March 11, 2013

11 March 2013

My Fam,

Hope everyone had a good week! This was Sister Passey's first week in the mission field. I have been so amazed by her! She is so solid and completely prepared. We've had a lot of fun together already this past week too. We connected really quickly which is such a blessing. I don't know why, maybe because we are pretty similar and have a lot in common, but we already feel really comfortable around each other. And we have a lot of the same views on things as far as missionary work and how to use our time and other things so that really helps with unity. This is just going to be the best 3 months! I'm excited.

Yesterday was Joseph''s third time at church! He expressed his desire to us to be baptized but he needs to overcome his drinking and smoking first and so once his lifestyle is in line with being worthy than he'll be set. The Feriovas are still helping us with translating some of the lesson. They are a great help.

We got a new investigator this week named Eric. He is a 63-year-old man that I had met here with another sister on exchanges here in Irvine. So we were finally able to contact him this week and he is really nice!! We've taught him twice now and he's coming to our Family Home Evening this Tuesday. He loves CDs and DVDs and music and so last week as one of our commitments for him, we committed him to watch the Book of Mormon DVD. When we came to our second appointment with him yesterday, he had watched the DVD and had taken notes on his feelings and impressions while watching it. I thought that was so neat. We hadn't even asked him to do that! But he was really moved and touched by the testimonies born about the Book of Mormon on the DVD. He was telling us how he normally doesn't accept religious visits but that for some reason he let us in and he told us yesterday 'You've really inspired something in me that I didn't know I had' . I thought that was a neat statement about how the spirit feels for people who have never felt it before. Eric is the cutest old man. He always sends us nice texts thanking us for our visits and how much he looks forward to seeing us again. When we came yesterday he had a giant bag of old DVDs and CDs he wanted to give to us. He's such a good person. You can tell he has lived a good, charitable life. We love him!

So another highlight from this week- on Saturday, all of our afternoon plans fell through, which was disappointing, but we headed out to contact some less actives on our ward list (We have about 500 less active in the ward/ 130 active so there's a lot of less active work we do here) Anyways, we were doing some less active finding and we met a man on the streets named Mark. He told us that he had gotten a Book of Mormon from some missionaries a while ago and that he was actually reading from it last night! We taught him on the street for about 20 minutes and he wants us to come back in 2 weeks when he's back from his holiday to Ireland. It was the most amazing experience. Then we met 3 more people in short amount of time that we were able to have really good street lessons with! We were feeling so giddy and blown away. It was one of those moments where we were able to understand why our plans had fallen through. Heavenly Father had a different plan in store for us. We were supposed to meet Mark, Joanna, and Hugh!

Another thing similar to that happened to us yesterday. We had met a lady while chapping doors a couple of weeks ago and she said to try by in the afternoons so we've been popping by while in the area to try and contact her. Yesterday was our third time dropping by and each time, her daughter Angela (in her 30's maybe?) always answers the door because she's staying at her mom's right now and so we always just have a wee chat with her. This time though, she took us in because she wanted to show us some pictures on the wall to go along with something we were talking about. We ended up talking to her for a while and she was showing us her family's tartan and started to tell us about her ancestry line and how she was trying to find out some things about them. So we casually just told her about a family history center nearby that she could go to to get help with her family history and how we know a lady in our church who could help her with it and she got really excited and said she'd be interested!! So even though we weren't able to teach any lessons right then, we are coming back to set her up with our family history consultant and have that be her introduction to the gospel! So even though our plans were to be teaching her mom, Betty. I'm thinking now that we were meant to meet her daughter, Angela and begin teaching her.

So it's pretty neat how the Lord works! Sometimes our plans fall through, but I know it's because Heavenly Father has something else in store for us. I'm more than fine with that. :)

I love you! Hope you have a good week!