I´ll be home for Natal... I mean Christmas!

I had so many things to say, but your email just blew it all out of the water. WHAT AN AMAZING STORY! I was reading the beginning of the story turning super frustrated (as I'm sure yáll were). So I start reading it to my compy like OH NO look what´s happening at home. SO then we get to the good stuff and I just start to cry. I cant believe you guys got to have a baptism this week! (My uncle got baptized) What an amazing blessing. I was thinking when hearing the story about the missionary side of it. How they probably were knocking doors because they had no one to teach. One of them probably tried to talk the other one out of it. They probably knocked 15 or 20 doors that were immediately slammed in their faces, but Heavenly Father knew who was prepared and where.

I'm so humbled everyday of my mission by everything the Lord does for his children. This week we had 17 investigators at church. Really we had 22, but 5 of them left before sacrament (which here is the last hour of church). President said we broke the mission record. I'm not going to lie, as you could probably tell from my email a few weeks ago we have been having a REALLY hard time lately. But I know that God was just preparing this for us. Preparing us to be even better everyday. Preparing us for the "real world" as we call it here.

Highlights:

-One of our investigators at church was the most ELECT Elizeth that I told you about last week. She announced her baptism to the branch, then got a little mad that we hadn´t announced it yet? AKA she´s amazing.

-One of our young men investigators is in love with me and tried to hug me for a total of 3 minutes straight. While the whole branch laughed and I tried to strong arm him as far as I could. THEN, his friend starts trying to kiss me on the face...

-During branch choir practice I didn't see a part of the stage sticking up and I tripped and fell into the pulpit, which then almost fell over WITH me. ALL while singing. The pianist was laughing so hard she couldn't stop for an uncomfortable amount of time. Everyone asked me if I got hurt and I go- JUST MY PRIDE!

-We won a mission contest this last month and now our zone gets to play volleyball and eat pizza with President and his family this week! Its one of the best "death week" presents ever!

-We had exit interviews with President Farnes yesterday in Sorocaba, and he gave me some great advice about law school, and about real life, and about dating (YUCK). It felt so weird to talk about the real world- especially with President.


Speaking of, all anyone can talk about is that we are going home. Everyone asks us how we are feeling and we switch off saying we are SUPER excited and that we NEVER want to leave. AKA we´ve turned bipolar. I bore my dying testimony in church (there are only like 10 members so we all have to use like 5 minutes every month) and I just started to bawl. Not just cry, but BAWL. 

More than anything I have a testimony that God knows best. That He loves me. I have been reminiscing about that day I knew I had to serve a mission and how I cried because I didn't want to and I knew it would be hard.

HA.

It WAS hard.

Sometimes I just wanted to give up. Sometimes, embarrassingly, I did.

Then when I came back with my tail between my legs, to apologize to God, I LEARNED the truth about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Remember: the heavens will not be filled with those who never made mistakes but with those who recognized that they were off course and who corrected their ways to get back in the light of gospel truth." - President Uchtdorf

You never forget a baptism, or a reactivation, or a companion, or your first orange peeling in Brasil, or the time you found someone PREPARED by God. 

So as a full-time missionary I'm arriving at the end of the rope, but I will never stop being a missionary.

I will never forget.

May God be with you til we meet again.

Sister Haley Kristina Mills

And this part is for Uncle Barry - no regrets.