such an enormous blessing that I hadn't been aware of! Thank you always for the prayers. They work! Heavenly Father listens to our prayers! Keep praying for the people we need to find. We'll find them. I'm excited. This week will be fantastic.
Alrighty so you are all on your way to the big Broomhead Reunion adventure!!!!! I wish you all the best and hope you have the greatest time ever! But not tooooo much fun ;)
OH ALSO this week I saw our van!!!! It was so exciting! I got a picture with me hugging it. Because I was seriously so happy to see it! It was awesome! So consider the love shown to that van here to be sent to our faithful big blue van you guys are traveling in over there to make it at least one more time through. How great that van is! And hey! Enjoy the extra space without me because when I get back from my mission I'm pretty sure I will be big enough to take up the whole bed we have back there and by big I mean by weight because the members here are too awesome and feed us lots and lots of yummy food and even all the walking doesn't take care of it :) hahahah
Love,
Hermana Olson!!!!
P.S. HOLY COW AMMON! Okay well, I have a very deep gut feeling that you will be serving in Chile. Oooh I sure hope so.
If not Bolivia.
Stateside? Um.... Tenessee
P.P.S. SETH HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I LOVE YOU, YOU SON OF A DAD.
And that's all I got time for. DANG IT I WANNA KNOW WHERE AMMON IS GOING! Woooo! I'm so excited
Hermana Olson
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