New Everything!

August 18, 2014 Wow, what a difference it was this week compared to my previous many weeks this summer. This congregation has 4 assigned missionaries- two elders and two sisters. They just switched areas as I came in. The sisters' area is now Penfield and East Rochester, and our area is Pittsford, Mendon, and Honeoye a Falls. Haha oh Pittsford. We found some stats and apparently Pittsford was one of the 2009 top 100 places to live in the US, and the average income per household is $94,000. Graduating rate from high school is 99%, which 97% of graduates being college bound. Very very different from any other area I've been in. To be honest, my biggest fear has been to get transferred to a rich area with nothing going on. Guess what? Heavenly Father has a sense of humor, but also a better sense of how to help me become better than I do. The sisters have to be giving tours at the historical sites most of the week, and so they normally don't have much time in their assigned areas on top of giving tours. Pittsford has been a sisters area for a long time, and just now is being worked by elders who have more time. But one of the consequences of switching the area from sisters to elders is that we have to go through a transition stage that includes us not have much to work with at the beginning. BUT. One thing I have learned is that if you have faith, The Lord will provide. We've seen so many miracles so far, and it's only been a few days. For example, I was walking down the street tonight and needed to go to the bathroom pretty bad (thank you dad for the genes). We see a guy walking and approach him, asking him where the nearest bathroom is. He says that the closest one is his house, and he leads us into his house to let me use the bathroom. Turns out, he's read part of the Book of Mormon before and met with missionaries a while ago! He set up a time to meet with us later this week. This is just one of multiple tangible miracles we've experienced ever since starting this intimidating journey of carving out a new area. I've relied on The Lord a lot to help me stay motivated and driven to find and find and find new people to teach, and others to help. He's definitely helped me get through many difficult times on my mission, and I don't anticipate anything different this time around :) We talked to a family today about trials. I know that we go through them for a reason. No one will escape trials. God loves us, yet still gives us trials. Why? I think there are many different reasons God would provide us or rather allow us to experience trials. It is hard to grow if we don't know what it's like to go through something hard. Something sad. Something imperfect. Because if we know the difference between distress, tragedy, sadness, worry, and happiness, peace, joy, then we can appreciate the joy peace and happiness to a much fuller extent. If we always live in San Diego our whole life and never escape the summertime paradise, then we become immune to that beautiful feeling of rubbing our toes through the sand, feeling the warmth of the sun against our skin, or looking over miles of blue cloudless skies. We'd appreciate it so much more when we're exposed to harsh New York winters, or bitter snow covering the driveway on your way to work, etc. I think we will get to Heaven and more fully understand as well as appreciate every individual trial we went though on this earth. Now don't think I'm sending underlying messages by mentioning trials or New York winters. I love it here and I'm not going through any particular tough trial. It was just a conversation we had that I felt was worth repeating haha in fact we have this same conversation pretty often with different people! Anyways, I love you all! Love, Elder Hirschi