June 15, 2014

Well... this is my last email that you will receive from me as a missionary. This week has been really strange, pretty difficult for me honestly. Filled with lots of questions like, "Are you excited to leave?" and "what's the first thing you're going to do when you get home?" (always answered with: hug my brother). I have experienced so much as a missionary. So many life-lessons learned, so many miracles seen, yet I'm still imperfect after this year and half (and that won't be changing any time soon). No one can really understand the lows a missionary reaches, unless you have served a mission. Satan works on missionaries possibly harder than those you are teaching. On the flip side, because we have experienced such deep lows, we experience the most intense joy I have ever experienced. The feeling of finding someone new to teach, someone that the Lord has prepared for His missionaries to find, is the most elating feeling I have ever experienced. "Have we not reason to rejoice? Yea, I say unto you, there never were men that had so great reason to rejoice as we since the world began." THAT is what being a missionary feels like.

We had a fireside on Sunday night, and it was a tri-stake event. David Hatch, a world-renowned pianist, played with a few of his child-prodegy students. WOW!! The spirit was so strong, it was just amazing, indescribable. Right before the event started, my companion Sister Patterson said, "Look! Sister Woodbury and her companion just walked in!" There were probably 500 people there, and not enough time to get through them all before the event started. So afterwards we shot out of our seats and ran to the back of the gym and i snuck up behind my old companion and tapped her on the shoulder. The second she turned around we embraced, and I just started bawling, i couldn't let go of her and i couldn't stop crying. She said, "i was praying so hard you would be here! There are so many people here, I just asked Heavenly Father!!" That is what Ammon felt like in the Book of Mormon, I think. She was sitting next to her companion who had just come from the MTC 3 weeks ago, and they had their investigator their that is getting baptized at the end of the month. Wow, her success, the person she has become, the missionary she is choosing to be.. that is reason for my heart to rejoice. (For those of you that don't remember, I trained Sister Woodbury.)

Although I have experienced so much joy as a missionary, I am just so exhausted. I don't have a doubt in my mind that I have put my heart, might, mind and strength into the work of the Lord, and I feel good about it. I will so miss being a missionary, but the thing I have come to realize is that committing to be a missionary 1.5 years ago, signing that paper and sending it into the prophet of the Lord, was actually an eternal commitment, not just one that is over after a year and a half. Hopefully I can live worthy of that.

I know that this gospel is true with all my heart. As Ammon says, "I cannot say the smallest part which I feel."
i love you all,
Sister Rose