this week. could have probably qualified as one of the shortest/longest weeks of my whole mission. don't know why... but time does wonky things here. some days just fly by... other days...
i usually look at my planner to help me remember what to write in my email. as i'm looking through it this week, i see things like:
try out a new lunch place.
pay bill
eat steak
zone training (when i look at that... i know it means 6 hours on a bus with no air conditioning)
call people
interview
"the only easy day, was yesterday"
president from chiang mai
inviting
inviting
inviting
inviting...
baptism!
so. at the end of the week. when every single one of our plans (or so it would seem at times) pits. fails. or stands us up... it was still a great week.
we had two baptisms yesterday. "the referral" - the girl who's parents we met while contacting. the ones that are most definitely buddhist... gave us their daughters number. wow. AND she was interested. we gave her a date before we even met her. she almost didn't make it to church last week... because she was eating. but we forgave her of that... and she is the cutest thing ever! she saw that someone brought food for after church last week, and brought some yesterday! (even though it was fast sunday...........) so we waited until after we got back from her baptism to eat it. gah! it's so cute i can't stand it!
our other baptizee was gamon. (we finally actually learned how to spell it in thai this week. it was so easy it was ridiculous. to think. i could have been writing 3 characters instead of 5!) the first time we contacted him, he was shirtless. very impressed i could speak thai. didn't come to our appointment, so we almost dropped him. but one day we were walking down the same part of town (usually we ride our bikes...) and we found him again. he said he'd actually come, but there were people there and he was afraid to go inside. we recommitted him to coming, and he got baptized!
i read a talk yesterday about being a "challenging and testifying missionary". if i could explain our mission... that would be it. the first (and pretty much only thing we do) is invite people to be baptized. everything else that we talk about comes after that. something that hit me was a line where it says "the lord knows who he wants in his church." and again, i realized that this isn't my job. it isn't my success or my fault when things do or don't work out. i can try as hard as i can, and people have their agency. but god has also prepared some pretty amazing people to come into his church. and he knows where they are. he also knows where we will be. and somehow he plays the puppeteer (aka us following the spirit) and gets us to find those people. it's quite an amazing experience!
my one thought for the day. comes from our district from chiang mai coming down to help our fledgling unit here in kpp. he gave a lesson to the members about basically how the church is supposed to work. he showed a picture of a fisherman. a nice fisherman at sunset. all alone in a river. pretty picture. said it was like missionary work. how many fish do you think you're going to get? a few right?
then he showed a picture of a team. with nets. all pulling. working together. it's true. missionary work alone.... is rough. but there is so much more that we can do together! not necessarily that everyone needs to get out and challenge people to be baptized. but everyone can reach out. we see that all the time with investigators. they might come because some gigantic blonde american invited them. they might come because they are curious. they might come because they've never been to a christian church before... but the members that step up and share their testimonies and share their love... will keep them there. my amazing companion shared a beautiful testimony yesterday and said, "if we want others to feel christ's love, they first need to feel our love." they will be able to feel his love through us.
so go out. and love people! :)
i love you all too!
sister ellis
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