Joyeuse Fête des Mères!

I typed the subject and then have been staring at the screen for like five minutes. I'm pretty sure I told my family all the important things on skype yesterday. This might be a really disjointed email.

It was wonderful to see my family :) There are a lot of people in it.  I cried a lot. It was pretty characteristic. Strong feelings tend to manifest themselves that way for me. I really love my family. My nieces and nephews are the cutest and they're really.....really funny. Hahahaha :) And I still have a good while left on the mish but this was my last skype call! The next time I see you all will be in person. Pretty weird.

So, Mothers Day. We talked in zone training last week about improving and maintaining mission culture and in explaining "culture", President Patrick said that the culture of our own homes was "what mom would always say". Which led to all kinds of reflection. A favorite Book of Mormon story about the two thousand stripling warriors, who were really just young boys, demonstrates the power of "what mom always says"...

47 Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. 48 And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it. 

 

We can rehearse the words of our mothers because mom repeats herself. Moms always have. And there is power in what she repeats, for the same reason there is power in memorizing verses of scripture. We can pull on those words whenever or wherever we might need them.

Naturally, this all led me to thinking about two specific things that my mom always says.

• Everyone is just doing the best they can with what they have.
• You never know the whole story.

In other words, my mom has taught (or tried to teach) me to have charity. I thought this was helpful to me before, but it has proved even more valuable on my mission. I'm still working on having charity for others. But everything I know about charity began in my home with my mother. I have a really wonderful mom.

I love you all! Sorry for the weird spacing of this email :)
Souvenez-vous qui vous êtes ♥
Sister Lonas