Week 7

Hola! 

One week in the field today, and it has really been the greatest week ever. Each day is super busy and super fast but i feel like i have been here forever at the same time. My first area is logan and north logan. Our area is really big because we are in the spanish branch which the boundaries cover 4 english stakes, so pretty big. It is great! I love my companions so much already! They are super great! We are in a trio. My trainer is Hermana Rickett who is super sweet and really great, she is from texas, she has red hair and she is a great teacher and missionary! I have learned a lot from her already. My other companion, Hermana Mejia, has only been out about a month and she is hilarious and great. She is especially great because she is fluent, she is from arizona but her parents from mexico. It is definitely a blessing to be with her and she helps me and Hermana Rickett out a lot. The spanish is coming along and I am learning pretty quickly. I understand a lot in church, but it is hard when teaching, it mostly depends on the person some i understand most but depending on where they are from some are super difficult to understand and then those are more of the moments when i am so grateful to have Hermana Mejia. It is only us three in our apartment but it is really fun and I love my hermanas. It is so great to be a missionary! This week has been so great! I have done so much and have met so many people that I feel I have been here so long! I already love the people that we are teaching! The lord gives us many miracles every day and I am so grateful for his help and guidance in everything we do or else we could never do it. Yesterday when we knocked a door, it was a young women who let us in and started crying she said that God has a sense of humor to send us to her at that moment and she is going back to church on sunday. It was so great to talk to her she was so amazing and I just wanted to be her best friend. Most of our day is filled with appointments and teaching. We also get a lot of referrals, but when appointment fall through then we go tracking and do doors, and that is my favorite thing ever! Well actually I love teaching the most but I just love it all! When you knock a door, you just get a little rush and it is so exciting to see who will answer and get to know them. So many of the people who aren't interested are super great and so nice to us and I just want to be their best friends, but they don't want us to come back. We are also teaching a lot of people though I was so surprised when I got here how many investigators we have it is incredible. I am starting to learn all of the names and the areas and it is great! We started running in the mornings and it is super great! Today is my first P-day here of course and it is only the morning and it has been so great already! We went to the Logan temple and it was super great! It is always fun to go to a temple for the first time and the logan temple is super pretty I love it!

Therefore, let us glory, yea, we will glory in the Lord; yea we will rejoice, for our joy is full; yea we will praise our God forever. Behold, who can glory too much in the Lord? Yea, who can say too much of his great power, and of his mercy, and of his long suffering towards the children of men? Behold,l I say unto you, I cannot say the smallest part which I feel. Alma 26:16 

This scripture is exactly how I feel every day! But Ammon says it much better than I can. I hope I can become a missionary like Ammon. I am learning more everyday, but this is an incredible work! There is just not enough time in a day. We are always running around trying to make it everywhere but it makes the days fly by. We had the coolest lesson this week with Julieta! She is coming to church and she is so great! We were teaching the restoration and when we taught about prophets the spirit was so strong and she was so amazed and humbled and grateful to know that we have a living prophet of God today. It was super cool I cannot explain but she just wanted to meet him right then and listen to him, and we watched him give a short talk and it was so amazing. Also, I think I have tried more foods in the last week than I have in my entire life. I haven't liked it so much but I can do it if I don't think about it and only think how much I love those people. Everyone wants us to eat all of their food. We are lucky that Hermana Mejia can eat forever so she usually gets the seconds so we don't need to.But the people are so great and so nice! I love everything! I love this gospel and my Savior Jesus Christ with everything I have. I am so grateful for the opportunity I have to serve the Lord and to represent Jesus Christ. There is everlasting joy in the truth and it is such a miracle to see someone receive the truth and joy and to change their life. This is the greatest joy and I am so happy every single day. 

Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever.

Alma 26:12

I love the scriptures! They are a gift from God, and there is power in them. They help me and teach me more than I even know they will. So many times the scriptures I have studied that morning are exactly the scripture the person we teach later needs and that is the coolest thing and another miracle that the Lord gives us. 

Con Amor,

Hermana Egan

Week 6

Hola! Today is our last day in the MTC! I am super super super excited to get to Ogden and to meet my mission presidents and my trainer! This last week has been amazing! The fourth of july was really great and we had a great devotional and we watched the fireworks which was a huge deal to us being in the MTC. We get really excited about everything here. I will miss a lot about this place though, these last six weeks have been so great, and it might be safe to say that this was the single best experience of my 20 years. It is super sad to leave all the amazing people and friends here and especially our teachers. This week I learned a lot about humility and the greatest thing that hit me was that when anything goes well that is when I will look up to heaven and give praise and thanks to God, and when something doesn't go well that is when I need to look into myself. Without the Lord's help, this work would never be possible. I have a testimony that we are all God's children, and that we each have divine talents and a special role and responsibility. I learn this through a perfect square, and how if any number was any different, it would not work and it would not be perfect anymore. Maybe sometimes we wish that we could be a different number or a different way but we all have something great, and i have really seen that with my district we are all so different with different personalities and styles of living but we all come together and work and we all bring something truly great to the group. I know that each of us have special blessings and talents from God and these blessings are given to us in order to bless others.

 

This is the day which the Lord hath made; we should rejoice and be glad in it.

Psalm 118:24

forever is composed of nows

happiness does not have the past, it does not have the future, it does not have a day, but it has a moment.

I am happy every day, and really every moment, and it is pure joy because of my Savior Jesus Christ. Today is a great day. Christ lives. We are on this earth as part of our loving heavenly father's plan for us. Through the atonement of Christ and his infinite sacrifice we are all able to become clean and forgiven from our sins and to receive strength from Christ. Through this life and as we act on our faith we can become like Christ and return to our father in heaven to live forever in happiness with Him and our families. This is our message of joy, peace, and hope. This message means everything to me. There is nothing I would rather do than share this joy with others, and today is a great day as I am a representative of Jesus Christ in order to share his message and teach of Him. Share your testimony through everything you do and through your actions and with love. If the members and missionaries both work together we will see many miracles.  

Con Mucho Amor,

Hermana Egan

 

Week 5

Hola!

We only have one week left here at the MTC! I cannot believe it! I feel like I came here just yesterday. I am so excited to go out, but there are many things about this wonderful place that I will miss so much. Our district is like a family and our teachers as well they have taught me everything and are the greatest people. Today our district had the opportunity to clean the temple while it is closed, and it was so great! The temple workers are so caring and funny and I was just talking to a cute lady who worked there for a few hours while we cleaned. You would be amazed at how carefully we cleaned every little detail, and I have never loved cleaning anymore than I did today when I knew that I was cleaning the house of the Lord. The spanish is coming along, it is still a struggle though during lessons, but now that we are the old missionaries getting ready to leave we do a lot of the training for the new missionaries, and that is when I remember how far we have come, and what we were like when we first arrived. We hosted the new missionaries that come in and help them do everything when they get here and that is fun to help and to remember your first day. I am so excited to meet my mission president and to get to Ogden, but I will miss my companion Hermana Barker so much! It is sad to leave but most of my district is coming to Ogden also, so that is great that we will still see everyone around, but I will miss my companion. Thank you to everyone that emails me it is so great to hear from all of you!

This is a scripture that I love right now.

It is in Alma 32:27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye will do no more than desire to believe, let this desire to work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

I love this scripture so much. I love how it says a particle of faith, because I know that is all we need. Even if we have any particle even if we have the desire to have faith or the desire to believe and we begin to act on it and we pray to our Heavenly Father who loves us and we will feel Him there and listening and His love and our faith will grow. In the next verse it talks about if we cast out our seed with unbelief and resist the spirit of the Lord. I like this because I know that faer and doubt are opposed to faith and that we can only have one or the other and both can not exist. Whenever we are worried about our lessons or during our lessons that is when we don't have the spirirt when we worry about what we will say or how we will say something in spanish. But when we only focus on the investigator and listen to them and love them than the spirirt is so strong and it doesn't matter if we said something wrong they can feel the peace and it is great. I have learned a lot about faith through teaching and it is something I will be working on for a while but it is truly great that the Lord will help us. If we have faith, we are worthy, and obedient, and ask the Lord he will always help us and I am so grateful because there is no possible way this work would be successful without the Lord. He is why it is possible and He is so involved in everything that we do. I have seen many miracles in just these last 5 weeks. I know that Christ lives, and that He is the way through this life because he has gone the way through this life, I know that through Christ we can become like Him and we can return to live with our Hevaenly Father once again after this life. I am so grateful for the scriptures, for a living prophet today, for revelation given to us today, and the Lord hand in my life. I am grateful for prayer and for truth. This life is a great one. I love my savior Jesus Christ and I am so grateful for this opportunity I have to represent Him and to bring His glorious message to others.

If ye have not charity, ye are nothing. Moroni 7:46 I know that if we pray and ask to be filled with his love then we will have so much joy as we forget ourselves.

Adios

Con mucho amor,

Hermana Egan

Week 4

Hola!

This past week has been incredible. Although the time here is very strange. Every day seems like a week and every week seems like one day and that is the truth of it. Anyways, yesterday we sang in the choir for the world wide broadcast and got to hear from the apostles and the prophet. It was an uplifting meeting with an incredible and powerful spirirt. In the video they show the row of all my hermanas but it cut right before me!  but just know that I was in there singing too somewhere. :) The MTC is the greatest and weirdest place ever. It just weird how great everyone is so it is almost weird. Everything is fun here and everything is so exaggerated it is really funny. Showering is the best because all of the sisters in the ones around you will harmonize with you and you all sing the hymns as one big happy chorus and it is so fun and happy and then you never even see their faces but you feel like you are best friends with them and you all laugh and it is great. I also love my teachers so much I admire them so much and they have taught me everything. Only two more weeks left, and as of today we are the oldest district and now are helping everyone else and next week we will be hosting the new missionaries who are just arriving, which is so crazy because I feel like I just got here myself. This week I learned a lot about the plan of salvation and also the atonement of Jesus Christ. One of the investigators we are teaching had questions about why these terrible things had happened to him and why these bad things happen in this world if there is a God. As I was studying more about the atonement and the plan of salvation in order to help them I learned a lot of great things to help me as well. That always happens and it is great because the best way to learn is by helping or teaching some one else. I learned a lot of this from a talk by Elder Holland, he is the greatest more powerful witness of truth and he teaches me so many things.This life is hard. Missionary work is hard. I wonder how come the people don't run up to us to hear this glorious message shouldn't they be coming to us rather than us trying to find them? This is the truth. That through a modern prophet, Thomas S. Monson, God has restored knowledge about the plan of Salvation, which is centered on Christ's atonement and fulfilled by living the first principles and ordinances of the gospel. and that this salvation, truth, and joy is available to all those who will receive it! que bueno! Then I remember that it just isn't that easy, that it never was and it never will be. Salvation is not cheap. It is not a cheap experience. Salvation was not cheap, easy, or conveinant even for the Savior Jesus Christ who we testify of. How dare we ask not to feel even this teaspoon of the cup he drank, and that he drank for us. Christ carries the evidence that there is sacrifice involved in serving God. I do not know why some terrible things happen in this world but I know that when we are given trials it is the opportunity for us to respond by applying the in our life the teachings of Jesus as well as a way to come closer to Him. Without opposition in this world the plan of salvation would be frustrated, and we would not be able to progress or learn. I know that Heavenly Father is always listening to our prayers and will answer us. He knows us and will give us the power and understanding we need to do all things we will and to do His will. I know that Jesus Christ has felt and experienced everything thing that you are, and have, and will ever. In a way that I cannot comprehend but I do know that it is true and that His sacrifice was real and was for you and me and that through Christ is the only way to salvation. Without Christ we are in big trouble and there would be no hope but with Him there is all the hope in the world and all things are possible. Without Christ, we are nothing, but with Christ we will win. I know these things are true with my entire heart and everything that I am made of. I am so grateful to be a part of this work and to share this astonishing message of hope, peace, and joy with my brothers and sisters who are all children of God, In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Love, Hermana Egan

Week 3

Hola Mi Familia y Mi Amigos!

The time here is going by so fast! This is our half way mark at the MTC and i cannot believe it! I have learned so much here and this is an incredible place, but I am so excited to leave and to go out and teach the people in Ogden! I also know that I have much more to learn and I am very grateful for my time here in the MTC. I love my teachers so much and all my district. Everyone here just wants to help me and is so great and nice! Yesterday in sacrament meeting I had an interesting experience. Every sunday all of the missionaries are asked to prepare a talk and then the missionaries that speak are randomly called at the pulpit right before you speak. It is usually the last week missionaries getting ready to leave that get called so i definitely was not expecting it and this was the week the i prepared the least and i only had a few thoughts written down. (the whole meeting is in spanish of course) and so i got called up and was not expecting it at all. I just went with it and said all i could and i could do it and it was great! everyone said it was great but everyone was laughing at sometimes and i didn't know why until i found out later that when i thought i said that the holy ghost and the spirit was like playing a baseball game with God instead i said it was like a firery baseball with God. woops. i think everyone got the idea though. i was trying to explain that he is just tossing us the balls really easy like we are the little child learning to play and we keep missing the balls and he always loves us and keeps throwing them, promptings all the time but we cant always receive them but the more we practice the more we will learn the spirit and be more able to receive the promptings and the personal revelations. In the lessons we teach it is even worse there are so many words that if you change one word it means something completely bizzarre so that has been really fun. I love teaching and I love the investigators we have here so much! I am always so happy about we finish a lesson and then we all go back to our district after and everyone tells how it was and everything and it is so fun and the spirit is so strong! It is just really great here and I love being a missionary! The spanish is really coming along even if I mess up a lot. It is so fun and I love it! I am even starting to think in spanish and as I write this email i think of some of it in spanish and then have to translate it to english! so thats is really great! I have learned a lot this week about love and about Christ. I know that Christ lives. Everyone needs to know this. I know that we are on this earth because it is part of God's plan of happiness and salvation for us. I know that me and you and everyone are all God's children and that we lived with Him before this life. He knows me and you personally, loves us, and blesses us everyday. Through the atonement of Jesus Christ we can return to live with our father in heaven. Through Christ we can become clean and perfect. We can recieve strength through the atonement to do all things in this life. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ is on the earth again today and we are lead by a living prophet of God. I am so grateful for this incredible truth. It blesses me in everything I do and brings me infinite happniess. Everyone needs to know this. And so I am so excited to go out and share with anyone who is looking for this truth and purpose in life. God is there and wants to hear from us. He wants to help us and he wants all the good things and only good things for us. I love this gospel and I know these things are true with my whole soul. It is a beautiful earth we live on, and this is a great life we live.

Adios!

Love, Hermana Egan

week 2

Hola!

This week has been incredible! Last night we heard from Elder Bednar about the Character of Christ and it changed my life. I learned that the character of christ is that he turns out (to others) when you or i would turn in (to ourselves)<-the natural man. and conversion means to turn away from yourself and turn to christ through others. This is what coming unto Christ means and this is what we are striving for everyday. The spirit here is so powerful and I love being a missionary! This work is the Lord's work and it is real and powerful and amazing! I have never been happier in my life! The spanish is really coming along and it is amazing to think back to the first lesson we taught in spanish and our lessons now. We are getting two new investiagtors tomorrow and we have been preparing and we are so excited! Every prep day we get to go to the temple in the morning and it was so incredible the spirit was so strong this morning and everything lately has been an exact answer to my prayers. These last two weeks have definitely been very challenging and humbling but so incredible and cool! I know that God is our father in heaven and that he knows us. He knows my name and everything about me, and he still loves me, what a miracle and what amazing truth. I know that he loves all of his children the same and knows us. I know that he hears our prayers and I know that he will answer us and that he is involved in everything we do, whether we realized the blessings or not. To feel the spirit of god is the greatest feeling in this world and it is so real. This week I have learned a lot about love and I have so much love for everyone around me, the people i am teaching, the missionaries around me, my teachers, my companion, my family, and all of you where ever you are! I just want to let you know that you are all in my prayers and I love you! Let me know if I can help you in any way you can think of! The first picture is of my hermanas i love them all and my companion (sister barker) is on the right in the green! The next picture is of our district and they are of course great as well we are all super close and they are all great! :)

Love, Hermana Egan

Week 1

Hola!

It is definitely a new life I have started here, and it is the greatest life. I used to refer to life before my mission as real life and I now know that this is the real life. These next 18 months will be the most real my life will ever be, and I am so humbled to be a part of this amazing work. Learning spanish is so much fun, and I already love the language. From the first day when I walked into my classroom my teacher only spoke spanish and i have learned so much already. The second day we were here we taught our first lesson in spanish and it was so incredibly difficult. When I could understand the investigators question I would want to answer so much and it is such a great question but I don't know the words to answer in spanish. It is so great though that we have begun to teach from the second day because it is such a great way to learn. I still don't know much but I know that Heavenly Father has already blessed me with the gift of tongues and I know that he will continue to bless me little by little. My companion is great! We are actually complete opposites in pretty much every way aside from the gospel, but we are working together and I do already love her. There is one other companionship of sisters in our district and they are so great also! We all room together along with two english speaking sisters and we are all very close already! My companion is going to New York for her mission but the other two sisters in my district are going to Ogden as well. I love being a missionary and this last week has been the greatest and most real time of my life. I have changed so much and learned so much already and the people and spirit here are incredible. I love my teachers so much and everyone I meet. Dare mi testimonio en espanol para practicar.

Yo se que JesuCristo vive. Yo se que tenemos la potencial ser a llegar como Dios y la potencial vivir con Dios y JesuCristo y nos familias por eternidad y con felicidad. Yo se que tenemos la luz de Cristo en nosotros y podemos compartir con otras personas. Estoy agraciado mucho por la expiacion de JesuCristo porque podemos ser a llegar limpio y recibir pardon. Me agraciado por la opportunidad ser en el ccm y la opportunidad servir mi missional. Me encanta la JesuCristo y la evangelio. La iglesia es verdadero y yo se que en mi corazon. (i have little time for email so i don't have time to figure out the spanish keyboard or accents.)

Love, Hermana Egan