A mission letter

Ethan has been a full time missionary for 21 months now. I am so proud of him and the service he is doing. I can’t believe in 3 short months I’ll get to hug him. I love that boy so much, there are no words. He has been a delight to his father and I since the moment he was born. He’s lucky since he follows several sisters in our family and all the little boy things that tend to drive a mom a little nuts I just found so charming. He has his own cheerleading squad as his sisters adore him as well. Being a mom is the greatest joy of my life and I am so grateful to have a wonderful son, and 5 wonderful daughters. 

Being a full-time missionary is so special. I can not wait until Rob and I can serve together. We have some great missionaries in our family. Greg served in Paraguay, Chris in New York Spanish speaking, Clayton in Kentucky, Sawyer in Tennessee, mom and dad in Belgium and then in Montreal. 

Spencer served in the DR, Tanner in CA, Ryan in MO, Amadeo in Argentina , Michael in Brazil.

We have been blessed with opportunities to serve and I am so grateful. 

Anyway, from time to time I feel the desire to share Ethan’s email so here it is.

“I'm leaving Arganda this week. I'm going to a new area still near Madrid called Torrejón de Ardoz. The fun part is that this will be in a different mission and the mission split is coming in now. So now I'm going to my third mission and my 4th mission president. 

We went to a BBQ with a menos activo in the ward in a sketch part of town. Apparently its pretty bad but it seemed all good there. We did spot some people shooting up in a van though. Our member has a super nice pool that had us all so tempted to go swimming.

I had some very spiritual thoughts this week. One came while listening to a byu devotional and the speaker was talking about moral courage. He said we have to be authentic to who we are and always stand up for what we think is right. We can't relent how we think and just to conform to out environment to fit in. This can be super tough. It sounds simple but we all wanna be accepted so it can be a challenge to overcome the social pressure. The talk quotes 1 Kings 18:21 that says "And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him..." simple as that. If we know God is God, that should surpass our motivations coming from other sources. It's not as easy as that but simple as that sure.

In a talk with a different member this week we were talking about testimonies. I feel like a lot of things in my life I did just cause it was the expectation the whole time and I never even considered an alternative. For example I got baptized when I was 8, didn't really know what that entailed. At 12 went to the temple, I knew I liked the temple and felt good there but didn't really have a testimony of it. Paying tithing with my first job, not playing sports on Sunday, even serving my mission at 18. A lot of these paths of life I followed because I didn't even see that there was a fork in the road, I didn't actually choose this path over another. Now I've retrospectively had to go get those testimonies of these things. The member I talked to is in his 50's got baptized in the last 10 years and says he had to make sure he was on the right path before making any decisions in the gospel. I really admired that about him. Then he dropped bars on my head. Man says "you remember Adam? He was making sacrifices and when the angel came and asked him why he said 'I don't really know. God told me to' that is what you were doing" FACTS! This gives me hope that I had good motives all along but even more with things I'm still unsure of. If I'm still following some paths without really knowing where they go or what the alternatives are like, but I know God said to do it, then I can keep going with faith and patience that I'll get that testimony sooner or later down the line. I don't need all the answers now.”