Vestel, Lauren P

Hello guys!! I hit 8 months on my mission today! Crazy right??  A) The Music drive is permanently deleted Hold on.... just give me a second (*Screams into a pillow*) so every mission in the world right now was asked to delete all copyrighted music because it is illegal to share music. I understand that, but then 3 hours later, President Holley asked us to delete all songs from our phones and we are now can only listen to hymns and the youth music on the Sacred Music app. I understand, but man I am going to get sick of this music so fast I know it.  B) knocking trailer parks *Dun Dun Dunnnnn* - Old lady in just a diaper - enough said - Flaming Ginger  We knock on his door and this angry 6'4 ginger opens and screams "what do you want?!?" And we say "We're the spanish speaking missionaries-" and cuts us off and says "Get the F*** off of my porch" and BOOM slams the door on us. I hear him stomping so we ran down the steps.  - The new cop outs that lati...

Hello! Buenas Tardes! I am going to be completely honest with you, this has been a had a few faith testing days for me. It was a struggle but I am doing a lot better now. So over this past transfer we have seen a change from the leaders being normally loving and obedient STLs to complete eyes on us. We have been rebuked every other day from the STLs and it's been taking a bit of a toll on my mental health. I am not going to say that I am completely innocent of certain things that happened, but at this point we are getting rebuked without any love. I don't feel that they trust or have confidence in me and my Companion ( as missionaries, really) and it makes missionary work really difficult and discouraging.  At one point I broke down. I did some soul searching and my companion shared a story about how she had to find humility amongst her struggles. I have been receiving a lot of messages around me from the spirit about letting go of certain pains/prejudices that I thought I had ...

Good Afternoon Hermanos, Hermanas y Elderes!  Payaso = clown. It's my companions' favorite word in Spanish The first part of the week wasn't really easy. We had 6 in our teaching pool, 1 is sick, the other 2 are starting to ghost us and the rest are in mexico. Finding is not easy in this area either.  We were at a council with the district and we were showing our key indicator numbers (new people we are teaching, people on date, etc.) And we combined our totals and discussed our goals, And Hermana Dababneh said that we should achieve the standard of excellence of 12 new people to teach in our district, and we said "finding 3 people next week is not achieveable for us" and she replied: "not with that attitude" and at first I was offended by what she said but I got over it because she just doesn't understand what the work is like here in Mt. Lewis. I am really grateful that I am reading and working on charity because it is helping be bounce back from h...

Buenas Tardes Todos! This week is FULL of emotions for me. Like the title, there's a lot of range of the things I have felt about the events that happened this week.  This area is so different from my last area.  1) All of the ways that I used to spot houses with latinos in them do not work anymore. All of the Latinos here work in bougee houses. I went up to a door and it had that "Your door is wrapped like a Christmas present" vibe with the biggest tree ever, and they were Latino!??! My stereotypes are out the door now (which is partly a good thing for me but difficult to find work)  2) so the Latinos I have met are bilingual so the English missionaries have been what we call in our mission "poaching" which means they have been stealing people from us because they think they are the default if they speak even a bit of broken English. We were able to get the Zone Leaders to check the companionships area books and one of the companionships told us about one of th...

Happy New year! I hit my 7 month mark! Surprise, I am actually transferring to my new area today. Me and my companion got sick on Sunday night and we had to stay in our apartment and recover for 5 days. I was getting a bit stir crazy. I had a lot of thoughts in my head about leaving my area, trying to keep calm about it and put it on the hands of the lord. I did wish I could have ripped the bandaid off and left when I could. But, because I spent that extra time in my first area, I got to have a very special experience.  On Sunday Night we went to go and say goodbye to Isabel Lopez. She is an inactive member who has kids that are interested in the gospel. We gave her the news that I was leaving..... and she stopped and processed it, and started tearing up and then cried. She said "why do you have to go?" "It's just that you have brought us so much love and peace to me and to my kids in this house". And then I remembered teaching Carlos how to pray and him getting...