Sister Harris // Philippines Cebu Mission: a blessed week‏

I think everything I want to write home about could be encompassed into what I wrote as the subject of this email: a blessed week. It truly has been a blessed week here in Labangon! I feel like I've lived like 4 weeks instead of just 1 with all of the laughs, tears, fun things, and spiritual things that have happened this week.

AMADA WAS BAPTIZED. It was such a sweet baptism. I cried the whole time. This sweet daughter of God has literally waited years to be baptized...but has never stopped paying her tithing every week or walking the long 2 hour walk to church every week. There weren't a ton of people that came to the baptism, but everyone that was there was really touched by Amada and her sweet spirit and the simple, sweet testimony she bore after her baptism. What she said, (in Cebuano of course) was that she knows she is a daughter of God and that He is happy with her decision to be baptized, and that she knew the church was true. She was confirmed the next day, Sunday...but we were so worried that she wasn't going to come to church because it was raining really bad (as in monsoon rain) and she lives so far up in the mountains, but she came just in the nick of time and was confirmed!

Here in the Philippines we get to watch General Conference a week after you guys see it, which means we will watch it this weekend...and which also means we should've been able to watch the Women's Conference last weekend, right? Well, we didn't. Here's what happened. We went to the church and were all ready for the re-broadcast to start, and when it started playing, it didn't start at the beginning...the recording started at the closing prayer, so we got to watch the closing prayer and President Monson walking out...the tech people said it'd just start playing from the beginning again...but it didn't. It started showing a BYU v.s. USU football game!! So here we are all ready to receive revelation and instruction from the Women's Conference, and we got a football game instead. The elders were really bummed when they heard they missed this. I was laughing and had difficulty gaining my composure again after this whole extravaganza happened.

Those are probably the two most eventful things that happened this week- but we also played larong pinoy (Filipino games) last Wednesday with my district at the church and I can't believe how many Filipino games you can play with a flip flop and a can.

We also went to two FHE's this week- one was with Carol and Chini (our RC's) because it was Chini's birthday. We also went to the Posadas Family and met their cousins, Lehi and Laurence, who were visiting on a temple trip to Cebu temple. Lehi is going on his mission to Provo and leaves at the end of the month so it was fun talking to him about Utah and things like funeral potatoes, jello salad, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, etc. haha.

I'm doing great here in Labangon and time after time again I can't believe how much the Lord has blessed me on my mission and just to be among the Filipino people and learn from them and love them. I am so happy and so blessed.

Thanks for all of your love and support and letters and packages :) I'll talk to you all next week!

Love, Sister Joslyn Harris