Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Jun 16...my my what a week!

Okay I know it usually don't explain Monday's very often but this past Monday was amazing. After p-day we start work again at 6:00. It was such a crazy night we had 7 lessons in just 3 hours. I think we are finally being trusted in is area by the people and by The Lord. We had 2 appointments at 6 so I went to one with a member and Sister Coleman went to another. The lesson I got to teach was awesome! I taught the restoration to two less active members. One has a quite a bit of knowledge about the church, while the other really doesn't know much. But the spirit was so strong and they said there is something about the church that is drawing them to come back. I know the spirit has told them they need to come. We also got a new investigator. He had wanted to be baptized at one point but something happened and so the baptism never did happen. We hope we can get him back on track for baptism. It was a really great night. 

Tuesday was a fun day. I got to do exchanges with Sister Funaki, who is the missionary I trained last October. It was so fun to see how much she has grown over the past 7-8 months. Our first lesson was with this girl from the Philippines. She is catholic and she her father just passed away. That is one thing I love about the message we share. We have the knowledge of an after life that allows us to be with our families forever. After that lesson we headed to the chapel so the
Elders could do an iPad update for us. Then we went to the mission office to pick up a Tagalog Book of Mormon. We then did some finding and setting up appointments and had a lesson right before dinner. We were planning on sharing a video about the atonement but since our iPads were just updated we didn't have any videos downloaded any more. So we found a scripture that talked about it. Dinner was interesting and a little awkward. This lady took us to a Mexican restaurant and when she was going to pay the waiter came back and said her card wasn't working. This was the only form of payment the lady had, so she called the bank and nothing. We offered to pay but she wouldn't let us. So we sat there until she finally decided to call her friend to come help out. After dinner we had some good lessons. We had one that we talked about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the guy was really struggling with falling back into temptation over and over again. He
said he feels really dumb repenting if he is just going to make the same mistake again. We also taught this little girl who has a super short attention span. Right before we went home we stopped by this apartment of some people that are moving. They literally had a zoo in their apartment. They had 6 birds, 2 dogs, 3 cats, a snake, a lizard,and a hamster. 3 of the birds we parrots and talked a lot, they even would laugh like humans. It was so cool!

Wednesday I finally got back with my companion, at least for a little while. We had DTM in the morning and me and Sister Coleman were in charge of doing the training. We talked about the important role the Book Of Mormon plays in conversion. I think it is key. If you know the Book Of Mormon is true everything else follows. After DTM we attempted to do some service, but no one was home. So we asked the Elders in the Zone north of us, that we cover, if they could let us in to their DTM chapel because we would be doing a chapel tour for their training in a few days and we wanted to get acquainted with the chapel. That chapel ended up being a hard one to tour because their was no pictures, just long hallways of brick. For dinner that night we ate with our investigator family, the K*** . We followed up with them on whether or not they have been praying about baptism and they said they hadn't so we recommitted them. They did tell us though that they had been reading their scriptures together, which is a huge step for them. After dinner we had our weekly Aspen Stake chapel tour. It was a little nerve racking because the stake president was their and he likes the tours done a specific way and so the pressure was on. But, I felt like it ended up being great. That night we were able to teach two new people and they were both non-members. The first was is living with a family that is members and he really didn't seem to interested. The second one was a girl who met us at the church because her roommates are super anti. But that was a really cool lesson. Sadly we had to hand her off to the YSA elders. 

Thursday we did another DTM training on chapel tours and the elders forgot to tell us earlier that the actual chapel where we have sacrament meeting was locked. So we had to stop our tour a little earlier than planned. After that we got to do exchanges again. I went with Sister Andelin who was in the MTC with me. It was a fun day full of lessons and finding. A lot of the lessons were actually a little awkward because there was a lot of awkward silence at the beginning before we would start.

Friday we did our last DTM training on chapel tours, at least for a while. This chapel tour went a lot better than the one the day before. When we got home we ate lunch and then started our weekly planning. All of our appointments were no shows. Which made it a long day. The one thing that did happen that was cool was dinner. We ate dinner with Brother and Sister Skinner and when he asked where we were from he told us his sister lived there. It ended up being Delene Ostler's brother! What a small world. So I have now eaten with Delene's brother from Orem and sister from Provo! 

Saturday turned into a service day for our ward mission leaders. One of the stakes we work with really doesn't have a lot of work right now and so we wanted to gain the mission leaders trust so that they will give us more work. So we wrote all of them notes and made cupcakes. Hopefully this will help. We also spent a lot of time with the senior couple, the Cornish's. They take care of us as if we are their own kids. They are amazing and help us a lot. We tried make some more contacts but the big Orem fest was on Saturday so no one was home.

Sunday was Father's Day. We had a meeting with the stake to discuss missionary work. Then we went home and studied, then went to sacrament meeting. After church we went and helped a ward mission leader deliver a birthday gift to one of the non-members in his ward. She is 16 and she goes to church every Sunday by herself. Her mom works from 3 in the morning until 10:30 at night 7 days a week. She does home health care. I don't ever want to be away from my family for that long! The gift that we gave the girl was a quad with her name printed on it. We are starting the discussions with her next week. Then we got to go teach the K*** again. I love their family. We asked about how the prayers were coming and the kids said they prayed but the mom said she hasn't but she still will. We asked the kids if they felt like they got an answer and they said no. We asked about how they were expecting to get their answer. We found out the boy really felt peaceful and happy when he prayed about it. And really that was his answer he just didn't recognize it. So then we taught about tithing and they thought it was a little strange but they were will to pay it after they get baptized. We also asked them if we could shoot for a specific day and they got a little worried. I hope they didn't feel like we were pushing them. They told us they would pray about it. I really hope everything works out for this family. Dinner was interesting. It was really good thought. We had a fondue dinner, we each had two little sticks that we would put a piece of meat on and then stick it in a boiling pot of broth. It took a long time, it was weird having to wait 5 minutes between each bite. But they family we ate with was awesome. They are actually good friends with the K*** and so we invited them to talk with the kids on how they felt about baptism and also to make sure they come to church every week. 

We have an interesting new investigator this week. She comes from a polygamist family and her dad is actually in the hospital with a broken neck right now. We found out he broke his neck from falling off a carriage he was "driving". I don't know if she really knows the difference between her beliefs and ours so hopefully we can clear some things up.
I am grateful to be a missionary, I love sharing the gospel, and I love seeing lives change!
Love, Sister Harrison 




No comments:

Post a Comment