Wednesday, August 20, 2014

August 4, 2014

Hey family and friends!

I hope that you have all had a great week! You are continually in my
thoughts and prayers. I hope that you have a great time in Idaho! Tell
everyone hi and that I love them! haha and maybe you can even start a
water fight for me? :) haha.

So I heard the news that Elder Bayles will be going back out next week
right? I am not sure if it is the same mission or not, but someone
from the Spencer Branch left to the MTC about 5 weeks ago. His name is
Elder Olsen and he was called to the Argentina Mendoza mission. His
plane goes out next week. (maybe the 11th but I am not quite sure on
the specifics.) but it is sometime next week! So maybe if you get a
chance, you can tell Elder Bayles to look out for an Elder Olsen!
There are always pretty cool connections all the time:)

We actually have 2 young women that are almost ready to put in their
mission papers! (Kendal Bosch and Jessica Holloway) It is so exciting!
And Elder Holloway (Jessica's older brother) comes home from his
mission in about 3 weeks! So I hope that I can stay here to see all of
these great things happen!

On Friday, we had another Branch activity which is always fun!
Everyone brought their own meat to grill and a side. They had several
families in the Branch make their own homemade miniature golf hole. So
after the food, we played mini golf and field games. It was a lot of
fun and a lot of people got pretty creative! I will have to send some
pictures of it. :)








On Sunday, we had 2 little girls get baptized. They are both 8 years
old:) One of them, Vanessa Tunzer, is actually a girl in a part member
family that we have been working with lately. She is setting such a
great example for her father and other family members! He is not a
member yet but he has expressed that he really wants to get baptized!
He said that he needs a few months though so the Elders are working
with him. We try to visit and help the mother, Sister Tunzer. They are
great and doing so well! We went over to their house on Saturday for
Vanessa's birthday party and we had a huge water fight!! It was so
much fun!





So I wanted to share with you all, a miracle that happened last night.
It was 8:50 pm, and all of the plans that we had made had fallen
through. It is one of the hardest times for a missionary when you
don't have anything left planned. You only have a little bit of time
before you have to go inside, or if you are lucky and get in a lesson,
you can be home by 9:30 pm. You can walk around for a little bit and
try to talk to people, but most people are inside by that point. You
can knock on a door, but most of the time, people don't really like
that when it's that late. So we were trying to think how we could best
use our time and decided that we needed to pray to see what Heavenly
Father wanted us to use that time for. As Sister Peterson was praying,
I got the impression that we needed to go and try this particular
house. I am not sure if you would call it a potential investigator or
not? haha We had been walking back home one night and it was about 9
pm so we were trying to get home on time. Sister Peterson glanced over
at a house and noticed that a lady was just standing there watching
us. She acted like she was just talking to me so that the lady didn't
notice that we had seen her. We have been feeling like we needed to go
back and try to talk with her, but we haven't felt right with the
timing quite yet. But as we were praying, I couldn't get her out of my
thoughts. I knew that we needed to go and try to contact her. So we
did. We quickly walked down the road towards her house, when lo and
behold, she was sitting outside! This is a missionary's dream! It is
great when people are outside because it is so much easier to start a
conversation with them naturally! So we said hi and asked how she was
doing and little conversation starters like that:) Then, she came up
to us and just started talking with us! She is
Evangelical Christian. She has 4 children but most of them are grown
and out of the house. She has one daughter age 15, that still
lives with her. Her husband died from cancer about 5 years ago, and
that's when she decided to move to Emmetsburg. She thought that it
would be easier to raise her children alone in a small town. She has
been to Utah before so she has seen and talked with missionaries in
the past. She had some good questions about Prophets, the organization
of the church, and the Book of Mormon. So we were able to teach her a
little bit last night. She was so friendly and it was cool because it
felt like I could be myself around her:) Oh and they have a foreign
exchange student coming to live with them on Friday from Spain!! Sweet
right? She gave us some sweet corn:) (we get a lot of that this time
of year:)) and said that we could come back anytime. She works a lot
so she said it will be hard to catch her home, but she is ok with us
coming by! It was a very cool tender mercy last night as we were
guided in our steps with the short time we had left.

So that's all for now. I hope that you have a good week! and please
stay safe!! I love you all so much! Wish me luck! I am giving another
training this week for District Meeting and it's transfer week!
Anything could happen.:)

With love,
Sister Christensen

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