Humbled

Hello Family!!

Wow. Such a good week. I've been humbled, learned SO much and seen so many miracles. The Lord's hand really is in this work. Sorry my letter is a few days late. We had Zone Conference this week and so our P-Day got switched. Speaking of Zone Conference, it was amazing. I now understand why every RM is so crazy about their mission president and I'm positive I have the best of them all. I feel so blessed to serve under President Sperry. He really is so inspired and full of so much love for us and the work. He was an institute teacher before and knows the scriptures inside and out. He is teaching be through example and His workshops what true love and appreciation for the scriptures means. Personal study has become one of my very favorite parts of the day. Pouring over the scriptures always gives me the "spiritual energy" I need to make through the day.

The work is going so great! We went from struggling to find any investigators to, through a series of little miracles, having too many to know what to do with. There aren't enough hours in the day! I am really excited about this family, the Dellarosarios, who the Lord completely guided us to. They are so excited about the gospel and we were suprised to find out they were taught in 2006 but then the missionaries never came back! We sat down to teach and they whipped out a Book of Mormon. Talk about a miracle!

For all of you who though I would lose weight in the Philippines, including me, that is definitely not a possibility haha. For as much sweating and good amount of walking we do the members and investigators feed us more rice, pop, treats, pop and more RICE. Its great! This week I discovered all the delicious food the Philippines has to offer that I have been missing out on all this time! SO GOOD! I finally tried the right kind of mangoes. They are truly a slice of heaven on earth! I can't eat enough.

This has also been the week of unpleasant creatures in apartment. We now have cockroaches. They're huge and luckily Sister Criste is really good at killing them. I also finally figured out what the tail and little legs I saw fly around the corner I was telling you about on Skype. Its a rat....gross. Kate Magleby if you are reading this you'll appreciate the fact that I'm afraid it will eat my feet at night :) We also have mice, who nibbled on Sister Noriega's Preach My Gospel during the night. So in weekly planning she informed all of us that her goal was to exterminate the rats and mice. Haha I'll let you know how it goes. We're pretty sure he lives in our couch.

I finally had my first mail run (which just means we got to pick up our mail) since coming to the Philippines! Thank you for your letters :) They meant the world to me!! Again, I have the best family and friends in the world. 

I got to go to the temple today. It was amazing! I didn't realize how much I had missed it until we got into our session. It is always so loud and crazy here so it was amazing to just sit in silence and peace. We are SO blessed to have a temple in a neighboring mission and get to go once a transfer. We are only like 15 miles maybe from it but we had to get up at 4:00 am to get there because in traffic it takes us about an hour. It also made me realize again how blessed I am to come from somewhere where I can get to a temple in about 5 minutes. So many members here ask me about Utah and have told me that their dream is to just get there once before they die. We are so blessed and take all that we have at our fingertips there for granted!

This church is so true and I feel so humbled and blessed to be a representative of Jesus Christ sharing the gospel message in the Philippines. We have a loving Heavenly Father who hears and answers all our prayers! We are so blessed.

I love you all SO much! Mahal na mahal po kayo!

Love always,

Sister Porter

 This is our house, Rainbow House, because the neighborhood is called Rainbow. Its awesome. We only live in one half of what you can see and the top set of windows is a different apartment, but the middles set of windows on the left is our bedroom view.

 Pictures after Zone Conference. The only time it isn't too hot to wear that shirt is when we have meeting because it gets so cold in the air conditioned room, which is awesome!

 Just loving it.

  Banana trees outside our apartment

 Temple DAY!!!!!

Manilla Temple :) So beautiful and SO small inside haha