Giving everything I am

Hello family! I am happy to be writing you today. I hope that this week has been a good one, can you believe that it´s March 31st? Because I sure can´t. I officially have 8 months out here in the mission. I remember when I first got into the field, my trainer had 7, almost 8 months in her mission, and I thought "Holy crap, that´s a lot of time. I don´t know if I´ll make it that long." Just kidding, I didn´t really say that, but I said something similar. And look, now I´m the one who´s training and I have 8 months. The good news is that I don´t think there´s a word for "crap" in Spanish, so my companion won´t be able to say the same thing I said ;) I can´t believe how fast the time flies out here. But I loving every second of it!

So I wrote you last week, and said that it had been a rough week. And it was the truth. But everything, literally EVERY thing changed this week. We had an amazing week, things are changing a lot over here in Cieneguilla 2! We had a baptism on Saturday of a 23 year old guy named Aureliano. I think that of all of the people I´ve taught on my mission, he is the most converted to the gospel. He is pretty shy, and doesn´t say much, but he has just completely accepted the gospel. When he prays, he prays so simply, but his words are so genuine and powerful. His mom, brother, and sister-in-law came to the baptism. His friend Sumilda was the one that invited him to church the first time, a little over 2 months ago, and Sumilda and all of her family were at his baptism also. It made me think of a sweet little family of blonds that I know that helped one weird girl get baptized once..... ;) It was a good time! We´re having fun over here.

So last night, Hermano Balvin and another hermano, Hermano Moncada, came out to teach with us. We had a great lesson with a family that I love to death, and we all left smiling and filled with this mutual, indescribable feeling of happiness. It was cute and super Mormon. :) But as we were on the way home, Hermano Balvin asked me how I felt about having 8 months in the mission. I literally didn´t actually know how to respond, I was really tired (it was 8:45 and we were running back to our 

house) and I was thinking about lots of things. But the thing that came to my mind was somehting that had happened that morning (yesterday morning), and I´m going to share it with you guys really fast. 

Before church, we were in the bus on the way to pick up some investigators for church. We were making good time, but we saw an inactive member walking on the side of the road when we turned a corner. We met this guy about 4 days ago, and when we found him, he got really choked up as he talked about how he had also served a mission but left the church for "something". We don´t know the somehting yet, but he told us that he would go to church on Sunday, which really means that he wasn´t going to go to church on Sunday. So as we sat happily in the bus to our investigators house, I saw him walking on the side of the road. I jumped out of my seat and pressed the "I need to leave" button, and my companion and I hopped off the bus and sprinted down the street to go talk to this guy, David. We caught up to him, sweating and out of breath, and invited him to church. He was 

really surprised, and said he "would do all that was possible to come to church." It wasn´t very 

convincing, but that´s what he told us. He thanked us for the invitation, and walked away with a little smile on his face. Not a "Gotcha losers" smile, but a genuinley happy smile that we didn´t see when we first met him.

And so that´s what I told Hermano Balvin. That´s how I feel about my 8 months in the mission. That 

sometimes we do every thing we possibly can, sweating or sprinting or walking 2 miles or teaching every lesson possible and all we see at the end is that nothing has changed, or that the person still doesn´t care, or they don´t come to church, or whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, that´s what I am supposed to do as a missionary - give everything I am and all that I have so that maybe, MAYBE, one person will have the chance to recieve the gospel of Jesus Christ. So that through my selfless labor, God can reach out to one of His children and give them all that they´ve been waiting for.

The bad news is that I´m not perfect. I don´t do that perfectly everyday. But another good thing about my 8 months is that I have 10 more to learn how to do it better :)

I love you so much, and I pray for you always. Have a great week, I´ll talk to you soon!

All my love,

Hermana Michelle Scott

Trust in God

FAMILY! Hello! I hope you are well.

I am not going to lie, this week was really rough. I cried a lot actually. I don´t cry a ton, even as a missionary, but this week, I cried. I have been WAY too stressed out, worrying about silly things, and letting the sweet, simple moments pass me by. That happens sometimes to us as missionaries, and then afterwards, we see that all we really needed to do was step back and trust in God a little bit (or a LOT) more.

I am on a computer that is slightly broken, so I can´t connect my camera to send pictures. But I got a hair cut! Professionally done by my companion. And then I cut hers...a little bit less professionally. But it´s great, I feel free from the monster that lived on my head. And the good news is that I won´t have to use as much shampoo now...look at me, growing up and learning how to save money and stuff :)

The point of this breif email is that I learned that you really have to trust in God. He really is the only one who knows how do this thing we call "life." I am excited, my companion and I are going to be changing a lot of things this week and we are going to make a lot of things better and God will be with us the whole time.

I LOVE YOU, and I always pray for you. I hope you have a great week, and I will be talking to you soon!

All of my love,

Hermana Michelle Scott

My Commission

Well hi there family! This week has flown by, but that´s normal. I hope it was a good one for you! 

I just want to tell you that the emails I received this week were all so perfect. For those that have written to me up until this point in my mission, I always feel uplifted and strengthened by your words. But this week especially I feel so much love and support, and I just want you to know that I am really grateful, and that your words have definitely lifted me up. THANK YOU! :)

I just have two things that I wanted to share. This week, just like every other week, I have felt my inadequacy (sorry if that is spelled wrong, i don´t really speak English correctly these days) as a missionary. Okay that´s not acutally the right word...just that my role in this whole big plan that God has is really, really small. As a mission, we all had to memorize the "comission as a missionary". This week, I memorized it, and I wanted to share it with you- 

I am called of God.
My authority is above that of kings of the earth.
By revelation I have been selected as a personal representative of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is my master and He has chosen me to represent Him--to stand in His place, to say and do what He Himself would say and do if He personally were ministering to the very people to whom He has sent me.
My voice is His voice, and my acts are His acts; my doctrine is His doctrine.
My Commission is to do what He wants done; To say what He wants said; to be a living modern witness in word and in deed of the divinity of his great and marvelous Latter-day work.
How great is my calling!

I love this. Actually, to be completely honest, I think it sounds way cooler in Spanish. But that 

literally is what I´m called to do right now. To do what Jesus would do, to say what he would say. It´s a little intimidating sometimes, but I´m learning how to trust less in myself and more in Him. 

I understand why the people we teach don´t understand that very well - trusting in God, a person that we´ve never seen and more than likely never heard. It´s hard for us too, as missionaries. We have a lot that we need to do, and we are supposed to trust in this person that we have never seen. It´s not an easy thing to do. It´s an interesting thing that the gospel asks us to do. When we pray, we are required to have faith that our prayer will be answered. We have commandments that we are supposed to follow, that sometimes we don´t understand very well. Being a member of the church, or even just believing in God and that He has a plan for us, isn´t always an easy thing to do. But little by little, I´m starting to understand my own faith. My own purpose not just as a missionary, but as a human living in this world. It´s a really beautiful thing, and it really all starts with our willingness to change, repent, and follow Jesus Christ. When we have faith, when we trust in Him, we can do those things 

that seem impossible, like change from who we are now into a person that God knows we can be. It´s all about faith.

Last night, Hermano and Hermana Balvin came with us all the way out to the farthest part of our area. I think I´ve told you about them before, they´re honestly the best. They are just a couple of 

sweet, returned missionaries that still love to preach the gospel, so they come with us to teach all the time. We taught some great lessons, but when we got back Hno Balvin said to me (in his sweet, broken English), "WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH, Hermana Scott and we want you to always remember that." I don´t really know how to explain what exactly I felt in that moment, but it just made me realize how grateful I am to be here, doing what I´m doing. I´m grateful to be able to share this love that I feel with the people I teach. I´ll never forget the love I felt for the missionaries, all of the people who helped me in my own journey to get me where I am today. I just feel really honored to be able to give my best effort and do all that I can to help even just one other person feel that same love, have that same life changing experience, being able to really come to know their savior Jesus Christ.

I am really happy. I hope you are all doing well. Know that I love you and I always pray for you! Have a great week!!!!!

ALL of my love,

Hermana Michelle Scott

Lactose Intolerance=No Happiness

Buenos días, family! I hope you´re doing well.

I thought I would start out my letter this week with the bad news. Something tragic happened recently, and it´s really difficult to say...but I found out that I am definitely, 100% without a doubt lactose intolerant. I´ve been sick for a really long time, not horribly, but just uncomfortably sick. As in I just never feel normal. We don´t need to go into details on that one, but last week or the week before, some members gave us ice cream and pancakes for the birthday of my companion, and as I was eating the ice cream I thought, "Holy cow. I bet it´s this stuff that makes me sick." I didn´t finish the ice cream that night, because it kind of freaked me out. Then I avoided milk the next few days, and I felt a little better. Then a few days ago I forgot, and drank a whole glass of delicious chocolate milk, and I felt soooo sick afterward. That was just kind of my evidence that it´s real. Lactose intolerance....who does that sound like? Sorry mother, but I am blaming you for this curse. But it´s better that I know now, I already told my pension so she´s not going to give me milk or lactose or anything. No yogurt, no butter, no milk, no ice cream,no happiness....

The good news is that means all the fat I´ve gained from eating stuff like that might start to slowly go away! Blessings in disguise.

Well, this week was really great. I don´t really know where to begin explaining it. But I just had a few things I wanted to tell you.

So Luis FINALLY got baptized!!! He got baptized yesterday after all of the meetings. Before I tell you about that, though, I wanted to explain what happened first. So since Luis had a few things he needed to get sorted out, he had an interview with the President of the mission, President Ardila. President Ardila is seriously the best, I wish we could send all of our investigators to meet him 

because he is just so wise. But Luis had his interview, and was just SO happy. He just looked so so happy, the kind of happiness that you can´t explain but you see in someone´s face. We took him to go walk around the temple, since it´s right across the street from the mission office, and he didn´t say much, he just walked really slow with this subtle but significant smile on his face. He´s been talking about that day so much - he really loved it. While we were at the temple, I saw one of the hermanos from my first area, Surco. He is from one of my favorite families that I´ve met in my whole mission - Hermano Joseph is his name. I was so happy to see him that I almost cried. It was such a crazy moment for me, because even though it hasn´t been THAT long since I was in Surco, it feels like a lot has happened since then. As we walked back to catch a bus all the way back to Cieneguilla, we were literally all just floating on our own little clouds, Luis just so excited to get baptized and really happy about his decision. Hermana Ponce and I just so happy to see that he was so happy. It was really a special moment,and I am really bad at explaining, sorry.

But anyway, the baptism was so special. I have seen a lot of baptisms in my life, and I even got to 

participate in one once, but this one just really impacted me. Luis has lived such a difficult life, and he has really changed so much in the short amount of time that we have known him. The gospel of Jesus Christ does that - it doesn´t say that we need to become different people so that God loves us more; it says that as we come to know God and learn to accept Him in our lives, we want to change. In order to grow and progress in life, it´s impossible to NOT change. Luis has experienced that so much in this short amount of time. You can see it so clearly in his face; in the way he acts and talks. It´s really humbling to be able to see it and know that I didn´t really do anything. As we sang the opening hymn at his baptism, "How Great Thou Art" he started crying and just looked up at the cieling, tears rolling down his face. It was so powerful to see that, and when he bore his testimony after he was actually baptized, he just talked about how he had always waited for this day. He didn´t know what exactly he was waiting for while he was waiting, but that he knows he has found it.

Last night, I was praying before I went to sleep. A thought came to mind, and I wanted to share it. As 

missionaries, we don´t have this special time set aside in our lives to be smarter or have a greater 

knowledge of the scriptures than other people so that with our words we can convert all the people we meet. Our oportunity isn´t to be smarter or have greater knowledge, but we have this great oportunity to FEEL more. I think that´s what it is. We feel so much. A lot of sadness, sometimes discouragement, a lot of indescribable happiness, a whole lot of love, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We feel a lot, but it doesn´t mean than we know much. What I´m trying to say is that because we have this oportunity to feel so much, we can be a little, teeny tiny part of someone´s conversion. I can see that Luis is converted to the gospel, but I know that God did all of that work. God has worked through us, we have felt it, and Luis has been able to feel it as well and let God work through him. 

I am really happy out here. I miss you guys, and I hope you are happy in what you are doing as well. Enjoy this week, and I will be talking to you soon!

With every last little piece of my amor,

Hermana Michelle Scott

Training a new companion

Hello family!! I hope that you are all doing well and that this past week was a good one.

I don´t really know where to start with this week. But I´ll start with a few little things - 

1. I literally saved a cat from a tree. Like that old joke or whatever it is, I did it! Even though I really strongly dislike them and it wouldn´t bother me too much if it was stuck up there forever, I´m one of the tallest people in this country so I thought I would help them out. I just kind of grabbed it and threw it on the ground...whatever works, right? 

2. The other day, I was doing my hair, just like every other day of my life. Out here, since there´s so much sun, my hair is getting pretty light in some parts. Not blonde, but significantly lighter. So I was doing my hair, and I saw this really, really light hair, and I thought "WOW a blonde hair! My hair really is turning blonde!" I was pretty excited. Then I looked a little closer and saw that it was GRAY. 100% GRAY. What the nasty? I´m only 20! If I come home with a head full of gray hairs, I´m gonna be a little bummed. Don´t worry, I pulled it out. It´s like it never happened.

Well, this week has been really long. It has been great, but really, really long. Last week we had transfers, and Hermana Mack went to a different area called Vitarte. I hear it´s pretty but I´ve never seen it. She was really sad, but also excited to start a new adventure. Cieneguilla was her first area in her mission, and she was here for over 4 months! It´s hard to change but it´s definitely fun to have new experiences.

Speaking of change, I also had an interesting change. I am currently training a new missionary! I don´t know why God thought that that was a good idea, but that is my current situation. My new companion´s name is Hermana Ponce, from Argentina. She´s from a part of Patagonia, which is super pretty and touristy. She is so great and we are really getting along really well. She is pretty shy, but she is really good at teaching. It´s always nice when you speak the language you´re teaching in...I 

wasn´t very good at teaching and I couldn´t speak the language, so she´s already doing a lot better than I was when I started ;) 

In all honesty, I was so nervous when I found out that I would be training. "Training" just means that I´m adding on to what she learned in the CCM, and helping her adjust to the missionary life. We have a specific little book that we do the training from, and it´s kind of a good amount of work. But anyway, I was really nervous. I didn´t really think that I would be able to do it, and I was sad that Hermana Mack was leaving. I prayed a lot that night. And the next day I met my companion, we had our little day-training, then we came back to Cieneguilla. That part was relatively easy. But this week just happened to be the most complicated week of my whole entire mission. We had two baptisms planned for Saturday, but on Thursday we found out a bunch of stuff that we didn´t know before; we had to make about 1,000 phone calls using public telephones since we don´t have a cellphone right now, we had to schedule meetings and interviews and had to go to the doctor and SO MANY 

THINGS. Honestly, it was just a little bit more than I could handle. I was already nervous to be 

training, and then all of this other stuff happened. I felt so bad because those days were the first days of my companion´s mission, which just made me feel even worse. I was really stressed out, and she was just super calm, going with the flow. She really helped me out those days. It felt more like she was training me than that I was training her. But in the end, everything turned out just fine, Ignacio got baptized, and Luis will be getting baptized either this Saturday or the next. Everything turned out just fine.

On Saturday,  Ignacio got baptized. After days of freaking out and feeling like I was all over the 

place, I found that I was really happy, and it made me so much happier to see Ignacio and how happy HE was. His baptism was so sweet. He´s just a sweet old guy. 

And on Sunday we had our testimony meeting, when any member that wants to share their testimony can stand up and share their thoughts. Luis got up and shared his testimony, and it was just about the sweetest thing I´ve ever heard. I just sat there, listening to the members of my ward here in Cieneguilla, in the middle of Peru, and felt so grateful to be a member of this church, and even more to be a missionary. It was a great moment.

Sorry, my thoughts are really jumbled becasue there are about 34 people around me screaming in a different language. But I want you to know I love you! Have a great week, I´ll be talking to you soon!

All my love,

Hermana Michelle Scott

Luis adventures

(This email was sent by Michelle on February 17)


Hi family! I hope you are all well. I hope this has been a great week for you and that you´re enjoying the nice weather! I was telling my companion about how February in Colorado is interesting. 60 degrees one day, snow the next. We´re still just in the steady 1,000´s over here, so that´s nice and temperate.

I just wanted to share a fun thought. First of all, the word in Spanish for bread is "pan." So since my American companion and I speak spanglish with each other, we have basically completely ditched the word bread, and just use the word pan. An example - "That was some really good pan!" Bread doesn´t exist. But I did a little math and wanted to share the result with you. So we eat 2 pieces of bread every day for breakfast. Every day, no matter what, that is what we get. That´s just a normal Peruvian thing. So my companion and I did some quick math and realized that in our 18 months, WE WILL EAT MORE THAN 1,000 PIECES OF PAN. Don´t be suprised when I come home a little bit "happier" than I was before. .... :)

I really want to tell you about a super awesome thing that happened this week. So Luis, the man who is going to get baptized this week, is now actually getting baptized NEXT week. Let me tell you why. -

We have been planning a service project for him for a while. I think I told you guys already that his house is a literal snapshot from the show Hoarders...it´s so dirty and just filled with garbage. So this week on Saturday, we went with the other 2 sister missionaries in our ward, Hermano and Hermana Balbin, and Hermano Pablo to go help him clean. When we first got there, it was kind of awkward because he was obviously kind of embarrassed about how filthy his house had gotten over the years. YEARS is the key word. So we started out slowly, and he was kind of hesitant to let us touch his things. But all of a sudden, his mood completely changed. He got super excited, and just kept saying 

"BOTA LO!!!" over and over again, which basically just means "THROW IT AWAY!!!" It was so funny. We just took that as a good sign, and just started cleaning like crazy. He didn´t let us into his "house house" yet, but he let us into the front part - it´s like a little patio room. The two front rooms are what we cleaned. One of the rooms was horrible...you´d pick up a piece of old newspaper or something, and like 47 bugs would fall out and start running all over the place. It was not a super pleasant experience, I´m not going to lie. But it was SO FUN. We just cleaned the crap out of that place! It was so fun. We cleaned for like 3 hours, and laughed afterwards because that wasn´t even half of the mess. It was awesome though. After we finished, we all sat down to share a scripture. We shared a thought, and then we all bore our testimonies and shared how we felt. Luis was pretty quiet, but you could tell he was thinking and listening. At the end, my companion invited him to pray, and he was like, "Wait, first I want to bear my testimony." And he just talked about how grateful he was for what God had done for him, that He had never left him alone. Then he started to pray, and his voice caught in his throat and he just started crying. It was the sweetest moment. All of us had those 

tears mirrored in our own eyes, and there were plenty of little sniffles as he prayed and thanked His 

God.

We had this great day, Luis felt a real love and change, and then what happens? ......He didn´t come to church on Sunday! What the weird? We were so confused. So after church we went on a little Luis hunt. And he told us he didn´t go because he was sad that Hermana Mack is leaving next week (we don´t know that for sure, but its likely). He said that he has been alone for so long that it´s hard for him to accept that goodbye again. We were with some members, and once agian we had this great lesson with him, and he will be baptized the next week. I´ll tell you more about our Luis adventures next week :)

All is well and I am so happy! I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH! Have a great week!!!

Love, Hermana Scott

Two Baptisms!

(This email was sent from Michelle on February 11)


Hello there family! I hope you are all doing well today, and that maybe there´s a little bit of sun today that you can enjoy. The sun´s definitely out here, and I will do my best to enjoy it as sweat pours down my face :) 

So I would like to share an interesting experience that I had this week. Remember how I told you that I jumped out of a window on my 3rd day in the field? Yeah, that was funny and all, but it was also one of the dumbest things I´ve ever done. So ever since that day, my foot has hurt. I´m really not trying to be dramatic, but literally, every day it has hurt. The doctors of the mission told me I had a little fracture in my heel bone and that it would take a while to heal, but whether I was walking or not it would be a while. So they gave me little foot shoe insole insert things, and they helped, but when I came to Cieneguilla they just stopped having any affect because we just walk everywhere all the time. So I had to go to a real doctor....and to make a long story short, they told me it wasn´t a fracture, but that something internal was damaged and that if I didn´t treat it, it would become chronic. (UH OH, Hermana Scott. Way to be a genius!) You don´t need to worry or anything, I´m fine, but the other day I went to the clinic to get a shot. And this was not your every day shot. It was a GIANT NEEDLE that they shoved in my heel. I was laying on this little doctor bed thing that smelled like babies, trying to play it cool, but as soon as he put the needle in I kind of freaked out. Because he didn´t change the location of the needle, but while this GIANT needle was in my foot, he just moved it around and inserted the liquid in the other parts. Does that make sense? There was just ONE little hole, but my whole heel got filled with this stuff, and he moved it around in the bone...oh man, it was the grossest thing of my life. So I don´t tell you this so that you worry, but I´m telling you because now my foot doesn´t hurt AT ALL! Seriously, everything is completely good. My foot is healed, and life goes on!

So this week was super fun! I told you about Luis and that sweet, awesome family last week. The 

family went out of town this week, so we couldn´t visit them, but Luis told us straight up that he wants to get baptized!!!!! So he has a baptism date for the 22nd of THIS MONTH! How crazy is that??? It´s super exciting, and he is just learning and progressing so fast. We have another investigator, Ignacio, who we have been teaching for a while. He has a date too, for the first of March. He is so sweet, he loves the gospel so much. He studies the Book of Mormon SO thoroughly and understands everything. It´s amazing. These two guys were so prepared for the gospel, we literally didn´t do anything but find them in the street. God has been working on them for a long time, and he just put them right in our path.

I wanted to tell a little bit more about Luis...when we went to his house this week, we told him that we wanted to bring some members over to help him around the house, and to help him clean some stuff out since he lives alone and it´s probably been a while since there´s been a deep clean in there. 

So he took us to go see the rest of his house, and literally never in my life have I seen so much gross stuff. Just piles of old, dirty clothes, buckets of nasty water (seriously, who knows what that stuff was), dust and dirt covering every thing, old food, trash, bottles and cans and so much stuff! It was 

just a never ending mess. Hermana Mack and I were so surprised, because while we had been there before, we never even knew! We had no idea. Where we always teach him is in the front part of his house, which is still outside, and it´s just normal and clean. A little cluttered, but NOTHING like the rest of his house. We sat down after our little "tour" and he told us that he was so thankful for us, that after so many years, he could feel like he was changing. He kept looking around his house saying, "This is all going to change. I´m really changing everything." I´m telling you, this man is amazing. Though his house may be a disaster, he has really decided to give over everything he has and all that has been over to the Lord, change his life, and start brand new. 

One time, a missionary who was about to leave said this in a big meeting of missionaries, and I´ll never forget her words. She said, "God doesn´t send us out here because he needs us. He could do all of this on his own. He sends us out here to GIVE US the oportunity of meeting these people, and having a small part in His great work."

Do you know how true that is? I can´t even being to explain how true that is. Even in the hardest moments, it´s an "oportunity". I just have to really learn to see it like that, even through those hard times.

Well, I am really happy! Hermana Mack and I are just having a blast and preaching the gospel here in Cieneguilla, Lima, Peru. You should look this place up because it´s probably the prettiest place I´ve seen in my whole life.

I LOVE YOU! Thanks for loving me, and just know that I love you more than I can say!

Have a great week!

ALL of my amor,

Hermana Scott