Friday, December 23, 2016

Inspirada & Madeira Canyon: January 12-18

Hello all!

We have had an absolutely crazy week! We met lots of interesting/crazy people and it has been a whirlwind.

We had an exchange this week and I stayed in my area with a different sister and we found some amazing new investigators! Amy is one of them--she is awesome! She teaches online school from home and she has a 3 year old son and a 7 month old as well. She belonged to a church with her husband until recently, when they had kids and she was thinking about how innocent little children are. She's been taught that we are born with sin and she disagrees with that completely. She is so right! She's so fun to be around and she's quite the talker. We happened to stop by her home with the perfect member for her! We had a member out with us and we just felt like we should stop by. There have been so many times when I look back and realize how Heavenly Father guides us to where we need to be at the perfect moment. We were delayed in getting to her house because we took a wrong turn, but the timing was perfect! When we knocked on her door, she had just finished putting her 7 month old to bed. Heavenly Father has been preparing her to receive the gospel! I've met so many people who have had tons of things go wrong recently in their lives--they're basically on a boat in the middle of a storm with no way of steering or staying secure because they don't have a foundation in Christ or even know of God's love for them. And then we show up at their driveway just as they're getting out of their car!

We've been teaching someone named Tracy who is a teacher and has two kids and three dogs. She is so sweet! She is going to be baptized on March 12! The previous companionship met her and have been teaching her for a few months. She came to church for the first time yesterday! Something crazy always happens right before church for her. Either her son is climbing on furniture and falls and hits his head really hard or her dogs get into something that makes them sick. Over Christmas vacation she left the dogs alone in her house and one of them ate an ornament! It delayed our lessons with her for a while. We fasted for her to be protected from that opposition and everything has calmed down since then.

During one of my personal studies I was reading 1 Nephi 11 and I realized there are three things we need to receive answers from God: You need to desire to learn, ponder on your own, and believe that the Lord will answer your prayers and others' prayers. The last one, belief, really hit me. It made me think of a phrase we read often in the Book of Mormon: "because of their unbelief". So I went through and read about everything that happens because of unbelief, and there's a lot. The main one that I focused on was that miracles cease because of unbelief. On the flip side, miracles happen when all we have is the smallest desire to believe! Alma 32:
"But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties,even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words." The rest of that chapter is amazing too!

I hope you all have a wonderful week! Happy Martin Luther King Day!

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