Serving in Santiago: Hello!

From Sarah's letter dated January 5, 2016

Hey people :D

We have walked SOOOO much this week!!! It's been crazy. In Chile it's super common for people to go on a 1 or 2 month long vacation for the summer so that is just GREAT for us missionaries haha. Idk if you guys remember Monica?? We've been teaching her for about a month and had a really amazing lesson with her this last week. We read the introduction to The Book of Mormon with her and got to explain again a little bit about the Restoration. I love teaching because that's when my testimony grows the most because of how strong the spirit can get. We saw the wheels turning in her mind and thanks to her spiritually receptive heart she commited to read The Book of Mormon without us even asking her to. Then she told us she was leaving on vacation for the month haha so that was a bummer. At least she'll have lots of time to read. :)

Oh yeah another reason why the lesson was so special was because that morning during personal study, I decided to pray again to ask if The Book of Mormon was true and if this was really the restored gospel. I think it was the first time I felt something right there, directly after praying. It felt like a wave of warm peace that started at my head and then just covered my whole body. I just sat there, glowing for a while and the words came to me that felt like a nodding head saying, "it's true."

That was the spirit we brought with us to the lesson which I think was also communicated to Monica.

Things like this remind me that what we're doing is so much bigger than ourselves... We passed by some pictures of the universe when passing by an astronomy lab in our area this week and it made me feel sooooo tiny. I've also found that feeling small is a really great way to cure anxiety haha. Our worries and troubles just somehow seem to shrink when we put the universe next to them. And then we think, "My God, how great thou art".

He is great. :)

We also started teaching a woman this week named Pamela. We contacted her in our elevator one day in our apartment building and as she was leaving, kind of just blurted out that she was actually a member of the church but had since stopped going. She gave us her apartment number and said we could come back later. So this week, after having all our plans fall through for the day, we both felt like it would be a good time to stop by. Turns out it was all meant to be because when we stepped out of the elevator, she was just leaving her room to take her laundry down to the washers. She was super surprised haha but you could tell she was happy to see us.

We ended up teaching about repentance, redemption, and forgiveness. Hna. Maxfield and I both shared some really personal experiences about those things. She had expressed to us how she always felt that the gospel was true, but somehow just fell away without really knowing why. She had gotten into drinking a little bit and a few other things and said she doubted whether or not she would be able to come back. I think the path looks far away sometimes because we forget that Christ will pick us up to bring us back wherever we are. We don't have to do any of it alone. We just have to take his hand.

She said she would come back this Sunday. :) It's been years.

I love you guys so much and think of you everyday. :)

Prayers, hugs, and love,

Hermana Cannon II

1. We climb a hill for P-day today as a zone! We sang hymns and had a testimony meeting up there. It was awesome. :)