Hey
kiddos...Me here, in Montevideo! My comp had to sign papers for her Visa. Which
I had to do like, 10 months ago. Except that it seems like last week...this
week´s email is going to be a little different. We had another great week! We
have this awesome teenager named Cintia. She´s 17 and on Friday she accepted
fecha for the 6th of September! Keep her in your prayers! And Margot...funny
story kids, Margot is moving. NO JOKE. Haha. She is moving to another ward. So,
we figured either we could rush the baptism to be this week, or, better, we can
let her go there and get baptized in that new ward once she gets to know it
better. And we decided that that just makes more sense. But it´s cool, we are
definitely invited to be there anyway. Keep praying for Margot!
So
since I´m getting so old and wise in the mission....haha no not even true. But
as my year mark comes up (ah man), I´ve been thinking a lot about things I´ve
learned here. The list goes ON. But I felt like sharing a few things:
- Laugh, laugh, and laugh some more. Sometimes, you say a
really stupid thing in spanish. Like saying "fideo" instead of
"video" during a prayer, for instance. I mean, somebody go back
and count how many stupid Hermana Dolan duh moment stories I have shared.
Sometimes, your umbrella up and breaks and blows away on you in the middle
of a pouring rain storm. Sometimes, you literally trip over nothing and
fall on your face. Sometimes, you have an investigator with a baptismal
date and then it turns out they´re moving. You have a lot of options of
how to react, but let me suggest the most therapeutic: LAUGH YOUR STINKIN
PANTS OFF. Life is funny. It´s meant to be enjoyed. Sometimes, I´ve had
missionaries question whether it´s really okay to start laughing during a
prayer if something funny happened. I answer them with the typical phrase
in the Dolan family: God has a sense of humor! There are obviously the
times to be serious and reverent, but most of the time, life was
meant to be laughed through, and it´s the only thing that will GET you
through. Laugh at who you are. Laugh at who you were. Laugh at that stupid
thing that you will mostly likely say or do in the future.
- "Beeeeee" yourself. That phrase has rung
in my ears ever since the night before I left on my mission. My stake president
asked each member of my family to share last minute counsel, and my sister
shared the classic Genie line from Aladdin. In the mission, in life, you
were created to be who you were. A typical phrase I´ve heard in the
mission is "Hermana DOLAN was called to this mission (or Hermana
Barrios, Hermana Zumeta, insert any name), not called to this mission to
BE Hermana Barrios (or Hermana Zumeta, Hermana Goode, Hermana Paris,
Hermana Sump) It´s the same in life. After all, we were called to this
life on earth, weren´t we? We accepted our call, didn´t we? We were called
to live OUR specific life. To BE our specific selves. It´s one of life´s
great challenges for a lot of us, to be who we are, and to love it.
- "Just Keep Swimming." The only way to "find
Nemo" is to KEEP swimming. The only way to find the light at the end
of the tunnel is to walk THROUGH the tunnel. The only way to receive the
blessings is to remain firm through the trial. Imagine if Dory and Marlin
hadn´t "kept swimming?" The best way to get things done, is to
pull a Nike and JUST DO IT. Keep going always. Just keep swimming.
- Lose yourself. The classic Gordon
B. Hinckley story always helps me pick myself up and get back to work.
After writing a discouraged letter to his dad during his mission, he
received the following response: "Dear Gordon, I got your letter, and
I only have one thing to say: forget yourself and go to work!" The
mission is a mini model of life, which means this is a principle that can
be applied to all. Discouraged? Disappointed? Going through a trial? The
best antedote? Lose yourself in the service of others. That´s something I
didn´t learn until being here in Uruguay. They are always worried about
others. My Uruguayan grandma here in Rivera, who we call Vovo (it´s what
they call their grandmas in Brazil), is blind, lives alone, and yet
everytime we come over....she´s much more worried about whether she has
something to give us to eat than that she just spilled car oil all down
her front haha. The point is, lose yourself in trying to help someone
else, and without even noticing, your situation will improve until it
seems like nothing.
- Look for the best in people. I have found here in
the mission that I can learn something from basically every single person
I come in contact with, even if I only talk to them for 5 minutes.
Everybody has something good about them to be shared and learned from.
Some more from others, some maybe less. But everybody has those divine
qualities, perhaps sometimes hidden, which were given directly to them by
their loving Father in Heaven. They´re important to Him. They were all
made to be good, so look for the good. Look for the best. You´ll be really
surprised at what you can find.
- Learn to love correction. This is something
President Smith has said he desires for every missionary in this mission
to learn. Not only to accept correction, to tolerate it, but rather to
seek it, and love it. No one is perfect. There is always something to
improve. Sometimes, maybe it´s hard to hear it, but it will ALWAYS help us
be better. Seek it from others. Seek it from God. And seek it, because you
love it, because you know that thanks to correction, you can be better.
Appreciate it. This is where a little thing called humility becomes really
useful. Nobody likes to be told we have to change. And yet, we all want to
be better, don`t we? The hardest part to be better is to accept that there
are things to improve on. So ask for those things, and get to work on them
with a big old smile on your face!
- Notice the little things. It`s the little
things in life that bring the greatest joy. The beautiful sunsets of
Uruguay have turned more days than I can count from a rough one into one
rich with beauty, wonderment, and....joy. Enjoy the sunsets. If you`re in
the mission, enjoy the little moments. Enjoy walking down the street and
having little kids yell "hollllaaaaaa misionerrrrrrrasssss!"
Enjoy sitting and chatting with someone who feels they can confide in you
things that they can`t anyone else. Enjoy stopping for an ice cream with
your comp. Drink it all in. The same with life. I am grateful to say that
I have been able to take a minute in many small moments of my life and
think "man, life is so great." I`mma go ahead and share a quote
from one of my friends that he shared in this weeks email of his: "let things
that don't matter make you happy, but don't let them matter." Good
quote to live by. Let little things life you up, but also don`t let the
little things get you down.
- It`s normal to get down sometimes. Life is to be enjoyed,
but there are obviously also going to be those days when life gets us
down. Maybe we`ve felt guilty for feeling that way. Maybe sometimes, we
look at at others who are so happy, and know we should be too despite a
challenge or difficulty, and yet maybe we`re not. Why? WE`RE HUMAN.
It`s nothing to be ashamed of. Let it out. Give yourself a good cry,
because you know you need it. This life wasn`t meant to be perfect, and we
weren`t meant to be perfect. Thanks to the Fall of Adam, everything has
its opposite. Not even Adam and Eve were happy in paradise, because they
had never experienced the opposite. To reach our own paradise of
happiness, it`s necessary for us to experience first the shackles of
disappointment, grief, guilt, and sadness. It is only then that we can
understand the joy of being freed through the mercy of the Atonement.
Which brings me to:
- He`s all you got. Do your best in life to be
successful. In the mission, work your hardest. But put everything you`ve
got into the only THING you`ve got: your testimony. The Savior is all we
have. Loved ones pass on, friends betray us, jobs come and go and so do
relationships. But the one thing that will never go, is Him. Only we can
make the choice to walk away, or to do everything we can to walk side by
side with our Best Friend so that when we fall, He`s already standing
right beside us to catch us before we hit the ground. Don`t let your self
worth or sense of who you are depend on numbers, on money, on whether
you`re married or single, on how big of a house you have. Let all of your
being depend on your testimony. if it`s not quite there yet, that`s where
the correction comes in and the need to get better. As a missionary from
Utah, I`ve gotten the comment from people here that life was always easy for
me because I was born in the church. My response to them is that I didn`t
have a grown testimony until something bad had to happen in my life to
make me realize what mattered in life. I had to lose someone important to
me to realize that the most important Person is Him. Lean on the Savior,
and let Him strengthen you. Everything else is just a bonus.
- The Lord has more. Never settle for
what you`ve got. With who you are, with the amount of success you have.
Don`t go indifferent because things are going well. Because the Lord
ALWAYS has more for us. More blessings, more happiness, more conversion in
our hearts, it`s all there. But ONLY if we seek it. (James 1:5.) Elder
Bednar taught President Smith when he came to Uruguay that the best advice
for missionaries is to "keep knocking." "Knock, and it
shall be opened unto you." But there are more doors. Perhaps there`s
more waiting behind the same door, if we will but keep knocking, waiting
patiently. Never settle. There`s always more.
- Be grateful always. In the April General
Conference of this year, I was having a rough week or two in Colonia. The
talk by Elder Uchtdorf on gratitude completely changed my perspective, and
it`s something I always keep in mind. We should not be grateful FOR
things, but rather be grateful IN our circumstances. No matter our
circumstance, there is always an abundance of things to be thankful for.
If anything, you can be grateful that you`re alive on this earth to be
experiencing this trial. you can be grateful for the better person you
know you`re becoming thanks to the grace of God.
- It`s all about HIM. The mission isn`t
about us. Life isn`t about us. It`s all about the SAVIOR. It`s all about
striving to become more like Him. It`s all about striving to return to Him
and our Father in Heaven. That`s where not letting little things in life
matter: let HIM matter. Look outside yourself, and look for that person
that`s right under your nose who needs your help. Yep, that person that
the Savior is lookin`right at. Do you see them yet? Plead for His divine
mercy and grace to help you bring yourself to Him.
- SMILLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SIEMPRE. (siempre means
always.) Charlie Chaplin had it figured out: "smile even if you`re
heart is breaking." You can lift someone else up, and in turn,
eventually yourself. Plus, everyone looks a heck of a lot prettier when
they smile. So SMILE. SIEMPRE.
Okay,
that`s my shpeal for today. The list certainly does not end there, and i
definitely know that i`ve got a lot more to learn both in these 6 months and in
the rest of my life, but here`s a start. I love the mission so much. I am SO
incredibly blessed. I can`t even believe it!
I love
you, I love you, I love you!
Hermana
Dolan
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