To be chosen

So!

A little few things I forgot to mention last week in my haste! I forget that not everyone reading this knows my whole life story and doesn't just get everything I'm talking about.

So my trainer Sister Storey finished her mission and went home! We were good mates before the mission and were there for each others crazy trying to decide to go on a mission moments, eventually both made it out, got called to the same mission, and then she trained me! It was the weirdest thing to see pictures of her at home with her family again and still hasn't sunk in any way that that might ever happen to me. Plus my trainee, my dear sweet Sister Lainhart is now a Sister Training Leader too. Absolute shock of my life last week when I walked into the STL house in Laoag last week and saw her there! It means shes grown up now too, which makes me old. Ugh, old. Haha. My current companion by the way is Sister Faletao. Shes from Samoa which is super funny when introducing herself because in Tagalog, you say 'sa' before the place. So if people asked me where I was from, I could just say Australia, or 'sa Australia'. So when she says Samoa, everyones like, Wheres Moa? And shes like nooo Samoa! Nobody gets it still. We laugh about it all the time.

This week was a week of strengths and weaknesses, which was obviously what the Lord wanted me to learn. I was on exchanges with Sister Vaka, a sister who I started out with in my first apartment so we've seen each others changes from the start until now. Now being at this point in the mission calls for a lot of reflecting and wondering where I'm going right and where I'm still going wrong, and the thought came into my mind, that I have done a lot of good, I really really have, but am I changed? I know I've done a lot of good for the people, through the Spirit of course, but what have I allowed the mission to change in me? Is it possible that even after all this great good has been brought about, that I could go home and be exactly the same person that I was before I left. That freaked me out, and me and Sister Vaka both freaked out a little bit and had to really think about it. And as always, when theres a question, the Lord is always right there to answer it.

So I'd heard a lot about this talk called 'The Fourth Missionary', which I'd heard about but only just now was given to me this very week. It was written by a mission president who said basically there are four types of missionaries; the first is the disobedient kind who either gives up or gets sent home, then there is the second who makes it the whole way through the mission but is still pretty disobedient, and therefore comes home unchanged or gone backwards. Then theres the third who does great work, strives to be completely obedient and has a lot of great success, but remains unchanged by the mission because they served only with their might and strength, and not with their heart and their mind. As I was reading about this third missionary, I was hit pretty hard. There was this one sentence which I wish I had with me right now that basically said exactly what I was feeling, in big bold letters on the page. But basically, this third missionary sometimes measures themselves in comparison, if their having more baptisms than everyone else they're successful, kind of thing. They're always obedient but lacking that extra charity that a true disciple needs all of the time. They can help change others, but they didn't change themselves. So here we are, Sister Vaka and I discussing this, feeling like someone has just cut to the core of us, thinking we are straight up that third missionary. So I started to think really hard about what to do to be better. The next day I finally had time to finish that article, which was 24 pages long by the way, and I read the characteristics of this fourth missionary. The fourth missionary is totally consecrated. They want to serve the Lord, and they seek His will and not the will of man. They do things not to be seen, but because they are right. They measure their success on what the Lord thinks of them and not what man thinks of them. Then it says, the fourth missionary is not without weakness, but they are very aware of their weaknesses. The closer they are to God, the more that they realise that they just are straight up weak and they need Him more than anything. So I really thought about this weak missionary, and I thought about myself, and I thought about how nobody could really put themselves into one of these four completely, but it really is a day to day process. We recently had a Zone Conference about being chosen. We all know the scriptures in D&C where they say over and over again that 'many are called but few are chosen', and so I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be chosen. We are already called, 'if ye have desires to serve God, ye are called to the work', but being chosen is a day to day process. We are only chosen on the days that we chose to be chosen. And we live to be chosen of the Lord, not of man. And thats what I learned from all of this, we just have to take it one day at a time, remember who we are and what were here for, and that more than anything we just need the Lord, and we will remain the chosen ones. And the only way we fail is if when our weaknesses get the better of us, we choose not to repent and do better tomorrow.

I hope you got something out of this, I think I just needed to put all those thoughts into words for myself more than anything else :-)

Pictures next week when I get on a computer that works :-)

Love you all, 

Sister McKim