Hola! Familia y amigos!
You are probably wondering why I’m speaking in Spanish. Well my nueva compañera es Hermana Tolman. She is a Spanish speaking missionary. Since she speaks Spanish we get to have language study every day which is pretty awesome. So I have picked up a few things here and there. So far I can pray for the basics in spanish, greet people, ask some questions, and bear my testimony. It has been a lot of fun. I see this as an opportunity that Heavenly Father has blessed me with to try and learn Spanish. Hermana Tolman is from South Carolina. She is super awesome! We have had a great week so far. SHe has been out as long as I have so we will go home together next July. Sister Thomas ended up going to Elizabethtown which is where she actually started her mission, so she was really happy about that.
Transfers were a little different this time. In the past I have always gone with my companions to the meeting and then picked up my new one, but this time I actually went out to Beaver and worked with a Sister out there for the day. Sister Thomas went to transfers with the other Sister from Beaver. I worked with Sister Romero and then in the evening Hermana Tolman met us in Beaver and we drove home to Butler from there. Sister Tolman is really short and super tiny. We have gotten along really well this past week. We have been working super hard too. It was hard to say goodbye to Sister Thomas, but I am so excited to see what these next weeks will hold with Hermana Tolman.
Within the week that we have been together we have contacted some new people and picked up a lot of potentials. I just feel like something amazing is going to happen within this next transfer 🙂
MLC happened this week and we were invited by President and Sister Johnson to stay in the mission home with all the other Sister Training Leaders. So we drove to Pittsburgh Thursday night and had MLC Friday. It was such a great MLC. We acutally had an Area Seventy come to our meeting. We talked a lot about working with the members which is something that I have been pondering about recently. The members here love missionaries and they desire to share the gospel, but they never come out with us or give us referrals. Hermana Tolman and I have been talking about getting the members to come out to lessons with us and helping them feel the spirit. Our hope is that this will in turn cause them to invite their friends to meet with the missionaries.
Saturday was a great day for us. We taught a lot of lessons. Hermana Tolman was able to meet Tiny and Jeanette and that was a great lesson. We are reteaching Tiny the lessons and he always tells us that he already knows these things or that he was just studying about this stuff. It is great to see that he is really going strong and putting forth effort.
That day we also met with our investigators Shana and Teresa. We started out by following up! We asked her what her experience was like when she prayed to know what church she should be baptized in, our church or the baptist church? She told us that she wanted to get baptized at our church! We asked her how to she came to this decision and she told us that she likes the way we teach, it feels different than the Baptist Church. So we set her with a date and she is planning to be baptized on December 6th! SHe is really excited about this 🙂 They had told us previously that they are visual learners so we were racking our brains and came up with a way to explain the Restoration. It worked really well. We were able to help her understand that Christ established a church which was then lost and has now been established once again. At the end we invited them to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. Shana said she would and so we turned to Teresa. She told us that she doesn’t get answers from God. She told us that she had prayed about the other churches and didn’t get an answer so she just decided to not join any church. As she said this a thought came into my mind that had never occurred to me before. I was told that by Heavenly Father not giving her an answer He was actually giving her an answer. He was telling her that those were not the right churches. I explained this to Teresa and she pondered for a moment. She told us that that made sense and that she would pray to know. Heavenly Father was definitely guiding me in that moment because she had told us this before, but it had never occurred that it was answer. I know that Heavenly Father answers our prayers and sometimes it is in a way that we didn’t expect, but He does answer.
We also invited Shana to church and she actually came yesterday! She really enjoyed it and the kids really helped her feel welcome. It was funny. During the lesson she asked if she had to come to our church every Sunday and we told her yes, she smiled and said ok 🙂 I am so excited for Shana and she had definitely grown spiritually since we first started teaching her. Our vision is to really help her understand who her Savior is and what His atonement can do for her in her life.
We had dinner yesterdary with this really awesome family. They are the Sanders and they just moved back into the ward. They lived here and then moved to Las Vegas and then moved back. Sister Sanders is from Sweden and is a Nuclear Engineer and Brother Sanders is from South Carolina and is a Lawyer. They are a super funny family and are very down to earth. They have traveled all over the world and speak quite a few languages. They sang the Cookie Monster’s song to us in Swedish. It was awesome!
We had a really neat experience last night. Yesterday at church Jan, the wife of Nick our investigator, asked if we wanted to come over and have a lesson with Nick. (Keep in mind that we still had Weekly Planning to do because we were able to get it down on Friday due to MLC) We told her that we would love to come have a lesson and that we could be there around 7 which would give us enough time to go to dinner and then drop off the Elders back in their area. Well when we got to dinner it wasn’t quite finished and then dinner ended up being a three course meal, which was really good by the way. ANyways back to the story. We ended up leaving their place later than planned so wwe debated whether or not we should go to Nick and Jan’s or just go home and finish weekly planning. As we talked I kept feeling like we needed to go see Nick. We didn’t get to Jan and Nick’s until 7:45. We always say a prayer before we go into a lesson and it was my turn to offer it. I know that in the past Nick gets really tired at night so I prayed that he would be awake and alert for the lesson so that he could feel the spirit. The great lesson with Nick went great. We read the Tesimony of Joseph Smith and he was asking a lot of questions. He has become more open since we have started meeting with him. He smiles a lot more and we can get him to laugh a lot. Hermana Tolman asked him if he believed that he could know if the Book of Mormon was true. Nick told us that he would like to know if it was true. I felt prompted to ask him to pray about the Book of Mormon again. He said he would so we asked if he knew how and his reply was, “I hear you pray all the time so I think I can.” We went over prayer briefly and talked about how God might answer. He then looked at me and asked me how I came to know that the Book of Mormon was true. I told him that when I was in high school I decided to read the Book of Mormon from cover to cover. I needed to know for myself whether or not the Book of Mormon was true and if I wanted to stay apart of this church. The night I finished the last page of the Book of Mormon I knelt down beside my bed and offerred up a prayer to Heavenly Father. I asked Him if the Book of Mormon was true. A thought came to my mind, “You have always known it is true.” I hadn’t realized that I knew it was true until the Spirit whispered that to me. Ever since then I have never doubted that the Book of Mormon was true. He then joked and said, “So if God tells me this is true, I don’t have to keep reading right?” We laughed and told him it was qutie the opposite. As we were leaving the house Jan came out and talked to us in private. She told us that Nick was excited for us to come and that he had been waiting. When he thought we weren’t going to show he came into the kitchen and sadly said, “They probably aren’t going to come.” Remember how I said that we almost didn’t go? Well I am sure glad that the Spirit told us to go because we would have disappointed Nick. The Spirit is definitely working on him because he is happy when we come over and he is becoming more comfortable around us. I know that Heavenly Father has great plans in store for Nick. I really hope I am here to see them unfold!
This week has just been super awesome! I am loving being companions with Hermana Tolman. I’ll bear my testimony in Spanish.
Yo se que el Libro de Mormon es veradero. Este conocimiento ayudame a superar desafios. Yo se que JesuCristo es mi Salvador. Estoy agradecida por este conocimiento que Dios es mi PAdre Celesital y su hijo es mi Redentor. Esta creencia ayudame a tener esperanza y vivir feliz. Yo dijo estas cosas en el nombre de JesuCristo, Amen.
Hermana Tolman and I
Hermana Tolman and I
SISTER JONES' BLOG 