When the spirit tells you to bring tape...

HEY FAM!

I got my package last week!!!!!!!!! THANKS SO MUCH!!!!!! I told Hermana Parraga that we cant eat the stuff til my birthday! and im not letting me use anything til then as well. (ok except for I wear the temple tshirt to bed, and ive had one green drink. yum!) Thanks soooo soo much! Today Im sending a small small package(finally) so hopefully everything gets to you! everything was in my package so im feeling lucky! thanks again! i feel sooo blessed!

So this week has been good. Yesterday we felt prompted to go to this house that we havent visited for a long time, and they werent there, but then i remembered that with Hermana Martinez we had seen a couple that was in a fight that lives in a house super close to the area and had wanted to talk to them, but hadn´t had the opportunity to come back, so i felt prompted to knock the door last night. so we knocked it, and ive learned something with martinez for the approach to knocking doors is to pretend like your not contacting them...aka like say something like: we´re looking for such and such persona or this street, were not from here, can you help us? then theyre usually always willing to talk to you and then ask oh, where are you from? and then we talk about why we're here etc.. chev. anyways so we asked about the people we were originally looking for and they thought that i had said a different name of someone that live there!(yay for american accent! :)) anyways they let us enter their house and we found a family of a mom and 3 girls and the dad that was wasted..like super drunk. but we invited him to come sit around the table with us which he did(the mom said that never before had he accepted to do something like that with people like us), and he told us as he was crying that he wanted to change his life, he didnt want to drink, he wanted to feel peace, he wanted to come closer to God, and that he didnt know how, he said that he had prayed for help and the mom said that God had sent us to help him. wow. so  my companion told him that he had to change his friends and not drink anymore. (hed get drunk every day). i felt prompted to pull out a piece of paper and write the word `metas` accross the top or `goals` in english. and i asked him what he was willing to do to change? he then came up with 3 goals, we wrote them on the paper and i taped a picture of Jesus with it and we hung it up in his room with the whole family(ya..i had happen to bring tape with me yesterday. the spirits awesome). We prayed together as a family and he was so happy, saying stuff like my soul feels liberated please please come back tomorrow, and then when we made an appointment he was just repeating and repeating the time. Incredible experience. It`s awesome to be an instrument in the Lords hands and know that we can actually help these people! I also hate Satan and how he uses alcohol a lot here to ruin families.  We have an appointment tonight to have the elders give him and his wife a blessing.

we need to have patience and trust not only in the Lord`s will but His timing as well. I guess thats with everything in life. we need to remember that He knows better. always. He knows us better than we know ourself, He knows how we can become what we want to become(even if we sometimes forget waht we want) and He knows everything else, so it would be wise of us to trust Him every once in a while ya know?

So the new sister leader that lives with me is named Hermana Lang(should be in the picture with the pie)) whats cool is to talk with her about planting seeds because she was in this area around Christmas time and is back now and has seen so many of the progress of her investigators progress and get baptized! or how like before if they didnt seem like they were going to prgress now is their time and they are more ready to hear! Sometimes it might seem like our little acts of goodness arent paying off or its not worth it to work hard, but we need to always remember that the Lord can see the end from the beginning and that every good act will ALWAYS be worth it.  :)

So i dominated the elders in futbol again this week! haha I love the respect I have from them now:) soo fun.

I think thats all for this week! Love you all lots!

Hermana Malorie Black

alcohol, sickness, and dominating satan

Wow. miracles miracles miracles.

My companions name is Hermana Ignacio! she is 19 years old(birthday in march) and has only two weeks longer than me on the mission.(she left the mtc right when I got there, but has a transfer more than me cuz i was in the ccm for longer). I’ve learned a LOT about following the spirit and communication with your companion.

This week was interesting because my companion has been sick (dizzy cuz not enough blood has been getting to her head so we lost about 4 days of work. I took the opportunity with excitement because I had actually been praying for an opportunity to study more and strengthen my testimony more. I’ve been learning that the spirit can only reach and touch the hearts of your investigators as far as the depth of your own testimony. I’ve been working harder and harder to study more in depth the basic principles of the gospel so that I can testify with more power and confidence.

We’ve been teaching more by the spirit this week, which makes all the difference. I also realized that we need to have fun (thanks to hma martinez´ teachings) and have a strong relationship or the people aren’t going to want to listen to us. Like why would someone want to listen to a message that brings happiness if we’re not happy?? So we had a tire race down the street. hahahah. I found some tires lying around and handed her one and said something like ´I’m going to win´ .. ´distance´ in my broken spanish and we raced! Rolled those things down the street! Laughed, joked. It was awesome! So the goal of the mission is to have 14 new investigators every week (meaning having a sit down lesson with new people that you’ve never taught before) which hardly anyone reaches in a week...and guess what?? We had 16 nuevos with only 3 days of working this week! When we're happy the spirit comes! Crazy how I never really realized that before. Don’t be stressed about anything in life! The church is true! We can have peace if we pray and read the scriptures! We know the purpose of life! This is a gospel of happiness! If we get discouraged, it means we don’t have faith that God is going to win. Christ has already won, conquered all!!! We’ve beaten satan! so next time you see something awful in the world or news, just tell satan nice try bud, but Christ has already won and just smile as you strengthen your testimony and spirit force field and share the gospel to help your struggling brothers and sisters.

Friday i was on a split with one of the sister leaders, hma ayalla and I felt prompted to go visit joses house(a recent convert). As we were about to knock on the door jose came up to the door DRUNK. I’m talking blood red eyed drunk with a bag of alcoholic drinks. he told us he felt guilty and so we came in and kinda talked with him and he agreed to get rid of the drinks, so we were about to poor them down the drain aka I had a drink in my hand when his parents came in!!! Bad news. They took him inside and jose went upstairs and his parents were just crying, miserable. PERFECT timing for us though. Why? cuz before they never EVER would listen to us. They would let us come into the house and teach their son, but never would listen cuz they’re ´catholics´. So perfect timing? ya, we cuz we comforted them and they agreed to have us over saturday to get rid of the drinks with them. So saturday we had a lesson with the WHOLE family and they agreed have the elders over on monday(today) morning to give jose a blessing and to be there. Yup, so we present all this to the ward council and the bishop volunteered his family to go over and give jose a blessing. So this morning with the bishop, his wife and son (who is the exact same age as jose) came and talked with the family for 2 hours with us! SO incredible how the Lord uses these challenges to bring about miracles (aka humble this family.) sooo cool. I’m excited to keep working with this family. What was also amazing was looking back and forth at this broken family without the gospel and the parents crying, desiring so badly to be better parents and to heal their family, pleading for help, and seeing the result of a family centered in the teachings of the church, of Jesus Christ. Amazing what we have to offer the world. To heal families.

church is true, i love cusco!

Hermana Malorie Black

Rejoice and Fiesta!

Hola familia!!

 So we only have a half hour to write our families and friends now…so ya! I’m going to print off your emails and not be able to respond until a week later.

 So..I’ve been learning a mountain with this new companion. I’ve been learning that getting the spirit in lessons is the most important thing. Period. I’m super glad that I’ve had such a contrast between my two companions because now I can see the difference the spirit and love makes. I don’t think that she realizes it because that’s how it’s been with all her companions. I’ve been learning to have patience and teach by example. No one likes being told that they’re wrong, so I’ve been trying super hard to make a super extra effort to have love for the people in the lessons, ask questions, and do all I can to bring the spirit. Obedience is also sooo important. This is what we came to earth to learn, learn faith and how can we learn faith? Through obedience to the commandments and to the spirit. Always.

It’s amazing to see the way the spirit guides us to the people that are ready. I made a bet with the zone leaders to have 6 baptisms this transfer and they have to have to have ten, and if we do then we’ll buy a huge cake for the other companionships. It’s cool to see how if we put our effort in, the Lord will help us meet our goals. We found a security guy next to one of our investigators, and he said he wants to get baptized and serve a mission. Wow. Idk if I wrote this, but there was a lady that’s super catholic that the members have been trying to visit etc, but wasn’t receptive. Anyways I had no idea about any of this, but we knocked the door next to her house looking for someone I had contacted on the street and she opened the door and surprisingly let us in. she ended up crying to us and telling us that her daughter was super sick, we cried with her, and told her about blessings of health that the elders could give her daughter—she let them! The spirit was there, and now we are teaching her the lessons. The members that are her neighbors were like—what?? No way! Super cool how the Lord’s timing works, and how He trusts us enough to lead us to the people that are ready.

As we learn to have the spirit more, the Lord has been trusting us with more of His children. 6 new people we taught yesterday. I’m learning how to follow the spirit, and it makes missionary work so much more fun! Cuz the people can feel it and were actually helping them. I’ve also never been as tired as I was yesterday, and I had to consciously make the choice to keep walking for hours when we didn’t have success, I decided to rejoice and thank the Lord for the opportunity to be refined and demonstrate my commitment. Having hard times?? REJOICE AND FIESTA!!!!! Sooo grateful that we have the opportunity to be beat up and our rough edges smoothed—to do what we came here to do.

 Love you all lots! The church is sooo true!!!!! I LOVE THE WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SMILE SIEMPRE!!!!!!

 Love, Hermana Malorie  Blacck

Ps, received 17 letters yesterday! Apparently I didn’t get a bunch in the ccm! THANKS SO much for all the support and updates on elisa and Michaela, sounds like they’re doing awesome! Black power!!! Haha people love that my last name is Black I get a lot of comments like, ‘ Hermana Negro, but you`re white!` or `Hermana White!`and then they laugh and laugh. LOVE IT! J