transfer call

dearest family,

Transfer calls came and it looks like I am finally leaving the nursery (i.e. Mulsay) and beginning a new phase of the mission that feels like growing up. I will be opening an area called Zazel-ha (actually, I cant remember how to spell it or even say it, so that might not be right ... but something like that), and I will be training a new missionary again. It is slightly scary and foreign and unknown, but I like to think that God is giving me the opportunity to trust in Him and learn to follow His Spirit more, and that perhaps He is testing my skills with directions because the new area is a lot bigger than my first home in Mulsay. 

Last night was a little hard when we received transfer calls because Hna Guerra and I both thought that we would be staying together in order to finish her training. It is always hard when one thinks they have more time and then realizes that time is something that they can't control or change, and then are left wondering if they used their time well or fully or wholly. My time in Mulsay 2 is sacred to me — a gloriously hard and absolutely full nine months of coming to know and love and feel for such good and chosen people. I think this was the hardest part: missing people the minute I found out that they would no longer be mine to teach and help and love. Because I loved God's children in Mulsay more than I realized; Lupita and Tony and la familia Canche and Gamboa. I found myself crying and crying and felt a pain that has never quite penetrated my heart before, the part of my heart that allowed myself to be vulnerable to loving. I have realized that the more we allow ourselves to feel, the more vulnerable we allow oursleves to become to pain or hurt, but then I realized that I would rather feel all of these things and more than to have never felt them at all. I realized that Christ has felt a love like this before — a love even greater than any of us are perhaps capable of learning —and that He feels this depth and width of love for each of us. I think I have now learned how real and pure the love of Christ really is. It is not something that He feigns or feels out of obligation. His love is vulnerable and open, because I think it is a love that He learned to have for us. I hope that I can learn to love like Christ does, because I think it is the realest and most unselfish depth of love.

Love you all and miss you mucho,

Hermana Rhondeau