Dear Family and Friends,
Maraming salamat for all of your prayers, good wishes, letters, friendship, etc.! Your kindness and love makes an enormous difference to me, and I am so grateful for each one of you! I am looking forward to being able to visit with each one of you again in the (relatively) near future.
This week has been filled with much change and lots of opportunities to grow in patience! I received a new companion, Elder Garcia. He's a native Filippino from Taytay who has been out on his mission only 6 weeks longer than I have. :) Despite our relatively small combined pool of mission experience, I am grateful for him and our companionship. Thankfully he speaks Tagalog natively, and is also a very adept teacher as well. With the absence of Elder Anderson, my previous companion, I am now the only foreigner in our apartment, and the only one who doesn't natively speak Tagalog. Needless to say I listen to a lot of Tagalog every day. :P And even though much of it is still incomprehensible to me, at least this way I should become a full fledged Fililppino much faster. (Except for the fact that I'm a giant white person of course. :)
We were finally able to listen to General Conference this past weekend, which was a wonderful, spiritual experience. I was so grateful to have the Spirit of the Lord whisper to me that all the announced changes are indeed the will of God for His kingdom. I am looking forward with great anticipation to the implementation of the announcements and the blessings that will surely follow. The Lord is surely setting our course straight and providing us with better tools to withstand the countless traps and deceptions of the devil.
After multiple messages about receiving greater blessings after great trials, I had an opportunity to experience that very thing yesterday. We had an appointment with a very promising person very far from our home. We were originally planning to take a tricycle out to this Sister, but discovered that all the tricycle drivers to her area had decided to go home for the day (maybe because it was dark, rainy, and kind of gloomy :P). So despite the distance, we decided to walk. After thirty minutes of walking, the rain turned into a downpour, and I seriously considered turning back, knowing that there was still a long walk and a very muddy ditch between us and our appointment. But, I decided to continue forwards anyways (probably to Elder Garcia's slight chagrin). After 45 more minutes of dodging puddles and cars sending up splash waves, we made it to the muddy ditch and discovered that it was very wet, very muddy and we really needed rainboots to have any hope of crossing without turning into swamp creatures. Again, I really considered just turning back. We were both tired, muddy and soaked, and really seemingly in no state to teach a lesson at all. But (now perhaps to both of our chagrin), we decided to cross anyways. After much slipping, some sinking and much scrambling, we finally arrived at the Sister's home. Hoping that our faith hadn't been in vain, we knocked on the door, and were invited in. Though the subsequent lesson wasn't perfect, I felt more at peace with my Tagalog than I have at any other time. I was able to communicate using words I had barely studied, remember phrases from the Provo MTC and actually understand everything that was said. Probably for the first time in my entire mission. I was (and am) so grateful for the blessings that the Lord grants us because of our diligence in spite of difficulty. Truly that are great blessings to be received and peace to be found, no matter how dark, wet or gloomy our days become.
Many thanks again for your love and friendship! Please take care and I will look forward to communicating again next week.! Ingat kayong lahat!
Love, Elder Dickison
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