Moving Company

I can't believe another week has passed already. The time slips away so quickly. This week has been another good one. We don't have any investigators we are actively teaching since our last baptism, so this week we focused on finding new investigators. We had been struggling with street contacts for a while. I go in cycles, I do really well for a while, and then for some reason I get a little timid. But geez, what the heck am I worried about!? I've got Christ's name on my chest, I can be bold just like he was! So we worked on that a lot this week and it paid off!

 

This week we had some cool experiences. Our recent convert taught the boys at mutual this week about being a police officer in Chicago. He has seen some crazy things so the boys were just in awe and so excited. He was so excited to teach them. He brought some supplies and some hand cuffs of course, so the boys had fun with that. He is doing super good and is just taking everything in so well. He is a little overwhelmed by how much information he still needs to learn, but he knows more than he thinks he does. He actually received the Aaronic Priesthood this week and was ordained a Priest! He was so excited about that. He is already just so involved in the ward and he just fits right in. He said he feels that he is at home so that is amazing.

 

We did some service this week too! I have done more service in the six weeks I have been in this area, than on my whole mission! It has been great :) We have some awesome members who are unfortunately moving to Utah. So we went one afternoon and helped them pack! We are going back this week as well to do the finishing touches. We were just the moving company this week because we had another opportunity to help people move as well. We got a call while we were at weekly planning this week and a member in the neighboring stake said that he had a family for us. He had taken them through the Gilbert Temple Open House and they were moving into our stake. So he told us they were moving the next day and he had asked if he could have the missionaries come help them move. They accepted the offer and he set out to find out who their missionaries would be. He was a little disappointed when he found out we were sisters...haha. So we wanted to give this new family a good support system and really impress them. Our ward had yet another Eagle Scout service project going on at the same time, so we had to work hard to find people to come help us. We stopped by people’s homes to invite them and we also called a ton of people and the Elder’s Quorum President sent out an email. So we were able to recruit a family to bring another truck and trailer and we also got our zone leaders and district leaders to come and then 2 other ward members came for some time as well. It was super good and the family was way impressed by all the help. The boys got big stuff and took it to the other house and Sister A and I stayed and helped the mom pack. They have 4 kids and the oldest will be turning 8 on June 1st. Jack pot! ;) haha but it went really well and we will probably be going back this week to help finish up or to help unpack. So hopefully we will have a new investigator soon!

 

We had dinner at our Bishop's house again this week. He seriously has the cutest family. He has a silly sense of humor and is always flirting with his wife too. It's cute. They have a cute tradition that I liked. Every year on New Year’s Day, they find a quote that stood out to them and something that they needed to work on that year. So one year they did a quote on scripture study and made a goal as a family to have scripture study as a family every day and they could only have 5 misses the whole year. If they did that, they would go to Disneyland! They reached their goal and had a great time. But I just loved the idea and tradition. They always paint a sign with the quote and hang it in their house and then make a new one each year and hang the rest in different places in their home! Too cute.

We also were able to visit this week with a man we have been to previously. We took him a Book of Mormon and showed him a little video. He said he wants to go to the Visitor’s center to watch the Joseph Smith movie when his wife gets home and also feed us dinner. He hopefully is coming around. He wasn't able to come to church this week so hopefully he comes next week.

 

We had a super cool experience of teaching a man I found on Facebook over Skype this week. He is from Brazil! He only knew a little English so when he didn't understand what we were saying, we typed a phrase into Google Translate and tried to sound out the Portuguese. It worked well! He said he would be open to having missionaries come to his house so we sent a referral and he also wanted 2 Book of Mormons, one in English and one in Portuguese. We also gave him the address to the closest church. It went super well and it is amazing that we can use the technology for something so good :)

 

So like I said before, we have focused on street contacting. We were able to talk to quite a few people and 4 people said we could come back and share a message sometime! So we were excited to see that in just a few days we were able to improve and find some new potential investigators.

 

This weekend our ward had a ward temple night and then a pot luck dinner afterward so we were able to go to that and just get to know some of the ward members better while we stuffed our faces. :) It was super good and very fun to talk to everyone. I don't think I've ever been so popular.
EVERYONE and their dog wanted to talk to us. But that is a good thing :)

 

We also had a super good Mission President Devotional this weekend that we took our new convert to. He enjoyed it and he was also able to meet President T. Some of the people who spoke gave their conversion story and one of the ladies had a super hard life. It makes me realize how lucky I have been. I really have had it easy.

It was a great week and it ended with transfer calls last night. We didn't get them until 11:30 so we waited up for the call, but it turns out I'm staying with my current companion here so that is exciting! I think things are about to pick up pretty soon. :)