Week 59: Shawn Mendes' 'Mercy' (2016)

God is good, everybody!

When you get up at 4 a.m. so your comp can do paperwork at immigration, you’d be surprised what looks you can serve

This entire week has been one of the most stressful of my mission. And there was no appendicitis to be seen!

We had to travel to Guatemala City again, and there was a lot of rearranging and scheduling things going on, but surprisingly, my nerves weren’t connected to that. No, dear reader, my worry stemmed from the pending news of …

TRANSFERS.

The view is beautiful from everywhere in Baúl, even the soccer field by Xelapan

Basically, I was pretty sure I was staying, but everyone around me kept saying I was finishing up the nursing thing and that I would be getting transferred. This made me freaked out, not necessarily for the nursing, but because I love Baúl!!! This might be my favorite area of my whole mission, and if I had to leave before Christmas, I would have never recovered. I honestly had to keep on telling myself, “I trust President Roden,” to keep myself sane.

Good views are also featured from our stairwell

Fortunately, as you can tell by the title, the Lord and the Universe are merciful, and Hermana Noyola and I are going to be doing this thing for another six weeks! We’ll see where it leads us.

I

Everyone seems to be acknowledging the little time I have left in the mission, including the public transport.*

’ve definitely mentioned this before in at least one of the dozens of weeklies that I’ve written, but trust is crucial to a mission and to life in general. One of my favorite things I was ever told (during theatre!) was that you will never actually know what another person is thinking. No matter the moment, no matter the intimacy. You just have to believe in their words and their actions and hope for the best. And that is what we do.

A verse in Mosiah 7 reads:

33 But if ye will turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him, and serve him with all diligence of mind, if ye do this, he will, according to his own will and pleasure, deliver you out of bondage.

The whole gospel is built on promises, and a promise is the deepest form of trust we experience. I have no physical evidence of any of the promises I have, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know they’re true. If you just let yourself believe, life is, more often than not, much happier.

—You’re good, too,

Hermana Newton

* “RM” is a widely used abbreviation for “returned missionary.”