HERMANA BERNAL HAS OFFICIALLY ARRIVED TO TEGUCIGALPA!!! YAHOO!!
Another great week! We had a road trip to a part of the mission that is called Agua Prieta, which literally means dirty water. What an interesting name for a city right? Whose idea was that?. Anyway, Agua prieta is in the north of our mission, so in this time of year, it is starting to get pretty chilly. I had officially forgotten what it felt like to be cold, but being there quickly reminded me of how awful it is! Maybe its because I have become used to really hot weather but I swear it was like negative 30 degrees or something. And I forgot my sweater because i assumed that in the Sonoran desert it doesn't get cold. Who-da-thunk. But wait, it gets better. We had to take a bus from Agua Prieta to Hermosillo, a 5 hour ride. Most of you have heard how much I love bus rides in the mission because it is a moment to sit down and take a breather, read some books, take a nap, and more recently, shout to a group full of people trapped in the same vicinity as me :) But this time, it was an ice cold blizzard torment. The bus did not have heating and once again, we didn't have anything to keep warm (except for the drivers extra sweater that I asked to borrow) and so from 5:30 in the morning to 9 until the sun came up, we had to suffer a sleepless freezing ride in the dark. No naps, no reading, no shouting on the bus. It was miserable. After thinking about it all, maybe I prefer the sonoran dessert to the Ukrainian winters. Looks like Garret had it worse than me!
A cool experience that we had this week was in sacrament meeting. We were singing the song "In humility, Our Savior," right before the sacrament was being passed, and as I sang one of these lines, it really caught my attention in Spanish. In Spanish, it reads "no me dejes olvidar que fue por mi oh Salvador", and directed translated it says, "don`t let me forget it was for me oh Savior." Many times when we talk about Christ`s atonement, we say that he bore the sins of the world, that he died for everyone, but often times when we say everyone, we tend to think it was for everyone else. By thinking of the atonement this way, we often detach ourselves from the personal effect and power that it can have and exclude ourselves in some aspect from the redeeming power of this love inspired act. But when we remember that what the Savior did was, for each one of us, individual, it becomes more personal. It becomes more genuine, we grow closer to Him. We feel more of his love, and our gratefulness to him increases drastically because what He did was for me, and for you, and for each individual in his own individual way.
I love you all!
Elder Bernal
Kudos to Sister Briggs
"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."
-Victor Hugo, French poet, dramatist, novelist
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