This gospel is miraculous!

This is what Alyssa sent this week.....short and sweet! So I decided to copy and paste part of a journal entry from one of her roommates blogs, Hermana Higginson, because it was such a tender mercy for me to be able to read about my sweet Alyssa from her training companion's perspective. Sister Higginson's mom gave me permission to share this with all of you. I hope it touches all of you like it did me ❤

From Alyssa:

Please tell peeps I am sorry I couldn't write a group letter this week! This week was milagroso! This work is Amazing! I love you all!

Hermana Roe


From Hermana Higginson's blog:

First I want to start out with a really tender experience. So as you all know, here I am training Hermana Roe. Did I mention my companions are basically thee coolest people ever? I am super duper blessed. Well, I think God has blessed me immensly with sending me my american missionary to train. Because she reminds me so much of me, little hermana higginson 17 months ago.

Spanish is hard. Us americans that come in knowing nothing… it truly does become a matter of faith and trusting the Lord that he will bless us with the hability to speak & understand such a different language. You learn what it means to “long suffer.” At the beginning of the mission as you enter into the mission field with little to none spanish, everyone always tells you, “what a special spirit we feel to hear you testify of the truth of the gospel” I always just looked at them a little weird and thought that they were just trying to be nice and make me feel good about my spansih. I always thought they were in a way lying to me HA! I thought to myself, “but if I cannot even express how I feel or if I can only say that I know this church is true & that jesus christ lives, how can they feel the spirit so powerfully?” I was confused. I was lost. I was sad. I was discouraged at the beginning of my mission to say the least with my lack of communicating… when everyone in peru spoke spanish. I felt so useless.

well, something major happened on Tuesday night. We once again visited the Segura family and we were teaching Patrick about the restoration of the Gospel. We got to the first vision and it was now Hermana Roe´s turn to speak & share the experience that Joseph Smith had. She looked at me with fear in her eyes but I just looked at her with eyes and smile telling her that she could do it. Oh my word…. people. What a spirit that entered the room. She was hardcore stumbling over her words, her spanish was not perfect whatsoever… but the spirit that testified of her words was heart changing. Hermana David then says. “thank you hermana for being here. I know it is hard for you… but the spirit is strong and you are a great example to us of being persistent and enduring through our trials.”

I have pondered a lot on that expereince. It dawned on me that at the beginning of my mission, people were not lying to me haha. They were actually being sincere. For 17 months I had just thought I did not really do that much good at the beginning of my mission with my humgous lack of spanish. But wow…. that is so not the case. God uses his simple & weak to preach His everlasting gospel. I am witness of it. Hermana Roe has been such a testimony to me that the gift of tongues is real. What a blessing to see how far I have come.

Now that leads me into saturday! ELDER STEVENSON visited the missions, Trujillo south & trujillo north. OKAY. It was SO beautiful. As he walked in his smile was so big and the spirit just hit us all and his eyes were so full of light. I looked at him and thought, “wow. this is an apostol of the lord right before my eyes.” Things on the mission have become so real concering the gospel. This all truly did happen.

I just want to share a few quick points about my experience:

– to start, Elder Godoy of the seventy also came… he shared a beautiful experience about his conversion. That he had long hair down his back and he just did not look like the “perfect missionary reference” but he said that we should never judge by appearances… because
inside of their bodies are spirits screaming, “help me. I am lost and I need the truth.” With tears in his eyes he testified to us that we need spiritual eyes to seen deeper than what we can only see on the outside of people. Every child of God deserves to hear the truth.

also, he is from brazil and so he shared the first vision in Portugese. He told us, “i know that you did not understand… but did you feel it?” that reminded me of that special night when the family segura did not really understand what Hermana Roe said… but they felt it.