Monday, January 27, 2014

Dear Family and Friends, 

This week was fantastic! One of the most spiritually uplifting weeks of my life! 
I have very little time to write today so I'm just going to do bullet points for the week to let you know what's been going on:
  • Tuesday: we dropped off Hermana Newbill. It was very sad, but I'm sure she's doing well she's been transferred to Lehigh Acres. 
  • Also Tuesday we taught Paco and Antonia, they are a couple we are teaching. They are both progressing really well they haven't been to church yet but they have interest. 
  • We taught an amazing lesson playing MASH but instead we called it CHILD with some recent converts in our ward named Maria and Alexia. We wanted to teach them about being a child of God because they are really young but before arriving we had no idea what we were going to do. When we arrived I got the idea to play MASH, I haven't played that game in years! What we had them do was write some blessings of living the gospel on one side of the paper, some things they could do to follow Christ on the bottom, and on the other side some people they knew in their life. We then picked a number and unlimited answers as we went. The idea is to have one from each category that will describe your future. In the end mine said that if I would pray for Tachima (one of our investigators) I would be happy. Alexia's said that if she would serve her dad she would feel love. It worked out perfect. We told them that CHILD stood for Cheerful Hopeful Intelligent Loved and Divine which are all characteristics of a child of God. They loved it so much they wanted to play again and again. 
  • We had stake conference. It was amazing! Elder Kopiscke of the 70 spoke and also Elder Nelson of the Quorum of the 12! He gave a really good talk on all the basic doctrines of the gospel. I learned a lot about how to simply teach it to our investigators. In the Saturday night session the Recent Convert of our old District leader got up and spoke and made us all cry. She carried with her such a strong spirit and she gave us hope for our investigators. Also one of the stake leaders talked about how we need to teach our family first. It made me think of all the family I have that I could share the gospel with, even though they are all pretty much members already. 
  • We also had a conference in Brandon with the whole mission. I was so happy to see Hermana Brough again! Man I love that girl! The conference was SO GOOD!! I feel so spiritually energized right now! Elder Kopiscke was there too and he and an Elder Thompson from the area 70 spoke to us about our desires as missionaries and about obedience. They also opened the discussion up for questions. One question was how do we be bold in a loving manner? It was just what I wanted to know! They told us some stories their missions and also how it's best to just be clear when your teaching. 
  • We've been talking about being bold lately, so me and Hermana Duong decided that we were going to be bold last night in one of our lessons. It went so beautifully! All our appointments canceled but it was a member's birthday so we decided to go to her party instead and her non-member best friend was there. She was really sweet and let us teach her the beginning of the first lesson. So there we were in the middle of a birthday party teaching the first lesson to everyone present! It was awesome! By the end she agreed to meeting with the missionaries more and reading the Book of Mormon. She told us that she had always thought the church was weird and that we cleared that up for her. Haha she asked us if we all got planets when we died. I was like, "I call Jupiter!" We didn't have time to explain to her the whole plan of Salvation so we just told her the basics of what we believe about life after death. 
  • Also we had the most amazing lesson this week about the Holy Ghost with Alfonzo the spouse of one of our less actives. I can't even explain why it was so wonderful you'd just have to had been there to feel the spirit that was there. He is progressing super fast too. I will have to keep you updated.  
Anyways that's all for today, turns out I had more time than I thought. I hope you all have a wonderful week and for all you missionaries out there be obedient to every rule and when you've done that search out more rules to be obedient to and never miss a prompting. I know we can accomplish great things! I love you all.

Con Amor,
Hermana Mathis
Happy Birthday Romanee!

This is Elizabeth. She is a doll. She made us all our little hats.

We love the girls in our Ward!

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