Hermana Mary DeWitt: 1 year, Reincarnation, and Consecration!

This last week, I hit my year mark, which is SO crazy! It feels just like yesterday I was sitting in my room in Zoom meetings with my MTC District, practicing simple Spanish grammar and phrases! I feel like I've learned and grown so much since then, with both my Spanish and my testimony! I'm excited to still have 6 months left to serve the Lord as a full-time missionar, but I know time is just gonna keep on flying by!

We put Diego on date for baptism this week! His date is March 19th, and we're super excited for him! He's been working through some Word of Wisdom stuff, but he's already making a lot of progress and seeing some blessings and miracles! He's so awesome!

We've also started teaching Juan Carlos and his sister-in-law, Jeisi, again (for anyone who remembers that far back, we were teaching this family when I first got to Fort Morgan, which was about 7 months ago!!) - we had dropped them a while back, but Juan Carlos reached out to us and seems interested in our message again! He and Jeisi have been reading parts of the Book of Mormon and had lots of questions, so we went over some of those questions in our lesson with them this week! Juan Carlos said he would come to church, but something came up with family and he couldn't (we were really sad) - but hopefully this coming Sunday, he will!

We had our Spanish Sunday School and Xochitl, Fabiola, Hermana Acosta, and Pablo came! It was so fun to have our little band of Spanish members talking about the Abrahamic covenant and the story of Isaac! At one point, though, Xochitl told the whole class that we would be reincarnated...Brother Wiedrich (the teacher) gave us the look that said "did you guys teach her the Plan of Salvation before baptizing her???" So, yes, we'll be reviewing that with her in our next lesson!

We also had dinner with the Goetz family again! Josh just got back from being deployed for 2-ish years and had joined the church a few years before that, so it's been really cool to share dinner messages with them! He shared some cool insights that we hadn't thought of, and we're so grateful that he shared them!

Personal Study Excerpt for the week:

2 Nephi 2:2 - "Nevertheless...thou knowest the greatness of God; and He shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain."

--to consecrate = to give to / to make holy

--we consecrate many things to the Lord, but He also consecrates things to us (I had never noticed that before!)

--if we allow Him, the Lord consecrates our trials and makes them holy experiences that help us learn, grow, and come closer to Him - to help us become like Him! BUT, we need to trust in Him and allow Him to consecrate those trials! If we try to go through those hard times on our own, we're not allowing Him to make those hard times HOLY times - allow the consecration process to take place - trust in the Lord!

Love you all and have a great week!

- Hermana DeWitt