Dear Family and Friends,

This past week has been SO crazy! I don't even know where to begin. So as some of you know, this is the first week of my 4th transfer. Lot's of things changed, and for the better! I'm just going to go through my week for ya:

Monday- P-day, emails, we had a lesson with a less-active member at Pepe's (a popular Latino market, anyone who's anyone goes there). Also later that night we went to a bible study. Now I have to give you some background because as missionaries it's rare that we go to another church. There's this lady that we've been trying to teach for a while now who goes to this Presbyterian church. So for the past few weeks Hermana has been trying to convince me to go to their bible-study so that we could talk to her. I've always been against it but I didn't want to ignore her impression, so we just went. Haha, the first thing they asked us, "Oh! You're sisters? Are you from the convent?" We were so tempted to say, "Yes, and we'll be giving a speech tonight!" But we didn't. It was very interesting. We were able to talk to the woman and it turned out to be not as bad as I thought it might be.

Tuesday- Transfer day...and this is where it get's crazy. So first of all, we had a beyond brilliant lesson with this new lady we met at Wendys! Her name is Elouisa and she is progressing really fast! She even committed to coming to church with her family! After that we drove up to Clearwater for a lesson with a new-member's Catholic wife. All we taught her was the first lesson straight out of the pamphlet. She committed to being baptized right then and there! She's going to be baptized on the 23rd! She just nodded her head and started to tear up and said, "It's true!" Hermana Duong saw her later in the week and she said that she is still stoked about her baptism! 

So we have these amazing lessons, right? Then we have ANOTHER fantastic lesson with Eluid, Elizabeth's brother. And then one after that with Antonia. We're like, "What did we do right?" Blessings were just being piled up. It's like God was saying, "Oh you liked that good lesson? Here have another!" Haha! We didn't commit them to baptism but it was so nice. 

Then after that we went to see this new guy, Juan, that we've been teaching. We taught him English. On the way to his house though, we realized we had missed like 5 calls from the AP's and from other sisters. Going through our voice mail we learned that we would now be rooming with four other sisters for a while in our apartment! Not only that, but then during our lesson with Juan, we learned that we were now sister training leaders! So long story short, we're STL's now, have two more date sets and are living in a small apartment with 4 new sisters!

We rushed home because the sisters were locked out and bought them pizza and spent the night helping them settle in. We finished the night with a lesson with Chavela. What a crazy awesome day! We only had three beds and a couch, so we slept on the floor in our study. It was like a sleepover.

Wednesday- Best district meeting ever, we learned so much, training meeting right after with the ZL's, learned even more, awesome second lesson with the family that fed us the cactus, weekly planning and then dinner with Cindy.

Thursday-Lesson with Eluid and his sister Ada, went really well he committed to baptism! We are so stoked! We're slowly bringing in the whole Perez family! They are all really big, like maybe 300 pounds each, so we decided that if we could get them all to come to church they would break the bench, haha! We taught Juan again, good lesson, he's still not sure of our church yet.

Friday- MLC (Missionary Leadership Conference), my first ever! I learned a lot from our mission leaders. One thing that I really loved that president said was that "if you err, do so on the side of love and compassion." How often do we mess up and then become frustrated with ourselves? It was a great conference.

After that we did our first exchange as STL's and I had the chance to go down south to Seminole with Hermana Wakefield. It was so much fun! I love Hermana Wakefield. She is a cutie! I will hopefully send pics this week, if not next week. They are living with two other sisters too, so it was like a party! We went to their block party for the free dinner and hoping to find some people to teach, it was ok, they were handing out beer, so we left. We spent the rest of the night contacting.

Saturday-Went to a parade to find, then to a carnival to find, then to the park to find. English finding is a lot harder than Spanish finding! I was super surprised.

We switched back and  then me and Hermana Duong went to Elouisa's and met her husband Juan. We taught them a little bit of the first lesson. All went well.

Sunday- 6 investigators at church! Wahoo! Seriously what did we do right? I guess we'll never know, but that's it folks, that's my crazy week! Hope you enjoyed it.

Have a great week!

Con Amor,

Hermana Mathis