I drove a car!

After years of waiting, I have finally driven a car in Germany.
It was somewhat terrifying.

 

In other news, I have a golden now! Her name is Sister Lehman and she's from Idaho. Interestingly, her boyfriend McKay Archibald served in my hometown. How do you like them apples.
I look crazed in this picture. We'll just call it exhaustion and move on.

As amazing as Sis. Lehman is, training is hard! It turns out Sister Haas spent all this time planning things and calling people and recalling people and calling people again while I was, I don't know when! Brushing my teeth? But now I get to do all of that. I don't know if you know this but I really hate talking on the phone. A lot.
I've also had a cold for like a week. My head feels fuzzy (name that movie). And I haven't decided if I should tell my mission president's wife because if I do, she'll make me stay home all day and sleep. On the one hand, that sounds amazing. On the other, we have too much stuff to do to waste time sleeping!



Elder Guymon and I were equally perplexed by the car in the Church parking lot with a window-pope in it.



We got doored by the Jehovah's Witnesses. We didn't let them in. (Is he writing our address down?)



Have you ever seen a more Germanesque vista?

Mom sent me a lot of wisdom about being a mother in preparation for mother's day, and hopefully you won't be surprised to find out that a lot of it applies to me and what I'm doing. I don't even mean with my golden: I just mean in missionary work.

There are some lines attributed to Victor Hugo which read:
“She broke the bread into two fragments and gave them to her children, who ate with eagerness. ‘She hath kept none for herself,’ grumbled the sergeant.
“‘Because she is not hungry,’ said a soldier.
“‘No,’ said the sergeant, ‘because she is a mother.’”
...
One young mother wrote to me recently ... one thing, she said, keeps her going: “Through the thick and the thin of this, and through the occasional tears of it all, I know deep down inside I am doing God’s work. I know that in my motherhood I am in an eternal partnership with Him. I am deeply moved that God finds His ultimate purpose and meaning in being a parent, even if some of His children make Him weep.
“It is this realization,” she says, “that I try to recall on those inevitably difficult days when all of this can be a bit overwhelming."
-- Elder Holland

Eve was given the identity of “the mother of all living”—years, decades, perhaps centuries before she ever bore a child. It would appear that her motherhood preceded her maternity, just as surely as the perfection of the Garden preceded the struggles of mortality. I believe "mother" is one of those very carefully chosen words, one of those rich words—with meaning after meaning after meaning. ... Some women give birth and raise children but never “mother” them. Others, whom I love with all my heart, “mother” all their lives but have never given birth.
-- Sister Holland


What a power couple. I love these quotes because I'm not a mother, but I am a woman, and I sure do a lot of mothering every day. I spend all day doing what I can to assist in God's work--the immortality and eternal life of man. Every person I see on the streets of Dortmund is a child of God, and my job is to guide them, lovingly, back to Christ. I don't give my bread to anyone but I give them my time, keeping only enough for myself to live on, because I feel how much God loves them.
Every woman is born with the power of mothering--it is our gift, our right, and our responsibility, just as the men have the right and responsibility to exercise the priesthood. Regardless of a woman's maternity, as daughters of God (and daughters of Eve), we are also the mothers of all living. How powerful is that!

So on Mother's Day, thank God for the women who have blessed your life. And then thank the women.