7 October 2013

Dear Everyone,

For those of you who don't know...my sister finally got her mission call!!!! She's going to Nampa , Idaho !!!! (It is a new mission just organized a few months ago. Most of the mission is located in the mountainous areas of Eastern Oregon and Southeastern Idaho . Laura enters the MTC in Provo on Feb 5^th). We'll just being switching one missionary for another in this family. Maybe after she gets back my parents will leave on a mission. Eh? eh?! We'll see, ;) (Bethany says she has been hanging out with the missionaries from Canada . Can you tell?)

 

So this weekend was General Conference (a twice a year conference for our church that is broadcast around the world) and it was like a breath of fresh air! I especially liked Elder Soares' talk about changing our personality to become more like Christ's. I also loved Elder Uchtdorf's. I suggest it to any of my non-member friends. It’s a good summary of what our church is.

http://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch/2013/10?lang=eng&vid=2721983168001&cid=12

Miracles!

So ever since I've come to St.Ouen we've struggled in trying to teach less actives/recent converts. I didn't really care too much because at least we were having a lot of success in other areas. Well, we decided that we needed to work on that and so we've been more systematic in contacting less actives.

Our plan has been, whenever we have some times to spare, go try to see the closest inactive on the list. While we do that, we contact every person possible on the way. This is sort of like the thing we do with visiting members twice a week to pray with them, which I talked about last week.

   

The mission has really been encouraging (and so was Elder Ballard during General Conference) that we talked with more people everywhere. It is really mind numbing when you just say "ok, we’re going just walk aimlessly around this area talking to people". We've been trying to be more effective with how we do things in our companionship.

So this week we finally got ahold of one less active woman named Soeur Ly and made an appointment with her. We also brought one less active to Conference this weekend! If you've ever tried to get in-actives without cars to come to church you know what a miracle that it. Especially since we had to watch it in Versailles instead of our normal ward building.

The best moment though was visiting a semi-active sister who seems to have the whole world on her shoulders. Her emotionally dependant sister's husband died a month ago and she's been the only support for her since. Then, her daughter broke her ankle last week. And they live on the 5th floor without an elevator! In addition, her job had decided to make her part time.

This sister is normally a bubbly Brazilian, but when we went by she was very subdued. She talked to us for a while, trying to act like everything was fine. But then Soeur Mackay put her arm around her and the tears started. I'm so glad we and other sisters in the Relief Society are able to be there for her!

We've also found or received several new amis this week and set up several appointments!

Bethany