Week 10

Dear Family and Friends,

Each week Rachel writes a minimum of two e-mails, one to the group and one to just Jason and me (and the kids). I post her group emails here in her blog for her as a record of her mission and so that if someone wants to read her letters without having to get the email they are able to. This week, Tuesday Oct 13th, she did not send out a group email. I am posting the brief private email we received.

I hope you enjoy her letter and I'm sure she'll be back on the bandwagon next week with a group email.

Love, Lanae

From her letter:

We have a little less time than normal because at 2:30 today, I'm going in-door skydiving!!! A member ran into my mission president and offered to take the sisters (I don't know how many are going) for free!!!! It's a wind tunnel and I am soooooooooooooooo excited!!!!! =D If I can, I'll try to let you know latter today how it went, but I can't promise for sure that I can email again.

We had a zone wide service project at a developing park. Construction workers are trying to make a scenic path through some wooded area but there's a lot of dead trees and shrubbery. Obviously, as missionaries, we take every opportunity to serve and make ourselves known in the community. I was helping and doing all that I can obviously, because I'm a Lindh. There was one tree that was dead, but really stubborn so another sister and I teamed up to try and break it in half. I was expecting it to break easily like the others trees have and it did! But, it broke between me and the other sister. She had the end unattached to the trunk while I had the misfortune of having the trunk hit me in the face.

My eyes watered up really fast and I stood dazed while blood started to come from my nose. Fortunately, I have had enough training that I knew what to do, so I leaned over and pinched the bridge of my nose to help the pain go down and to keep the blood flow to a minimum. The sister who was with me has gone through nursing school and also knew what to do so she helped me out. My face hurt really bad, and my nose/top teeth were throbbing. I could feel that nothing was broken, but I think that I may have damaged the cartilage a bit. My nose still hurts today but I never bruised and there was no swelling so I know I didn't break it. 

The first half of my day is spent studying usually (we also sometimes have service at the library or family history, 2 things that Pres. has required of our mission) and the second half is in lessons/tracting. I use a lot of Spanish but I also have quite a bit of English in my day. I am picking it up fairly quickly, or at least according to Hermana Lewis, my companion, and others in the ward. Apparently, I speak a LOT more than other missionaries who started or were fairly new when they came to this area. I try to talk as much as I can because I know that that's how I'll learn the fastest and I think it's paying off. I love the ward members and all of our investigators. They help me so much and I just love them and their culture. The ward members, I think, have respect for me because I'm willing to just throw myself into the language and the culture, take criticism (I mean that in a positive way), and laugh at myself when I mess up. I learned this skills though through all the moves we've made so I thank Heavenly Father for having blessed me with that. And thank you, and daddy, for listening to the Spirit each time and being willing to listen and obey. I know it was hard for you to move too so I'm grateful for your faith and diligence to the Lord. 

I'm doing well and I'm happy. This past week has been kinda hard, a lot of cancelled appointments, members not coming with us, etc. but it's all part of the job. I still love this work and I'm so grateful that the Lord prepared me and allowed me to do this. It's a privilege to be here and to be a missionary; I say thank you to Heavenly Father everyday for this opportunity. If I ever complain (which I'm hoping I won't ever do), please remind me of this feeling. 

Love,

Rachel

These are pictures that were sent to me by members in UT. The top one was taken 9/28/15 and the other was 10/15/15