hola hola!!!! i always thought msisionaries were crazy when they said the days are long adn teh weeks are short. but this is SO REAL. the days all blur together, but when im within them they seem so long. we study for hours but then i blink and its bedtime. time isnt real i swear. life here is GOOD. most of the days are the same. study. lunch. study. play volleyball with the district (we literally play every day), shower, study, teach, study. bed. hahaha but we like to freshen things up with the occasional downpour of rain making us all completely soaked for dinner and the last 4 hours of the day. when it rains here... holy cow it rains. the streets become rivers. the other day we were running to dinner and this hermana tripped and fell and then her shoe just floated down the street which was then a river hahahahahahah so funny so terrible but so funny. dont worry she was okay. anyways it makes the days really fun! we had some new latinas move in across the hall and i didnt think it was possible to love hermanas more than our last latina hermanas but WOW I DO. They have 3 Hermana Lopez and theyre all so nice. one hna lopez is literally me as a latina. except she has this stuffed Bart Simposon doll who she calls mama who whenever im sad she uses to attack my face and make me feel better hahaha shes so awesome. its also cool because our spanish is decent enough that we can actually hold conversations with them now. ISNT THAT COOL. ive only been here 4 weeks but i can hold my own with natives! GAH THIS WORK IS SO COOL. anyways, nothing too awesome this week. we had one of our teachers talk about the need we have to speak spanish as much as we can in the day. she said you can either choose God, or choose to speak comfotably in English. really put into perspective what im doing and who im putting my life in the hands of, and i know God will bless me for trying to speak this language even when its difficutl and im tired and dont want to. God is good!!! we had this awesome experience the other day. We teach our maestra, Hermana Alvarado, for our progressing investigator. we were teaching her about repentence and baptism, but she kept asking about what to do if she has weaknesses and keeps sinning. my comp whipped out Ether 12:27 and had her read it and she started crying in the middle of our lesson. at first we were like wait what? and she said things like this was the perfect scripture thank you thank you. the next day, she told us that she was being the investigator, but she was also struggling with things in her life. and that although were teaching fake investigators, were still teaching real people. gah it was so cool and the spirit was so strong and i KNOW it wasnt us that came up with that scripture but we were 100% guided by the spirit. i love this missionary life!!!!! sometimes its rough to study here because our elders are so distracted and its easy to get discouraged because i want to progress so much faster than i am. but i definitely know why im here and im putting my full faith in the Lord to help me be better for him, not for me. i love this work and i love being a missionary and AY YO ENCANTO ESPAÑOL. thank you for all the prayers and love! ill talk to you all next week! con amor, hermana reed IV 1 tacky mission pics for the win
2 ya main hermana starke 3 my bff hna lewis left for peru this week :) 4 other bff hna clarke (yes they were companions lewis and clarke lol) 5 best district in the world!!!!
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mi familia, hola hola!!! i can not believe i have been here for almost 4 weeks. time is flying. i swear the ccm is a time warp because i swear yesterday i was saying ill never make it to august and not were like almost done. how is that possible? i hope everyone back home is good and life is good and baby Rex is big and healthy :) this week has been pretty basic with a splash of fun. last pday we went to the temple and WOW its so beautiful. its really big i was suprised but the paintings are gorgeous and the outside is as well. it was good to get out of the walls and actually see mexico city haha im a big fan of this place. its gorgeous. doing the session in spanish was interesting. we had headphones that talked to us in english but we still spoke all spanish but it was so fun and the cute little latina abuelas kill me. it was amazing. we get to go again today!!!!!! ive made a ton of latino friends here, probably because theyre literally so nice and so funny. i dont know why but i feel like the natives have so much more fun than we do. theyre just such a happy bunch. we live with a bunch of latinas and they came in the same week as us but were only here for 3 weeks so they left this past tuesday and it was so sad to say bye to them. we sat with them in lunch on domingo and it was bittersweet. theyre amazing and will be missed. we took probably a million pictures with them in our casa before they left though so all is well. we also have this friend who works in the comedor named roberto. hes having us help teach him english so everytime we see him i teach him a new word. nicest guy ever. he even played double dutch with us last week (train wreck as you can imagine ) but it was so fun!! funny story of the week. we were playing this game during language study called fruit cocktail and basically someone stands in the middle, calls a fruit, and everyone named that fruit has to switch chairs. whilst playing this, me and an elder named elder devereaux (awesome kid - going to alabama birmingham!!! youre lucky a melanee and u stanford!!) went for the same chair and amidst a tackling/shoving/falling maneuver we both ended up on the ground half on top of each other which was WAY awkward because missionaries and also i was in a dress and long story short we havent been allowed to play since hahahaha it was so funny though cause it was all an accident. this sundy my comp and i taught relief society about faith and hope. it was such a powerful leccion and it was fun to prepare because we couldnt just google talks and quotes from apostles! it was all hard copy. it was really good and we felt the blessings from it all throughout the week. earlier this week i think my district and i hit a wall. we call it the ccm wall where youve been studying so long and in here so long that EVERYTHING is funny hahaha we literally sat and lfipped a watterbottle for an hour and were laughing so hard and so loud. pray for us hahahaha the studying is going good though! on monday our district did our first english fast where we spoke spanish all day! by all day i mean we lasted til like 1 pm which is pretty good for us! ive got a long ways to go and a lot of words to learn. best part of the week is we sang calma mi alma in choir for our devo. as many know this is my favorite hymn. it was so powerful especially being sung by hundreds of missionaries who definitely need the Lord to help us calm our souls each day. it hit me as more of a plea than a song because all of us plead with the Lord everyday for these things but at the end of the day, we simply ask to just still our souls. pretty awesome experiecne. lastly, last night we had TRC where people from mexico city come in and volunteer to be taught lessons. it was SO great to teach real people with new experiences, except wow their spanish is really good and fast and hard to understand to 3 3 weekers. speaking of which, were back in a trio! hna johnson left yesterday for Chile, so the trio is back and ready to work! i love this place, i love my district, i love my comps, and i love being a missionary! thanks to mom and dad for being so awesome and helping me get to where i am. im all too blessed. adios! Fe en Dio, y adelante. Hna Reed IV 1 Mexico City temple round 1!!
2 this temple is one of 5 temples in the world where angel moroni isholding the gold plates!! 3 latina bffs ): gonna miss them a lot (spot the gringos?) 4 5 this girl is the bomb. she loves to stick her tongues out in pics like americans haha Friends and Fam, HELLOOO FROM MÉXICO. life is still awesome. life is still hard. but i think thats what makes it awesome. thank you to everyone whos been writing me!!! its hard to respond to everyone when i only have an hour but i try. also thanks to everyone who used that missionarycarepackage site to send me letters during the week! it seriously brightens my spirits so much and makes me smile waaaay big. okay i testify that pdays are BLESSINGS. did you know we get to take naps on pdays? am i blessed or am i blessed. last week we accidently napped for 2 hours. NO REGRETS. but today we get to go to the temple!!!! ill definitely skip a nap for that. ill let you all know how it goes next week! this week was really cool. we had a fun service activity last week where i learned how to fold a fitted sheet (mom goals??¿¿) and we all messed around in the sheets for like an hour. it was fun. we then had an intense kickball game against another district and it got surprisingly heated... for people who arent supposed to engage in distracting competition it definitely got competitive... all is well. 0-0 final score as always hahaha my companion is doing really awesome. she continues to teach me things each day. on saturday we had a bit of a breakdown moment for her and it was really hard. she told me some issues shes been having emotionally for a while and it was really helpful because it taught me ways that i can help her instead of just not knowing what was going on. since sunday was fast sunday i decided to fast for her. she bore her testimony in sacrament then saying that she felt and overflow of love the past day and that day which i knew is exactly what she needed. i know fasting is real and it blesses the lives of those who need it!! its serioulsy amazing. sunday night we had a devo where we watched a talk Elder Bednar gave to the MTC about 5 years ago. IT WAS SO GOOD. its a talk that like everyone hears in the mtc cause its so powerful and its supposedly only heard in the mtc but i bet you guys could find it. its called the character of christ. he talked about how the natural man in any situation tends to turn inwards and think ´oh woe is me my life is so hard´ whenever they have a difficulty but thats the opposite of what christ does. he turns outward to others even when hes struggling. when he was betrayed by judas after hours of pain and torment in teh garden of gethsemane, instead of being angry with him what does he do? he turns and heals the ear of the guard about to arrest him. it really taught me that as a representative of him i need to lose focuse of myself and turn outwards for others. so so cool. tuesday night we had a devo live from the Provo MTC (i tried to look for Sam in the audeince but theres a lot of blonde elders...) from Elder Andersen!!! shoutout to my girl Joelle. it was a really awesome talk as well. every talk here is amazing but the ones from the quorum are always STUNNING. he talked about faith and always having faith and working hard as missionaries. he says ´missionary work is not complex. but it isnt easy´ COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER. good think i love what im doing and i love that its hard stuff. this week mi maestra told me i look like addison sheppard from greys anatomy and now she calls me hermana addison hahahaha its so funny cause i dont even think i look like her but it was so cute cause shes just this little latina. gah love her. the spirit here is awesome and the elders are getting much better and much more dedicated. i think therye finally realizeing why theyre here!! in other news, last week my comps were all sick and as of yesterday it was my turn!! YAAAY. thanks to Marita for all those pills for me to take though im recovering!!! CONGRATS TO DEE ON THE BABY. hes adorable. please keep sending pics because i cant get enough of his cuteness!!!! i cant wait to watch the video once i get to WA. i love you all! thank you for the love and prayers. youre all amazing! Fe en Dios, y adelante Hermana Reed IV Mas Picturas
1 MY MISSION LEL 2 our district squad goals #readthebookofmormon 3 FOUND HERMANA STARKE 4 were making the same face as this pug on our shirt because we were tired after studying for 16 hours so 5 this is our whole zone! we have the greatest zone ever. and the second pic is us all making the mr bean face because if you look at the guy in the middle front row he IS LITERALLY THE SAME AS MR BEAN so we all call him that hahahahahaha best thing ever. HOLA AMIGOS Y FAMILIA!!
boy is it awesome to hear from you all. it has been a LONG 10 days here in ciudad de méxico but an awesome one to say the least. ill try and include as much information as i can but pardon me if its a bit jumbled. all the words im typing are underlined in red squiggleys and its throwing me off. haha also pardon the grammar issues. like i said, long week. okay so life here is so great! we arrived around 530 to the CCM on Tuesday because traffic here is obviously a mess. but the city is gorgeous!!! the CCM is like a mini city within the city. it has giant walls of cement and barbed wire to keep us safe but then it also feels so friendly inside somehow haha its cool. we have our own casas that house about 20 misioneras each and were all such good friends. espeicialy us with the latinas. theyre so nice and even though i speak to them in terribly broken spanish they still love us hahaha but yeah theres streets and the comedor (ill talk about the food in a tish) and so much more and its basically the greatest place ever. when i first got here i found out i was in a trio! my companeras were Hermana Knudson and Hermana Frazer. I actually knew Hermana Knudson from school because she was friends with my friend Mandi back in high school and wed hung out before so it was awesome finding out were companions. hermana frazer is actually going to the alabama birmingham mission! so i told her all about how awesome her mission president is going to be. shes all too lucky! hermana kundson is going to arizona scottsdale so were all going different places. anyways, then on monday of this week we actually got another companera! so now there are four of us and only hermana frazer is my companion. but we only have hermana johnson for about two weeks because she had to stay two weeks longer for medical reasons so they threw her in with us. shes awesome too. theyre all awesome. basically everyone here is awesome. more about the CCM is there are parrots EVERYWHERE. its so weird like ive never actually interacted with parrots but theyre like the main bird and they squak all the dang time. not a huge fan. there are houses literally halfway up the mountains that surround us and i have no idea how they are built becasue theyre on like super steep parts and it doesnt make sense. ill send a picture of them sometime but theyre way cool. there are gunshots sometimes hahaha actually entertaing. but sometimes theyre fireworks. so its kinda a game of like oh was it a gun or a firework? the world may never know. its so beautiful here. ive gotten used to going to sleep to the sound of sirens blazing and its actually quite peaceful now. okay so the comedor. great place. we do eat lots of tacos. shoutout to méxico. the other day they had fresh mangoes and i almost died i kid you not. the greatest things ive ever eaten. they came short only to the mangoes i ate in the dominican but it was seriously so good. especially after eating beans and canteloupe (i seriously have canteloupe every meal) for a week straight. theres this elder in our district who enjoys complaining a lot and he was saying how all he wanted was an american burger. then we had burgers for dinner and he refused to eat it. he said it wasnt american enough. that was real annoying. i thought it was bomb. the chefs are actually quite talented. hes such a highschool boy. more on him later. the second day here after literally no lessons they had us teach our first lesson in spanish. to say it was a train wreck is quite the understatement. i cant even explain hahaha we wrote down basically a script because we didnt want to mess anything up and then they would ask a question and wed like stare at them and then go back to reading teh script. TERRIBLE IDEA. the spirit was not there and our spanish was still terrible. so after that weve gotten a lot better. except for our lesson last night where i meant to say {you guys dont need to believe us} but i forget to say creer and i also switched some words so i ended up saying {no necisitamos ustedes} basically we dont need you. they straight laughed in my face. nice fallyn. oh well, might as well get the mistakes out now am i right? the greatest part of every day is gym time. gym time is serioulsy blessed from the heavens. the very first day me and my friend hermana orton who played bball in high school decided to play knock out with all the élderes and get this I LITERALLY BEAT ALL OF THEM. it was awesome and they were all like woah ive never seen an hermana play and i was like yeah respect us. it was so great hahah today on pday a bunch of the hermanas played futbol and it was so dang fun. squad pic attached later. my district is very interesting. Elder Devereaux is going to birmingham too! hes the one that complains a lot (goodluck a melanee and u stanford) but he could be such a good missionary if he tried harder i just know it. we have this elder named elder duval and hes so funny hahaha hes like a big guy and has glasses and is kinda shy so he never talks but when he does all of us just crack up. funny story, we were playing kick ball the other day and he was like walking to the base and i didnt know that he was already out so i tried to throw the ball at him but my hand eye sucks right now and i hit him directly in the glasses and he like fell over and they fell off and it was SO FUNNY just cause it was Duval but i also felt really bad hahahah our district though literally was all on the ground cracking up hahah when you study all day evey the little things like that are funny. theres also an elder who is so short and small he looks like a deacon hahah but hes great. and this Elder named Elder Squire who we found out his real name was Carleton so we all call him Elder Lassy like from psych hahaha its so fun. i love them all. okay well thats all ive got! this week i saw Teagan from BYU and it was so good to see her. shes on her way to Chile already and shes going to do amazing. I saw Christian too on his first day and his second day and maybe hes just too cool to talk to me but he wasnt really down for a big conversation haha maybe he was tired but hell warm up to this place. i also saw my roomie ally from BYU! she cried when she saw me hahaha if any of you know her that isnt surprising. haha i lvoe this place and i love this work! yo se que el evangelio de jesucristo es verdadero. yo se que el libro de mormon es el palabra de Dios. i love you all so much!! until next week. Hermana Reed the 4th ps CONGRATS DEE ON THE BABY!!! HES BEAUTIFUL! I LOVE YOU LITTLE REX! pss mom and dee i got your letters from the mtcmexicocarepackage.com thing! those work! if you email through that they print off your email and i can get it in the middle of the week and it makes me so happy :) you can also send people food... people in my district have gotten a box of krispy creme donuts... just saying. my district is 11B! i love you all! Picturas!!! 1 this ones for you ma!! orange houses everywhere! 2 us after the most intense futbol match the CCM has ever seen. jk the score was 0-0 hehe 3 the crazy houses on the hill plus benemirito! 4 me and hermana knudsen!! i cant believe were here together!! 5 all the chicas in mi districto. the third one from the right is my compañera hermana frazer. 6 if youve been to the ccm, you know what this is 7 mi districto |
Hermana Fallyn ReedMissionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Federal Way, Washington Mission. July 2016 - January 2018. Archives
January 2018
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