Well I guess it's officially fall. And the trees are REALLY starting to change color! I'll send pictures so you can see how beautiful it really is! I'm in the most beautiful place in the world!! And the part I'm not too thrilled about-- I had to wear my coat for the first time this week! BOO!! I'm not ready for winter! I'm going to need a much better coat once winter hits but for now this wool coat will do!
Conference was this weekend!!! HOW GREAT WAS THAT?!?! Oh my goodness! So insightful! I've always heard there isn't anything better on a mission than watching conference. But I'm going to change that a bit and say there's nothing better on a mission than watching conference at the Joseph Smith Farm! There's just something about listening to our living prophet in the place where the restoration of our church happened! It gets to me!:) There were so many great talks and I've started to try to apply it to my life/work.
This last week has been filled with both miracles and challenges so we'll start with the challenges to get the bad news out of the way.
Esther dropped us... I've had a really hard time with that. I keep feeling like there's more that I could've done to REALLY help her see the importance of the restored gospel! She was so prepared and maybe if I had taught something differently it would've helped. BUT-- all these wonderful sisters keep reminding me that she has agency and gets to choose for herself and I have no control over that. (I'm not going to lie... Sometimes satan's plan sounds pretty nice-- I would like to take away people's agency sometimes so they can accept what has brought me so much joy!) But I've learned something life changing this week with Esther. As appealing as satan's plan sounds to missionaries sometimes, our Heavenly Father's plan is so much better! He gave us our agency, not so we can earn our way back to Him, but so we can show Him that we want to be there! He wants us to want Him. He's not going to force us to come to Him, so I just have to trust that somewhere along the line, Esther will run into missionaries again and she'll be more prepared then!
MIRACLE TIME!! Exchanges!! Exchanges are so wonderful! I went with Sister Newson yesterday and boy is she a great missionary! We went to U of R and walked around since she's serving in the GVB (Singles ward). It's so different because on campus, we aren't allowed to proselyte, so when my instincts want me to go and talk to all these people about the gospel and I'm not allowed to, it's a bit challenging. So we walked around and made our presence known, hoping people would ask questions. NOTHING.... But we had an appointment to go to so we left and went to see Kash. Turns out he wasn't home. Well, we started knocking doors and it's a bit different from the GVB standpoint because we get people ages 18-30 so we can't really poach in other missionaries areas but we knock anyway looking for YSA age.. No one answers.. How does this involve a miracle you might ask? Well, we realize we're on the street with one of the referrals that they'd received so we knock on her door and she's the only person to answer her door! She's not YSA age but we decided to teach her then hand her off to the other missionaries. OH MY GOSH!! She is so prepared for the gospel! We taught her the restoration and read from the book of mormon and she talked about her kids in jail. It was so cool for her to realize that the gospel can really help her! so she's totally open to having new missionaries to come over!:) Then we had a lesson with a guy named Peter that night. I have never had so many questions about such deep doctrine in my life! He'd read an anti book and was sad that that's the only impression he'd had with 'Mormons' so he wanted us to come clarify things and MAN was he intelligent! He asked some pretty crazy questions but it turned out really well and he now realizes that mormons aren't so crazy as he thought!
Everything is going great out here! I can't believe how fast time is going! My Birthday is in just a couple weeks! 20 years old?! WEIRD!!! But I love you all and hope you have a great week!
Love Sister Nield
No comments:
Post a Comment