What touching experiences shared by this sister missionary.
“The Future of Puerto Rico Is Bright” – Elder Neil L. Andersen, March 18th, 2017
My Dear Family and Friends,
I want to start off by expressing my heartfelt gratitude for all of you. All of your prayers towards the lovely people of Puerto Rico, for my family and I and for our mission. I have felt the love of many through your emails, letters, and hand-written notes. There are not enough words, songs, letters that could describe the love I have for all of you.
These last 3 weeks have been without a doubt some of the most spiritual and some of the most faith-trying weeks of my life. A lot has happened so I’ll just start from the beginning. So, on Saturday the 16th of September we received a text from the Mission President, that we needed to go to the store and buy food, water, and any other supplies needed in preparation for Hurricane Maria. Everyone was already freaking out a bit, buying everything they could since we had just gone through Hurricane Irma a week and a half before. We were able to buy everything and all was well.
That following Monday night, a member had been accompanying us to different appointments and she was updating us on what category the Hurricane was at, and we knew the trajectory and that it was coming towards us, but we really still kinda had no idea what was going to happen. The next morning, we received a text saying that we needed to pack our evacuation carry on suitcase (basically, grab a change of clothes and leave everything else) and that we were going to the Mission Home. That was not what we were expecting, but we packed up and were on our way.
While I was packing, I wasn’t thinking that this might be the last time I would be packing, but I did get this prompting many times, that came to my mind saying, “pack what you REALLY don’t want to lose”. So, I followed it and packed my scriptures, missionary journals and memory cards of all my mission pictures, still not thinking anything severe was going to happen, but I followed the prompting anyways.