Momentous occasions

We’re running on extremely short time today! This morning we were able to go down to Boston to attend the Temple and we stayed there for the day. Unfortunately we didn’t get any shopping or emailing done :/ but with gluten-free and dairy-free I hardly eat anything, anyway, so the no food thing should be fine! But I have to make sure to let you all know how much fun it is over here!

Yesterday was a landmark in my mission and yet it feels like the starting-line. I was able to teach someone the gospel, experience the fight through trials and mistakes, teach them about repentance and forgiveness, and finally get to see the change in their eyes when they came to understand and know that there IS a way to be clean again and there IS a way to be with our Savior and Father in Heaven again. He’s only eleven years old but somehow he’s lived all of the right situations to really appreciate the need for the Atonement, and somehow he actually understands it. Yesterday he was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is the first baptism I’ve had after 16 months of missionary service and I sure hope it won’t be the last! But if it was, it was worth every single minute of struggle and sadness that I’ve felt not only here on the mission, but in my life. If this one boy can grow up with an understanding of God’s love and the Savior’s Atonement, and he can graduate high school, and go on a mission, and get married in the Temple, and have kids, and raise them strong, and baptize them, and teach them the gospel, then everything I’ve ever done was for a reason. I’d do it 10 times over for Jordy. He’s the coolest kid I’ve ever met.

I’ll give more details next week; it was a really fun day! I mean it was more hectic than Madrid after the 2010 World Cup, but it was fun.

In addition to this momentous day for Jordy, last week was a momentous day for me, as well! Last Friday Elder Jeffrey R. Holland came to visit the mission. From 10 feet away I heard from a living Apostle the most beautiful, uplifting, and also shockingly true things about life. I learned that the pathway to Salvation always goes through Gethsemane. And I realized that . I committed myself in that chapel in Weston, Massachusetts to a lifetime of Discipleship. Not a lifetime of skirts (that’s a horrible joke) and not a lifetime of 8-hour Sundays at the chapel (that’s an even nastier joke). But rather a lifetime of living to serve others. It’ll probably be easier when I have kids because I will know exactly who needs me; it’ll be them every time. The Lord needs us always, though, not just in the moments we find ourselves conveniently in the right place at the right time. It was amazing that just last week I was thinking about this and then found everything I needed to hear and more in this meeting with Elder Holland. I’ll give more details on this next week, too.

I’m sorry there’s not more time!

I LOVE ALL OF YOU!

Make it a great week. The “make” part of that is a verb. You really do have to MAKE it a great week. 

Love,

Hermana Hileman