Visas (continued)

Hey everyone!  Hope you are well!

Sorry for not giving very much detail last time.  I was more tired than anything else.  And actually I've been sleeping more than anything else this p-day.

I was thinking about giving y'all an example of my daily life right now, but being in the office my life is so crazy that I can't come up with any sort of consistency.

This week has been so crazy I can't believe it.  There is nothing that I haven't done.  After all our plans of traveling through different parts of paraguay to do zone conferences with the missionaries got thrown out the window by the news of having to renew everyone's visas, we were a little stunned.  Basically they told us that every missionary in the entire mission has to come to Asuncion to get a real visa, and they had to do it in the next 3 weeks.  That did not give us a lot of time to get 180 visas.  We started pulling in missionaries from the farthest parts of the mission so they could head up to the DMV-looking office and get their work done.  It's a little weird because I'm just the tech specialist, but the majority of that weight falls over my comp's and my shoulders.  

We have been working tirelessly to get every missionary over here.  We usually bring a zone of missionaries out here for 2-3 days, and in that time they all need interviews with president, they need to stay fed, they need their zone conference, and they all need to go through the visa process.  It's a lot to handle.

This is one of the busiest weeks that the office has ever seen.  And I just got here.  Plus, when missionaries come, they stay here in the office.  So I'm doing things I've never done before without help (because the guy who is supposed to be training me is too busy with other things) while there are 20 missionaries behind me with nothing to do but be loud and distracting.  

We also had a surprising amount of medical emergencies this week.  And, of course, that somehow falls over the tech specialist's shoulders.  I wake up in the middle of the night to tell Elders what they need to do and how to get to the hospital to get the help they need.  I had to call 7 different hospitals to find the MRI machine that one Elder needed and I helped Elders that lived in a tiny tiny town 2 hours away from anything find a place to get urgent medical attention in the middle of the night.  I also gave 30 min presentations in every zone conference and helped every other person talking with their powerpoint presentations for the same conferences.  The amount of work I am doing literally is blowing my own mind.  And I think my comp is honestly doing more work than I am.  

Also, fun fact, during the visa process I met the office elders from the north mission in paraguay, and there are 5 missionaries that do the job that I do alone.

Also, I am learning a lot about how to keep my life Christ-centered, especially because not everything I am doing is so directly related to Christ as it was when I only taught about Him.  The help he gives us is incredible.  Something I loved is that reading is Mosiah 14 in spanish, instead of saying that Christ was despised, it says he was undervalued.  It really made me think about all the pain He suffered for the people that would never even appreciate it.  It honestly made me really sad.  I am learning a lot about the importance of Christ's Atonement that I thought I already knew.  My invitation for you today is to never undervalue the Atonement of Christ in your life.  It covers everyone.  

And also listen to a song called The Same God by Sofia Calderwood.  She's my mission president's daughter.

Love Yall!

Elder Blacker