COVID Missionary Chronicles: Spring Has Sprung...And It Attacked

¡Hola a todos!

How is everyone doing? I hope everyone had a great week and saw God's hand in their life! We have two birthday shout-outs today!! The first is my cousin Adam Hall and the second is Sister Birch (Mama Birchie)!!! Happy Birthday to both of you!!!

Alright y'all this week was a roller coaster. Here are some of the main points...

First, we had a mission wide Facebook fast this week. President Harris wanted us to spend more effort working with members and with Area Book. At the beginning of last week, I was super excited at this opportunity, but it proved to be more of a challenge than I originally thought. Area Book is a great tool for us to use but if can also be kind of difficult as well. Everyone on our Area Book has met with missionaries at one time so it's just a matter of continually inviting different people to hear more. We had a lot of people answer this week, which was a miracle, but most of them said they weren't interested. It's definitely hard as a missionary to hear those words, but at the end of the day our job is to invite.

As far as lessons and investigators go, we're are kind of in this complicated situation. At the beginning of the transfer we had two super solid investigators (Luz and Ever). At this point, neither of them have answered us in the past 3 weeks. We still have Rosa, but we didn't teach her this week because she was in Florida with her daughter. The only lesson we taught this week was a private English Class with a lady named Ana Maria. She's super funny and has a huge personality!! She has expressed some interest in the Book of Mormon. She took a copy from our group English Class and said that she has been reading a little of it. Hopefully she is someone who continues to develop an interest in the gospel. The highlight for our investigators this week was that we finally had someone at church!!! It has been 6 weeks of inviting every week and then finally, literally at the last Sunday of the transfer, we had a friend at church. Her name is Lidia! I'm not sure if I've talked about her yet in an email, but she is so cool! We met her through English Class! She works with Hermano Rivas from the Branch so she has already had some contact with the church through him! She came to the Relief Society activity a couple weeks back and really enjoyed it! We were so excited to see her at church yesterday! She seemed really touched throughout the meetings and seemed to really enjoy it! We are praying hard that she is someone we can start teaching soon as well. 

The weather here took a sharp turn this week...as you can tell from the title of the email haha. The trees decided to dump every once of pollen in Georgia haha. Allergies were all over the place for me this week lol. Good news though, MY TAN LINES ARE BACK!!! Living in Utah destroyed my tan but I'm happy to say it's back and will hopefully stay for a while! I also learned a new word, "abeja" which means bee. The bees here are insane!!! 

Laughable moment of the week actually deals with the bees. We were walking into a dinner appointment and we get to the door and like 5 bees are swarming right there. We couldn't get to the door because the bees were in the way. We sat there for a bit then this Hispanic guy came up and said that he'd spray them for us. He came back and sprayed the bees and our night was saved. This guy was laughing so hard at us but we were very appreciative lol.

Something that I loved this week from my reading in Preach My Gospel is this quote, "when people choose not to learn more about the restored gospel, your work is not wasted". This quote definitely got me through this week. We did a lot of "seed planting", which is actually just as important as "harvesting". I know that even if I don't see the effects of my work here in this area immediately, that the Lord will work his perfect plan. 

We have transfers happening tomorrow and Sister Robertson and Sister Rodgers are leaving. It's ultra sad, but Sister Abbot's new companion who will be moving in is an experienced Spanish missionary so that will be a huge blessing!!

Alright, that's all I've got for this week everyone! I hope everyone has a great week full of miracles! Can't wait to fill y'all in next week! Love y'all!!

Herman Adams

Pictures:

1. Zone P-day

2. Self Defense with Jere and Amani ( I know have two Brazilian Stick Fighting sticks in my possession haha)

3. Mexican tacos never cease to amaze me 

4. District cheer-up because we all had a rough week haha