Who Made Those Beans?

God is in the details.

I'd like to start by sharing a really cool story that happened to me!

So, on December 1, 2021, I got transferred from Arecibo to Aibonito. I really had a hard time.

I got to Aibonito, and everything bad was happening: I got bed bugs, the branch president's wife got mad at me, I got sick. I felt abandoned and lost. Every day felt like it was getting worse and worse.

I felt like Satan was attacking me more and more every day. I was getting more beaten and more beaten, and I just felt like I couldn't endure this anymore.

I was very upset.

I just left Arecibo and loved my mission.

And now I'm here in Aibonito for only 2 weeks, and I just want to go home.

Time goes on, and I get a vision of a butterfly in a dream while I was praying before personal study. And I was just chasing it, and I woke up right before I caught it.

What could the butterfly mean? Why did I feel the need to look up their life cycle?

My mission president comes up to Aibonito and starts to talk to me about a certain talk.

"Living after the Manner of Happiness" by Jeffrey R. Holland.

In this talk, he goes on to give an analogy about how we obtain happiness, and in it, he starts talking about how happiness is like a butterfly. We can't chase after it; we just have to sit and wait for the butterfly to land on our shoulders. It's the same with happiness. We have to live after the manner of it, and it will come and land on us like a butterfly.

When he said this, I remembered my dream about the butterfly. I knew that God was talking to me through my mission president.

And the butterfly's life cycle is also six weeks. A transfer is six weeks.

The symbolism of a butterfly is so rich. Their life journey and expression are symbolic of our own spiritual path.

"If you're seeing butterflies, you may need to ask yourself what changes you need to make to live more aligned with spiritual truth, or perhaps you're already experiencing big changes in your life, and the butterfly is only appearing to let you know it's going to be okay and to trust the process."

Zoom forward to the last day of the transfer, my dog dies. Kinda ironic for the whole six weeks, three days from done, the last P-Day. LOL.

Anyway, we're going through the work, and we see this lady's name in our area book, and Elder Granados and I are like, "We need to visit this Giselle lady." The story is a little crazy anyway. So we hear about this family whose son just died from falling off the roof, and we're like, "We need to go see that lady" because we had been calling her, but no one picked up. So we drove to her house, but the dot was (meaning we didn't know exactly which house was hers). It was in a weird spot on the area book. So we see this house with two stories and a driveway down below, and there's a stair set to the roof on the other side. So I'm like, "This must be the house that looks like a kid could fall off the roof way too easily." So we yelled and waited, yelled again and waited (yelled because you don't knock here; you yell), and we waited like 3 minutes. Nothing. So we start to keep walking up the hill, and we hear "entren" (come in), so we walked in and talked to her. We didn't even know her name; we had to ask the neighbor after. 

We end up finding out she's doing a service project to fix up her house for her son's birthday, who was 13, and died trying to fix up the house for his birthday party. Now here's where it's insane: he didn't die off the roof; he was using one of those chisel machines and hit the wall, and it fell and crushed him. Very sad. But God knew we wouldn't find the house unless we heard the story of him falling off the roof. That is not a coincidence. Isn't that insane? We got passed along a different story to be able to find this lady's house 2 months after Elder Barben had visited the husband. She told us she never really talked to them; they were talking to her ex, and now they're separated, and that's why we couldn't get ahold of her. We had her ex-husband's number who left her after her son died.

Anyway, back to the house. We find out she's fixing it up to do a memorial for him. So we come and we show up. Elder Granados and I do about 42 hours of service for this lady in a 3-week period, just painting and scraping off old paint to help this lady achieve her goal for her son. She was broken. Still is.

So we help her, and we gain this amazing relationship with her and her immediate family of Giselle, Yanitza (sister), Enid (other sister), Nelson (boyfriend), Nitza (mom), Celimar (daughter), Fabian (grandson), Odalis (daughter), Frankie (brother-in-law), Lissa (Yanitza's daughter), Yanaliz (Yanitza's other daughter).

So we have taught 10 people because of service and just loving this lady.

Anyway, we go on to the end of the last transfer when Elder Granados gets transfer news. He's going to Saint Croix, and I just get this overwhelming spiritual feeling that I need to be here for Giselle and that I am here for Giselle.

I was like, "Okay, weird," because I'm fine with staying. It's not a thing that bugs me. I love Aibonito now!

Anyway, fast forward to this week. I now realize why the first transfer was so hard. I had the potential to teach the gospel to 11 people from a family, and Satan didn't want that. I also had to learn and progress, and God knew that. There are a lot more crazy spiritual things that happened too during the first transfer in Aibonito that I won't get into.

Anyway, this week we taught Giselle last week on a day I don't remember, and we invited her to pray about what we're saying. Anyway, we come back Tuesday with the members, and she's like, "I'm not going to lie. I prayed, but not for what you said for me to pray about," and she's like, then I started cleaning, and I found something, and she goes and gets it. It was a restoration pamphlet that the missionaries have with names. None of us knew, neither did the Cartagenas (the members who have lived in Aibonito for the last 15 years), but it had our number on it. The exact phone number that my companion and I have. And missionaries got phones in 2019. Giselle has lived in that house for 21 years and never saw missionaries before us. The members don't know them. Same phone number as us. God is real. But the story just stopped after nothing more.

We go back Saturday, and I feel like I just strongly need to testify to her of my story I just told all of you, and she's just crying. We're asking her about it again, and she continues on. She said she found it and started to cry, and she knows we're her angels sent from God. Then we asked her about baptism, and she said she wants to. Her daughter's reading the Book of Mormon! And they trust, and they feel something different when we're there sharing, and it's so awesome. She just wants to come to church one more time (when it's a regular meeting before we set a date) because she only came to a stake conference over Zoom, then went on vacation to New Jersey, then the Dominican Republic. She told us that she didn't know the Book of Mormon was about the Americas. We've taught her the restoration twice; it's okay though! We are going to help her get ready. She told me I have to be here for it, and I hope so because transfers are this Sunday, and we have conference, so it won't be a normal meeting. It will have to be a Sunday after, then we put the date. But I could possibly be gone. She also told us she wants—well, we told her we do baptisms in the chapel and the beach if she wanted to. That's the only time that we are allowed on the beach, and she says, "vamos pa la playa entonces" (we go to the beach then).

There's a lot more to the story, but this is a good version I feel like sharing.

God's real. There are no coincidences. God loves you. He knows us individually.

God is always for you, never against you!