A Busy Week with Lots of New Sister Missionaries

Our Mission Leadership Council

This past week has been super busy. Last Wednesday, Sister Barrientos had us come to the mission home from Wednesday to Friday morning to help with the new arriving missionaries. 19 sisters came, and 7 or 8 of them were American. We got to go to the airport to greet them. The airport has improved a lot since I last saw it. When I arrived, it looked like a barnyard, but now it's a pretty nice building. We got to help Sister Barrientos orient the new sisters about the culture and stuff like that, and she also just wanted us to help make the new sisters feel welcome. It was pretty fun. It brought back memories from when I first arrived in the mission. When I arrived, I was the only American sister in the whole Laoag mission. And I arrived with only 7 other missionaries. We got 2 more American sisters a couple transfers later, and a couple transfers later we got one more, and then one more came a couple transfers after that. Then the explosion came and the new missionary age really started kicking in. 7 more American sisters came the next transfer, and this transfer there were 7 or 8 more. Now there are so many of us here in the mission! And the groups of arriving missionaries have just gotten bigger and bigger, and more and more sisters have been coming. There were more sisters who arrived last week than elders. President Barrientos said that soon the ratio of elders to sisters in our mission will be 50/50. It's really exciting to see the Lord's work growing!

Last Friday, we were trying to find the house of a potential investigator who had called out to us on the street one day because he said he had been taught by missionaries before, and he didn't know why they had stopped coming. So he told us where his house was so we could visit him. He said his house is right by Brother D, who is a less active we hadn't met before. His house was also close to the house of Brother M, one of our less-actives whom we haven't been able to get to come to church ever since we have been here. So we went to find his house. But when we got there, no one answered the door. So we asked the old man next door if this was the house of the investigator we were looking for. He said he didn't know. So we asked if he knew the house of Brother D. He said he was Brother D. We talked to him for a couple minutes, and he said he would go to church the following Sunday with brother M. On our way out, we stopped and told Brother M what Bro D had said. We didn't really think Brother M would come to church because we've been trying and trying to get him to come to church, but he never has. But when we went to church yesterday, they were both there! And they stayed for all three hours and they said they felt happy after. We didn't ever find that investigator, but I know the Lord led us to Brother D to help him and Brother M return to church. It was a really cool experience.

Just keep living the gospel. I really know blessings come when we trying our best to be 100% obedient to the Lord. Sometimes it doesn't seem like our efforts to serve God are doing any good. I've seen that here in the mission. Sometimes investigators don't keep commitments, sometimes members don't work with us, sometimes less-actives have many excuses, sometimes Satan works so very hard to destroy all our efforts to help God's children. But even at those times when it seems that our efforts are doing no good, if we just do our best to be obedient and to serve with all our might, the blessings come. God' is so much more powerful than Satan, and He will always win in the end. I am so thankful to be a missionary. I really know this is God's work.

Sister Boekweg

The sisters in my apartment