07/10/23 Karma

 Ill talk about the karma in just a second but first a story from my childhood that's nada que ver 

When I was 13, I remember one day I was playing a game on my dad's computer- it was a puzzle game kind of like sudoku, and I was getting good at it. I enjoyed it because it helped me relax. Not that there was that much to be stressed about back then, but anyways, my dad came up to me and handed me a pair of headphones (to this day I don't know what the original motivation was behind it, nor why he chose that day), and told me to plug in the headphones and listen to this album. 

And that was when I feel in love. 

With 2:00am Paradise Café by Barry Manilow. 

This week we were in the house of a member, and the music she was listening to was that same piano bar/blues vibes, and I started talking about the experience above, and she searched it up on her Spotify, and I had the gran bendición of hearing several of the songs from that album. I just about died. I had forgotten just how much that album means to me. I closed my eyes and it was like I was in that old desk chair listening to this random music because my dad said to. It was magical. Nostalgic. I told the member what I could remember about the story of the album (they recorded it one take and it came out perfectly), and accidentally created another fan. 

Now for the karma... this has to do with something that happened last week. 

Worms. 

But like tiny worms. The size of a grain of rice. 

Friday of last week I was in an exchange with an hermana from Mexico and I made breakfast- baked French toast. And it was all looking (and smelling) perfectly. While I was making it, and I don't know why I did it, but I put oatmeal in the mix. 

The oatmeal wasn't mine. 

It had been there for a while, but when I asked my comp she had told me it was from her previous comp. 

So I pulled it out of the oven and we started eating, and right away i tasted something a little weird. I was pretty sure the oatmeal was kind of old. My comp for the day had already eaten most of hers when I mentioned to her... I think this oatmeal might be a little old. And she said, now that you mention it, I think this is a baked worm! 

And that it was. 

But we both agreed that it was far too delicious to just THROW it AWAY!!! So what could I do? 

Well conveniently at that moment the Elders we share a sector with were bothering us about a bunch of things about our sector. 

So I'm just gonna leave it to all of your imaginations what I did. Or maybe didn't do. The world may never know. 

The karma comes in this past week. 

We went to lunch with this little grandma and her family and gave us these little bowls of nuts while we were waiting for them to finish cooking. I eat about half of mine and my eats the majority of hers. And that's when I realized.

Live worms. 

In the bottom of the bowl. 

When the hermana left the room we stuffed all the nuts into the pocket of my comps jacket. 

I'm still uncomfortable!! 

Más cosas que pasaron: 

-leader conference: it was sooo good, and I feel like a lot of things that didn't make sense before now make a lot of sense, and I wish that my zone leaders and Hermana leaders before had explained things enough so that we could all understand the purpose behind the things we were doing- I think that's what helps people to want to do the things. 

- family home evening in English. It was super weird to teach in English, but it turned out good, right until the end when the dad of the family told me I had bad gringo accent, which I know isn't true, because mil personas have told me so, but it's still bothering that this one guy thinks my accent is strongly gringo. My comp says when I've spoken a lot of English in any given day my accent falls a little bit, si she thinks that having spoken English for the whole fhe, when I spoke Spanish it was coming off as more gringo than normally. 

-I contacted a Chinese guy who speaks English and Chinese but doesn't speak Spanish. It was super weird. But he said he was going to go to church, and then stopped answering our texts and didn't show up, so it seems like he's not real interested. Darn, I was looking forward to teaching the lessons in English hahaha 

- we've seen cualquier miracle working in these low income apartment buildings knocking doors and talking to people. It's incredible the amount of people who lived there who were willing to listen to us. And the Lord has a way of helping us to get animated to work again when we're feeling discouraged. Like, we'll get rejected, strongly, 3 doors in a row, and just as we're thinking of going somewhere else or taking a break or something, we meet someone who's just feel of love and 100% willing to listen, or someone who's absolutely crazy will do something random and make us laugh. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's so cool to see the way the Lord helps His missionaries  

-Ive cooked a lot. 4th of July burgers and lemonade (even though it was super cold that day hahaha), today I found brown sugar!!!!!!! And made peanut butter cookies!!!!!! For the first time un over a year!!!!!!! I also made bread, banana bread, the infamous baked French toast, buttermilk biscuits, etc. I guess that's nothing out of the ordinary, but I enjoyed it! 

- still getting along great with my comp! And even though the Elders are sometimes a little intense with the need to meet numbers and stuff like that, we're all good friends here and it's been entertaining to see them interact with the members. Like, one of them is a super picky eater and won't eat hardly anything, and the other one eats soooo much food. Like, especially salad, if there's a giant pile of lettuce, he will eat ALL of it. There's never leftover salad when we eat with them. 

I'm most likely missing details and stuff but you get the idea!!! 

I love you all so much!! 

xo-hna griffin 

Fotos:

A member straightened my hair because the way I did it wasn't good enough haha

This crazy hill we climb up like every day and all of its garbage 

It's very cold, therefore hoody

Flowers!!! 

4th of July burgers!!!