Hey family!! I love you
guys so much!! Like seriously, I just love each of you so so so much!!! I hope
that you had a Happy Thanksgiving this past week:)
Since I am sure that you
are wondering, I had dinner on Thanksgiving with the members that we live with,
the Fredricks. They are really great and she made delicious food. She had all
of her children and grandchildren over as well for the dinner so it was really
nice to be surrounded by family and children. It was difficult being away from
home but I had great members watching out for me here. One really nice thing
that Sister Fredricks did, was surprised me by making an attempted version of
your orange jello salad, mom:) I'll be honest, it was far from what its
normally like, but I was so touched that she did that for me:) She makes us
feel really at home and loved:) So I am very lucky to live with such great
members:)
Also on Thanksgiving we
went over to the Broyles house and made some banana bread for some of our
investigators and less actives in the ward:) that was really fun:)
Transfers happened this
last week! We waited anxiously by our phone waiting to get the phone call that
would tell us what would happen to us for the next 6 weeks of our lives:) I am
staying in the Lakeview ward with Sister Frisina:) I'm actually really excited
about this and I feel really good about it:) There are great things in store
for us here:) I can feel it:)
This week was kind of
hard and discouraging at some points...:) Our 3 "most promising"
progressive investigators dropped us. C (the young boy that read the
book of Mormon twice) told us that he didn't want us to come back anymore. That
same day we went over to an investigators house, E. She is 9 years old and
wants to be baptized and become a member so badly. She has had all of the
discussions and believes everything. Her parents are atheist though and they
have a problem with our churches stance on gay marriage. So they told us that
we weren't allowed to come back and see E anymore. Also we took one of the
loafs of banana bread that we made to Ev's house, our other young woman
investigator. She has been living with her aunt but a family crisis came up and
she had to move that day back to her home in Texas. It was really discouraging
because this all happened on the same day. I was really sad and
discouraged but I know that whether we are planting the seeds, or reaping the
seeds, we are all called to the same work. I know that they have been
given the experiences that they needed to accept the gospel at a later
time.
On a positive note! We
have another potential investigator! We went on Tuesday with a member for
team ups and we felt like we needed to go see our investigator K. She is
16. We got to her house and her sister answered the door and told us that
K wasn't actually home. We talked to her sister though for a
minute and asked if we could talk to her instead. It was really cool
though because she had a lot of questions that she wanted to ask and
she was really interested in what we believed in. So we taught her the first
lesson and plan to go back sometime soon this week to follow up with
her. Her name is S and she is 19. It's kind of interesting how
most of our investigators have been youth aged. I really like it
though!
Guess what happened
yesterday!!! We got a call at 8:30 asking if we could teach young womens that
day:) 10 minutes later we got a call asking if we could teach gospel
principles/essentials (not sure what its actually called) Yea church started at
9 and we had to teach the two lessons. Yikes! haha I guess when you are a
missionary, you are the default person for ward members to call! I couldn't
believe that we had to teach two lessons the same day though with no time to
prepare! The spirit was there though as we were teaching and both of them
turned out really great! I was so relieved! One of the lessons was on charity.
One thing that I realized that I haven't really noticed before, is that
charity, and how strongly we feel the spirit, is connected. When we feel
charity, we also feel the spirit. When we feel the spirit, we feel a strong
sense of love and concern for others. As we increase our ability to feel pure
love for others, our ability to have the spirit with us stronger increases as
well. So for this week, I want you guys to try and find a way to increase in
Charity. There are 4 ways in the lesson that you can do this. 1: Study the Life
of the Savior. 2:Pray for it (Moroni 7:48) 3: Learn to love yourself. (Matthew
22:39) Something that stood out to me is that we can't fully love people,
unless we love ourselves. 4: Avoid thinking that we are better than others. I
want you guys to think of which of these 4 things you could better implement
into your life and do it:)
I love you guys so much!
I have been so blessed to be a part of such a great family! I love you guys
dearly! You will always have a special part of my heart:) Don't worry about
me:) Heavenly Father is taking good care of me here:) I am being protected and
guided and He gives me tender mercies each day to know that He is mindful of
me:)
Have a great week!
Sister Christensen
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