What a week. I thought last week had all the miracles but this week had an overflow from last week. Though would you all pray for snow? I know that sounds ridiculous coming from someone living in Alaska but we need it. We have gone through a heat wave and the roads are just covered in ice. Sister Yeates has fallen a couple of times from the ice but she realizes the more you fall the easier it is to get up. What a life lesson we can learn from that. Here are some highlights:
Lessons: We had a lesson with Sheyla about temples with Sister Fitzpatrick as a member present. It went great because Sister Fitzpatrick works at the temple once a week and was able to share her testimony of how going to the temple gives her peace and enjoyment and helps her to have an eternal perspective to life. Since we found Sheyla’s records we are helping her to work towards going to the temple and she is very excited to do family history work. Later in the week we had a lesson with the Hinckleys. One of their sons and the husband are fairly recent converts so we are finishing the new member lessons. One of their other sons is not baptized so we are trying to work with him too. We forgot they had changed the time of our lesson with them so we were a bit late but were able to teach obedience in 15 minutes by using an analogy of a kite. The boys seemed to like it.
Tracting Miracles: Well we went back to Rhiannon and she told us that she is not wanting to explore other churches right now as she is just now attending a church since she was 7 years old. We will still keep in contact and hopefully can still teach her a little bit about how this gospel can improve the quality of her life. Right after having somewhat of sad news to not teach her automatically we went tracting and one of the first few houses we knocked on was this woman named Kim who let us come in to share the #LightTheWorld video. She cried. She was overcome with the Spirit and said her daughter who is 7 is asking questions and wants religion. We set up a time for her to come have a church tour. We practiced doing a chapel tour the next day with our ward mission leader which went really well. The day we scheduled to have the tour we got a text from her saying basically her husband is not for it which was really sad. Okay so these two tracting miracles ended in tracting blues but then there is Nicole. The elders tracted into her the same mega tract day and we went back and caught her at the perfect time when she was waking up before going to work for her graveyard shift. We set up an appointment to come back and we were beside ourselves. She said she wants to go to a church that is a community with each other and teaches about truth to help us in our lives and not go for the rock bands and that such. With my mouth dropped we told her that this is the Church she is looking for. We taught her the first half of the restoration and she was excited to read the Book of Mormon. It is like The Lord let her fall into our laps. What a tender mercy and miracle for us after so much hard work lately.
Facebook Video: We were at dinner with the Palmers and we asked them what their ideas were of doing something with children that can be shared on social media. The Light the World scripture of the following day was Mark 10:14: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” As missionaries we are limited on what we can do with children as it can turn into legal complexities if people want to take advantage of the Church. They came up with the idea to video children’s testimonies about Christ. We asked some members nearby who had kids if we could do this and post it on Facebook and it was awesome. The kids really enjoyed it and it was fun for us. It was a bit stressful having to work only in the bounds of our photos app’s video editing resources but it turned out the best a missionary could do.
Double District Meeting: Okay this is just another way of saying zone meeting. Zone meetings use to be a thing in the past prior to having zone conferences and interviews every transfer. We had this meeting to talk about all the announcements being discussed in MLC and to come up with our goals for baptism in December. It was needed and cool to have some input to what our zone goals will be.
Transfer calls: Normally the sisters get our transfer calls on Thursday night but that didn’t happen this time. President Toone was up in Fairbanks for zone conference and then coming back they had to sleep in the airport and fly out the next morning. Long story short we got our calls Saturday afternoon. Sister Johnson and I are staying and Sister Yeates is going to be with SIster Vellinga in South Anchorage in the Jewel Lake and YSA wards. Guess who is coming here? Sister Jewel!!!! I was called to greenie break her after my first area but then emergency transferred to Soldotna after a week. I got to know Sister Jewell pretty fast and always wanted to serve with her again. Well now she gets to kill me! (“Kill me” means that she will be my companion right before I go home—like you die on a mission if we relate a mission life to real life). She is getting a double kill. We will kill off Sister Johnson who is going home a half a transfer early for school right after Christmas and I die at the end of January. It is gong to be so much fun.
Sent from ALASKA!
Sister Shelley Willden
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