My last weekly email on my mission. I never thought this day would come and now that it’s here it is hard to believe I’m almost finished. It will be hard going home because this mission might seem to fade like a dream but I know I’ll think about something pertaining to my mission everyday for the rest of my life. Here are the highlights for this past week:
District Meeting: I was asked to give a training Monday night for Tuesday morning... yeah, I know. The ZLs wanted me to train one last time as a missionary on whatever topic I wanted. Makes it even harder when I have to come up with my own direction last minute. I decided to talk about trunkiness (term in the mission where a missionary is wanting to go home and has his bags or “trunk” packed and ready to go in his/her mind). I wanted to train on this mainly on how to overcome it. I drew upon my experience as an EFY (“especially for youth” youth camp centered on the gospel) counselor. I compared the youths’ experience of what I call “spiritual roller coaster” (where they come home after a week being on a spiritual high to come crashing back down a short time later and then repeating this process) to a missionaries' spiritual roller coaster battling trunkiness. I had a lot of fun training on this and then had the opportunity to give my departing missionary testimony.
Live Chapel Tour: We are trying to be creative with our Facebook proselyting so we came up with the idea to do a chapel tour video. We can’t record in the chapel so we thought to just video the paintings in the building and teach principles of the gospel. Neither of us had done a live video on Facebook before and felt it would be cool to try. We did some practices the day before but once you start a live video there are no redos or cuts; whatever is filmed is filmed. So we finally had the courage to do it and the first time Sister Jewel accidentally swiped off the app while handing me the iPad which took us off of our video. We had a little panic with this. We didn’t realize that it was still recording us so when I got back onto Facebook it showed we were still live. I said something to Sister Jewel and she popped right back up and continued on like a pro. We deleted this video and then redid it so no one will ever know...except those 16 lucky people.
Tracting: The sun was finally out on Wednesday so we did almost two hours of Tracting. We parked the car and just walked. The houses were all on one side of the street and we tracted until the very end. That was such a trek getting back to our car after we were done. This guy named Fernando let us share our message. His eyes had light to them and he was so accepting of the Book of Mormon. We set up an appointment with him but that fell through later as he got called into work. Hopefully the missionaries will still be able to teach him in the future.
Lessons: Had our lesson with Cole finally. We tracted into him forever ago and our appointment kept getting rescheduled. We brought Brother Holt and Brother Farnsworth to our lesson we had at the church and it went great. He is so open to learning more which is phenomenal and truly a breath of fresh air. We had another lesson with Leah and that went well too. The Spirit was so strong when her aunt was testifying to her that it is her choice to be baptized and how much this gospel will change her life if she choices it. She is great and she even said she felt comfortable around us which she normally wouldn’t in that situation. We had a lesson with Nicole on the Word of Wisdom (law of health) and that was very rocky. We knew she was battling with some Word of Wisdom struggles so we think we were a little fearful to have this lesson. We scheduled a lesson for the next day which we brought over her neighbor this time and we helped to clarify some things which went a lot better. We seriously love teaching her.
Dinner with the Goldbergs: They are like a super member-missionary couple in our ward. Everyone knows them and Brother Goldberg hands out copies of the Book of Mormon like they are candy. We asked about their conversion stories which Sister Goldberg said we have already heard. In April 2017, Elder Rasband gave a talk in General Conference about a missionary experience he had while serving in New Jersey. He felt prompted by the Spirit to put his foot inside the door to ask if there was anybody else in their household who had a question. I reread the talk and he didn’t go much into her conversion story so she expanded on that which was really cool. (We learned that animals will be in heaven! [Revelation 5:11-14; Doctrine and Covenants 77:3]) She told us that in order for Elder Rasband to use her story she had to sign all this paperwork for legal rights and protection which was interesting. The Church is very good at covering all of it’s basis.
Sent from ALASKA!
Sister Shelley Willden
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