May 11, 2015
Wow. My hundreth week. Who would have ever thought
I'd make it this far? I remember back when my weeks were in the single
digits, and two years seemed like it would be an eternity, that it would
never end. Now, I only have a little more than two weeks left.
This
past week was a good one. I'm learning an important lesson about
enduring to the end - the closer I get to the end, the harder it is to
keep going strong. It reminds me of when I was a child. In
a ridiculously high percentage of all the instances when I wet my pants,
the sad event happened when I was in the bathroom. I don't know what it
is, but in those last few seconds, your bladder has the hardest time!
(Don't try to tell me it isn't true for you.) If I liken that to my
current situation, I would say that I'm remembering (consciously and
subconsciously) all of the things I left behind that I'd kind of
forgotten, a lot of the sacrifices. And it makes the final stretch a bit
harder... When I was a kid, I remember, in those strenuous moments,
telling myself I had two choices. First, hold on a little longer, in
spite of the extreme discomfort, and make it to the toilet, or two, have
to change my pants. And deal with the embarassment of telling my dad.
(My dad is great, but for some reason, he was never happy when I told
him that I'd wet my pants...again.) In these final weeks, whenever I
keep the end goal in mind, and the blessings that enduring for the last
bit will bring, I get motivated to stay focused.
Excuse
me if my analogy seems a little crude, but hey -- a man has got to
express the feelings of my heart. (Or his bladder. Sorry. I'll move on
to higher thoughts.)
The work definitely has
been picking up here in Tilburg. Our "Amulek" investigator from a few
weeks ago is still doing great -- it's awesome to see the Spirit work
with him. We've also found a few new people. On Tuesday,
we were knocking doors, and this woman (maybe 30 years old?) in a
wheelchair answers the door. After a nice, short conversation, she told
us we were welcome to come back another time. We were in the
neighborhood the next day, so we thought, why not? We dropped by, and
she let us in. We were able to teach a great lesson about the
restoration and the Book of Mormon, and she was super open. We're hoping
to be able to teach her again this week. I learned an important lesson
on gratitude while teaching her -- she wasn't raised religious, so I
asked her how she came to believe in God. She responded with something
along the lines of "because there are so many beautiful things in the
world." This woman is in a wheelchair, and still she chooses to see the
good. She doesn't limit her gratitude (or her happiness, for that
matter) to her circumstances. That's something I still have room to work
on.
Later that day, we were knocking doors in
an area close to where we'd worked before. Suddenly, I started hearing
soft music, like it was coming from far away. As I listened closer, I
realized that it was an Enrique Iglesias song that I'd really liked back
home, a song I hadn't heard in almost two years. I said, half jokingly,
"hey, Elder Byers! It's Enrique Iglesias! I'm feeling like we should
maybe go...towards the music." My companion just laughed, and we headed
towards the source of the music. After walking for about twenty seconds,
we turned a corner, and boom -- there was a kids' party going on in the
park. At that point, I started to feel a little creepy, and the song
ended, so we started walking away, a different direction than the one
from which we came. We realized that we were right by a super cool woman
we'd found earlier who we'd never been able to get in contact with.
We'd kind of given up on her, but since we had ended up in that area, we
gave it a shot. She was home, and she was more than willing to set a
solid appointment with us for this week. Sometimes, good things happen
in funny ways. God played off of my strengths that day (humor me by
allowing me to call missing normal music a strength...haha).
On Saturday,
we had a lunch appointment with a Columbian family from the branch, the
Peña family. I'd talked to them a lot at church, but since they live so
far away from Tilburg and work a lot, we'd never eaten there before. We
took a forty minute bus ride out to their town, Baarle-Nassau. It's an
interesting place -- part of it is technically in Belgium, the other
part in the Netherlands. But it's not even like it's split in half;
there are just fragments of the city that are considered to be part of
Belgium. There were these dotted lines on the sidewalks and roads
informing everyone what was Belgium and what was the Netherlands. I'd
never been to a city like that before. We had a really fun lunch
appointment with the Peña family, by the way -- they were great.
Yesterday
was, of course, Mother's Day (Moederdag!), so I got to Skype my family!
My fourth and final Skype. It was weird to think that, in just a few
weeks, I'll be seeing them in person. I also gave a talk in church. It
was a nice moment of reflection -- two years ago, on Mother's Day, I
gave my farewell talk. Weird, right? I've changed a lot since then,
that's for sure.
Well, I'm out. Be good and enjoy life. Until next week!
-Elder Bonney
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| In Baarle-Nassau, by one of the markers. I never thought it would be so easy to be in two countries at the same time - go figure. |
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