This Week Filled With Much Happiness & Sadness

April 13, 2015

Sister Weaver & Sister King
using whopper candy eggs
as lipstick.  Just saying.

Dear Family & Friends,

Thanks for the pics Momasita! She looks beautiful! I am so proud of her for being such an obedient and stalwart daughter of God being married for time and all eternity in the temple of our Lord! I can't wait to get to catch up with her again. I got Karissa's wedding announcement thank you! She looks so cute and I am so happy they will be married in the temple too!!! Ahh!! Everyone is so cute!

I am obviously not surprised that brosef is a DL. Not one bit. He is epic.

This week was filled with much happiness and sadness between finding, setting dates, dropping people and dates, finding random members of the church we didn't even know existed, the works! But the happiness outweighed the sadness for sure! I was so happy to be on exchanges with Sister Kunz! She helped me so much in asking for return appointments with new people using the Diana Holscher (from "The Missionary Next Door") method: "As missionaries we help others come unto Christ through teaching 6 consecutive lessons about His Gospel. If after the first, you are still not interested, then that's fine, but we know that the message we have will greatly influence your life and help you develop the relationship you have with Jesus Christ even more! Do weekdays or weekends work better?" We found three new investigators! She also led out teaching the Restoration on the doorstep to a man named Maurice who has a family! We will be meeting with them later this week.

As a zone we are working to get our baptismal dates progressing by setting goals to employ the use of members more to help them get to church and keep their commitments. We are also striving to keep finding and inviting more of God's children to baptism. Last weekend was killer stressful seeing as we had to spend ALL of p-day planning for Zone Training Meeting. We weirdly enough were given the bulk of the trainings, but it all tied together quite nicely. The theme that ended up coming about related to Peter and the other fishermen dropping their nets, or the life that they once lived to follow the Savior. It was brought up at MLC how as soon as the Savior left them, they went back to fishing...Are we going to do those same things? Not let what we do on our missions change us enough to forsake our lives as fishermen and endure to the end in the service of Christ? It was a pretty powerful ZTM. Consecration is key. We do this because we love the Lord. We obey the rules because we love the Lord. We sacrifice because we love the Lord. And we will continue to let this His gospel change us after our missions because we LOVE the Lord.

We found a few promising people this week: Ricky, a young 15 year-old Hmong boy who the Elders are now teaching and committed to baptism. We also contacted a referral who is an undercover former whose house burned down 6 years ago and wanted to replace her bible and Book of Mormon! And she has a family! Also one of our less-actives Cammi brought her friend Veronica to church and she is interested to learn more!

Sadly, Kelly is not doing very well with her smoking :(. We will have to drop her date for now, until she can commit to quitting for good! We hope to teach her more about the repentance process and the Atonement more this week. We feel that she has the desire to quit, but does not fully understand the concept that it is a sin.

Love you all very much! Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you all in your endeavors/stress :).

-Sister Weaver-

P.S. It's like 75 degrees and I'm wearing no tights! Boo for having to shave your legs!

April 3, 2015 Mission Leadership Council

I LOVE That Video!

September 22, 2014

Momma and Family,

I LOVE that video! It's probably one of the ones I've seen more often in our Mormon Messages DVD. They do such a good job! Have you been keeping up to date with the Bible Videos...they are PHENOMENAL! Guess what?? You know the new movie coming out in theaters "Meet the Mormon's"? Well it turns out that they will be showing every missionary in our mission it so we can use it as a proselyting tool! Pretty cool if you ask me!

That's a cool idea using a basket. Technology is a power and with great power comes great responsibility (name that movie); unfortunately, power has the potential to be abused...All in the church know this. We SEE this every day. So who better than a Latter-day Saint to set the example :) Elder Bednar said that the the church will be a media flood upon the earth...let's not make it a flash flood, but one that will cleanse the earth and promote righteousness everywhere.

For Sissy, I would suggest talking to an admissions adviser like I did. It really helped me know what to expect. Also, tell her to meet with an adviser for what major she wants (like the English Adviser). For fun, she should talk to someone in every building she goes to. It may sound cliche' but every person has a different view on things based off of what their major is. For example, someone from the Snow Building will give a totally different low-down than someone from the Romney Building. Take pics so she can get oriented to campus...even though when she gets there it will be all under a blanket of white. Eat in the cafeteria (if she can, I don't THINK she needs her ID card yet for that). It is bomb-diggity. And when she goes, make sure that she doesn't bring stuff she doesn't need until she gets there (like multiples of everything). We need less than we think sometimes. Tell her if she has any specific questions to email me (even though I probably won't get back to her till Monday :)

Last night we had dinner at the Osterhause's who just moved here and are SO sweet! Their son Sam, who is like 12 taught me a couple cords on their guitar and then was oober talented as he played for us and his sister sang, Maggie, who is in her teens and is so down to earth she is the ultra member-missionary who has a friend taking the discussions. We then fed their horses and it reminded me of home!  Their mom called us today and thanked us for coming over. It sounded like she was crying as she mentioned how things are tough right now and she appreciated us being a good example to her kids. It warmed my heart to see a mother want the best for her children and appreciate the service God renders for them.

This week we are hoping to meet with a couple of new investigators we met with this week we have appointments with Franklin, who self-referred himself (to me...kind of sketch--but we're giving him a chance and will see what happens), and are hoping to contact Derek, who we met tracting, once more.

We also finally got back in touch with Alex and are meeting with her on Wednesday and she said that she definitely wants to come to mutual.

I was able to learn a lot about opening my mouth and teaching by the Spirit when I went on exchanges. It's been a while so I was so happy to actually help teach a sit-down lesson!! Sister Bennett is a wonderful teacher who gives back plenty of useful feedback that has helped me have more confidence in my abilities as a teacher and a servant of the Lord. She also helped me to understand how I can more fully take initiative and compromise on things that I may feel prompted to do or regarding specific plans for specific people, which is one thing I really needed help with.

We also contacted Cynthia, or investigator Sally Black's friend who she referred to us a while ago. Sister Trent said they have been trying to get to her for a long time and the time was finally right! We brought her cookies and simply offered our service to her (since she is very into her congregational beliefs) and we saw the miracle of her heart being softened. She put her trust in us and we are going to help wash her windows this week. She offered her thanks to us for helping Sally get back into church and hopefully she will continue to soften her heart towards us and our message. We plan to read from the bible with her this week and hopefully the Book of Mormon, soon!

We hope and pray that this week we may set baptismal dates with three different people on three different occasions just as the Zone Leaders committed us to do. As we work until we have nothing left, I know this can happen!

Thank you so much for your uplifting and inspired words. I think that Austinio will side with me when I declare that YOU are our hero. All of you!

I IMPLORE each of you to read your scriptures this week, at least 10 minutes a day, for in them are the words of eternal life and as we read we will be guarded each day with the Spirit of the Lord. In his talk "Seeking the Spirit of God," Douglass L. Callister talks of the importance of scripture reading when seeking for the Spirit to teach us. He references one of my favorite quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning in one of her poems: "Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; and only he who sees takes off his shoes."

I know that heaven is alive and well in the hearts of all of us, some holding it in a more dormant state than others, and the scriptures are one way that we can awaken what we have already known to be true in a lifetime before. This gospel is just as true now as it was then, we just have to seek it.

I love you more than I can type (which is ALOT as you can see pahaha)!

-Sister Weaver-