August 18, 2014

TRANSFERS HAVE ARRIVED!

Sister Steck and I got call at church yesterday and were told that I am getting transferred to Great Falls and Sister Steck was getting transferred to another ward in the Missoula stake.  Worst news of my life.  We both cried.  There are a few families here that I will miss dearly and hope to keep in contact with.  I will really miss Sister Steck. A LOT.  She has become a Sister to me and a very dear friend.  I think that is the hardest part is leaving her.  We have had an amazing growing experience here in Missoula together and I am so grateful the Lord brought her here to me.  They are taking the two sets of missionaries out of our ward. Steck and I are leaving so the other set is taking over.  I am a little worried about the transition of work.  These Sisters are great but they don't have a lot of urgency in their work. I hope and pray that the ward can step in and work with those we have worked with and really take them under their wing.  Although I am sad to leave Missoula, it has been really hard here.  The work was and is slow, but I am thankful for the experiences I have had to help my faith grow and expand.  I told Saryn this in an email, but I have learned over and over in my mission that what the Lord has planned for me always has and always will be better than what I could have ever planned for myself.  Sometimes it is harder, but it is always worth it. ALWAYS. I trust in Him.  

We went over to April's the other night and she cried to us as she expressed her frustrations she was having with her ex husband at that time.  We all cried together. I love that woman!  What a strong person she is.  And the faith taht she has in God is incredible.  I will really miss her.  She just moved here and has no friends, no family, and doesn't really know or connect with anyone in the ward.   We really have been the ones to take her in and visit her and make sure she is doing okay.  It was funny becacuse when we told her the transfer news at church yesterday she totally swore. Hahaha she grabbed her mouth and was like, " I cannot believe I just did that in the church."    ......maybe you had to be there. But it was really funny.  Haha 

Rewind and try and remember Ed.  We talked with him and Matt in their garage. Matt was studying to be a Lutheran pastor and we had a really neat discussion. Well we met with Ed last night and had a phenomenal discussion. We brought a member with us and it went so good.  They clicked right off the bat and the member was a convert himself so he was able to pitch in and give the insights he had as an investigator.  Ed is a believing man and told us that he wanted to meet with us again because he saw only good things coming from meeting with us. OF COURSE! And we are getting transferred.  I have to remind myself that I trust God.  hahaha He has his finger on everything. It will all work out in His timing.  

Last transfer I had dinner with a Less Active member of our ward who invited her personal care assistant. Her name is Lori and we had a great discussion.  After dinner and the lesson I asked if there was anything we could do to help her out.  She said that there was.  She was moving from an apartment to a house and had no one to help her load the boxes in the truck.  We got her address of where she was moving to and got the Elders in that area involved.  They brought a member and we got to work. We had a good gospel conversation through the whole thing.  After that the Elders stepped in and got her all moved in with the member in the ward. She was one of the 1 million people we found for other missionaries. And guess what.  She got baptized on Saturday. :)  Sister Steck and I got to speak at her baptism. There was an amazing Spirit there.  And get this. We met another guy named Tony and gave him to the Sisters in his area.  Turns out Tony is her son.  AND! Another man just recently got baptized into another ward, and that was her son as well.  All three of these family members independent of each other found the gospel and have been or will be getting baptized. Incredible.

I NEED EVERYONE'S HELP!  Sister Steck's Birthday is this Saturday and I am really mad because I won't be here to celebrate it with her. She is sad because she will have a new companion and be in a new ward where no one knows her. WOULD YOU PLEASE WRITE SISTER STECK A BIRTHDAY CARD! Just send it to my address here in Missoula.  I just want her to have a wonderful birthday! And I know that it would make her day if you all wrote her a little something and she got a lot of mail.  

THANK YOU

I must say I have always wanted to serve in a little Montana town but after exchanges with week in Ronan and St. Ignatious I am so happy I haven't. THe Lord obviously knows me better than I know myself.  Haha. We went to the Dentist while on exchanges and all anyone talked about were their steers and cattle entering into the fair and all this talk about chickens and pigs and their weight blah blah blah.  I was so unbelievably lost.  Plus, everyone lives in the middle of NOWHERE! I am talking you have to squint to see where your neighbor is.  Crazy.  We went tracting and contacting while on exchanges and man was it different.  Finding in small towns is totally different than in the areas I have been. I wanted to say big citites, but they really aren't.  They are just big for Montana. hahaha I am thankful to go Great Falls.  It will be good.  God is good to me.  

Another side note! We got to go to an Osprey baseball game with the stake! The stake put on a huge BBQ that we served at and had tickets to the baseball game and we got permission to go! It was really fun! I had no idea what an Osprey was...and they played against the Chuckers....what the heck is up with these strange birds as the mascots?  

Anyway, I better go. I have a lot of packing to do and a lot of goodbyes.  I love you all!  I want to leave you with a quote that I found and fell in love with. 

"The Gospel might be likened to the keyboard of a piano.  A full keyboard with a selection of keys on which one who is trained can play a variety without limits; a ballad to express love, a march to rally, a melody to soothe and a hymn to inspire. an endless variety to suit every mood and satisfy every need.  How shortsighted it is, then, to choose a single key and endlessly tap out the monotony of a single note, or even two or three notes.  When  the full keyboard of limitless harmony can be played."  - Boyd K. Packer

We are capable of so much more! Through the Atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ we are capable of so much more! How grateful I am for my Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ for giving me the ability to do things I would and could have never been able to do on my own. I have seen that day in and day out on my mission.  The Lord sees greatness in each one of us and through Jesus we become great.  Let us all give more place for Him in our lives each day so that we can take full advantage of the "keyboard" god has given to us.  God is good.  He is literally my everything.  Without Him I am nothing.  I am thankful for my knowledge of this Gospel. It has changed me.  I am happier than I have ever been before and I know it is because of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

I love you! Miss you! 

Sure love ya! Moline's rock! Missionaries rule!

Sister Mo-Line

August 11, 2014

IN A MONTH AND A HALF IT IS GENERAL CONFERENCE. SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!  I need to cherish every moment in the sun before it gets cold again.  Another winter makes me want to cry.  

Please prepare yourselves for the greatest week of your life! So many miracles! I wonder if there were this many miracles that took place when I was at home, but I wasn't in the mindset to recognize them.  So pull out the popcorn and the PJ's and get ready.  

MONDAY! yeah, it all began last Monday after emailing.  

Miracle #1 After dinner we didn't have any set appointments.  So the evening was starting look pretty long.  We had a list of people that we thought we could try and follow up with.  One of the names is Lisa.  We tracted into her about a week or so prior.  She is this adorable Mom with a little 3 year old and a new born baby.  She let us in when we were tracting and had a lot of question about missions and prophets and things like that. We left her with a Book of Mormon and a pamphlet.We both just had a really good feeling about her and were hoping she was the family we had been praying for.

So we decide to stop by her house.  But it's really awkward because we forgot to leave her anything to read from the Book of Mormon to follow up about. So we park in front of her house and we are trying to think of a normal way to talk to her and to hook her in.  So we walk up and I'm planning on asking her if she had a chance to look at the Book of Mormon and I am thinking she is going to say no, so I am trying to think of what to say to that.  bla bla bla she answers the door and I ask her just and she says YES! " yeah I got to read your pamphlet and I read only a page or two of the Book of Mormon"  So yeah, that ruined me.  hahaha I was totally surprised.  Then I just felt like I needed to be bold and tell her how much the Book of Mormon has blessed me and my family and offer her to take the lessons.  SO I DID. I don't even know what I said.  But she said yes.  SHE SAID YES! She let us in and she asked a ton of questions.  I totally was not expecting that. AND! It turns out that she knows a family in our ward pretty well.  She teaches at the High School and knows their kids. 

We set up a lesson for Tuesdsay and brought the wife and daughter of the family she knew and had a great lesson on the Plan of Salvation.  The first part of the lesson was alright but when we started to talk about temples and families being sealed for eternity the Spirit in the room changed.  Her body language and her attitude completely shifted.  She kept saying how much she liked that and thought about it for awhile.  Sister Rollins told her about her Mom that converted and had the opportunity to be sealed to her family.  Lisa asked her what Sister Rollin's mom had to do to convert and what the process was to go to the Temple.  IT WAS AWESOME! She comes from a very faithful Catholic family and she is very active so that will be difficult.  But PRAY! She is awesome! We are going back Tuesday :)

Miracle #2 So still Monday, we were walking back to our car to drive to another area of town when we ran into shirtless ED! We talked with him and another guy about a week ago as well.  We talked with him and asked him about the Book of Mormon. Ed is kinda crazy, but he was talking to us and he believes a lot of what we believe.  We were both really bold with him and bore testimony of teh Book of Mormon. We are meeting with him today :)  

Miracle #3 After Ed we continued to walk to our car when we saw a man walking his dog. I fearlessed Sister Steck to talk to him. We did the survey with him and he was really open and took a Book of Mormon and gave us his number to set something up.  GOLDEN! 

Miracle #4 Literally right after the man with his dog we take a few steps towards our car when a teenage kid starts running after us and asks us if he can take the survey.....why yes. Yes you may.  We get talking and find out that he lives here with his Mom but he has a lot of LDS family members in Utah.  We find out that his mom is LDS but he hasn't been baptized.  He told us that he saw us tallking to that other man and felt this need to talk to us.  He said he realizes that there is more to life than just hanging out with friends and he isn't sure what  it is.  ITS THE BOOK OF MORMON JACKSON! Ha we had a really awesome discussion about the meaning of life and our purpose here and how we know our purpose. He gave us his number and we gave him a Book of Mormon.  

Handing out copies of the Book of Mormon is the most fulfilling thing. Even if I don't see any results from it, I know that they now have something tangible in their hands that convinces us of God's power.  And if it isn't now, it will be later.

Since I came to Missoula I have been trying to find guy named Jake.  He was on our list of prospective Elders and I have literally gone to his house 4 million times since I got here.  He was baptized 2 years ago. His girlfriend was a member and from what I hear, he was getting ready for a mission.  A couple of weeks ago his Dad answered the door and said he moved and didn't know the address. Yeah right. What Dad doesn't know the address of their son.  LAME.  One day this week we needed to tracting so I suggested a street that I had thought about before but hadn't felt overly impressed to go to.  Get this. The first door we knock on a young man answers.  We do the survey with him and he says his name is Jake.  As the survey goes on I looked at him and then it clicked. THIS WAS JAKE!!!!! So I stop and I am like, "What is your last name again?" He said Christian and then I was like, " Shut up. You are not. I have been looking for you for 6 months." I didn't actually say that, but I definitely was thinking it.  The more I think about it the more crazy it gets.  He has 4 roommates.  If any of his other roommates had answered the door and said they were not interested we would have marked that on our list and never gone back to that house.  But he answered the door.  Nothing short of a miracle.  We asked him why he stopped coming and gave him a Book of mormon and encouraged him to go to the YSA ward.  It was totally crazy.  I couldn't believe. God has his hand in everything! And the thing is, my thought to go tracting on that street was not a huge urgent feeling that I had.  It was just a passing thought.  And how important that small passing thought was.  I have never been more aware of the Spirit and how I feel promptings than on my mission. It's awesome. I hope that never leaves. 

Do you remember Danny from Bozeman? He had a girlfriend that I started teaching and she got baptized on Saturday :) 

We got to help take care of a booth at the fair this week. It was a Family History booth.  We got to help people find their ancestors and tell people about the Family History Center. It was really cool.  

I may or may not have snuck off to see the llamas

I love you my family!! You are wonderful! The gospel is the good life. It is true and it changes lives.  I love you! Talk to you soon!!!

Sister Moliiinnnneeee

  

August 4, 2014

My goodness! My 11 month mark is today! Can I get a WOOT! WOOT!  Ladies and gentleman.  One month from today is my YEAR MARK! Get out of town! That is just down right crazy.  How does that even happen?  

Mom to answer your question, Hansen asked me to add him to my email list and Oliver got home a couple weeks ago and has been emailing me a little so I thought I would share the love! Cause you know, everyone wants to know what is going on in the backwoods of Montana.  

I am inlove with the image of Mom hanging out with Saryn's friends without her. hahahaha I love it. :) I am glad they took good care of you. 

One of Sister Steck's companions went home in April and came back to visit one of her areas with her Mom and fed us lunch. It was really fun.  She should marry Tanner.  We ate at this delicious breakfast place called, Paul's Pancake Parlor. I am obsessed. So gooooood.  But she told me that she texted Mom and got to talk with you a little bit. She got me some Hot Tamales. :):):):) Heaven. Purely heaven. 

I know I say this every dang week of my life, but this week seems like it didn't even happen. SO FAST! Slow your roll! But! Some pretty cool things happened this week.  I was on exchanges with some Sisters for part of the week and a straight up miracle occurred. Check it out.  So they didn't have a car, so we rode bikes most of the night. AKA Sister Moline is a sweaty nasty mess.  But we rode our bikes to go tracting.  Out of no where one of the Sisters pulls over and says they hadn't ever tracted this one random street and thought we should give it a shot.  So we lock up our bikes and start. Door after door after door after door these 97 year old women answered the door and would shut it right in our face.  I thought old people were supposed to be nice! FALSE. Old women are not.  So as we are tracting part of me is like, okay let's go, none of these old people are interested.  Then we knock on a door and I see a younger looking lady peek her head through the window and roll her eyes.  Goooooood! Hold on, let me just slam the door for you lady. I am terrible and obviously have no faith at all.  But she answers and through some conversation we find out that she is a baptized member that has been through the temple and everything! GET OUT! She invites us in and we can't find her records anywhere. She has been living in Missoula with her non member husband for about a year.  We had a really interesting conversation. I asked her about the Book of Mormon and the temple and she said, "Oh of course I believe it is true. I love the temple. I love it with all my heart!"  She was surprisingly really open and honest with us and told us that when she got married to her current husband she couldn't stand the thought of not being with him after this life.. Knowing that she would be in different place than he would because of the covenants she had made.  So she made the decision to stop going to church.   We asked her if she would be interested in having visiting and home teachers and she agreed without a moments hesitation. Her husband is a pro tennis player and came home right as we were leaving and we got talking and turns out he teaches tennis to one of the young women in my ward! Get out of town! That is too crazy! SUCCESSS! That was why we were supposed to tract that street!  She said we were welcome back anytime and to give her a call.  INSANE. PURELY INSANE.  If that is not a miracle, I don't know what is.  I mean, come on! it just so happens that we find a inactive member whose records are floating around in Georgia somewhere and I just so happen to be with the Sisters to know who her husband is teaching.  Yeah. Super cool.  

Something cool I learned this week was, " If everybody did____ how would it effect the world?"  The stake president in Bozeman told us that.  For example, if everyone in the world ate a spinach salad everyday the whole world would be a whole lot healthier. Or, if everyone in the world was homosexual the the increase of humans would end in one generation.  He told us this as a formula to know if something is good or not.  If everyone in the world smoked everyone in the world would have lung cancer...blah blah blah. I thought it was kind of interesting.  What would happen to the world if everyone did ___.  

OHMYGOODNESS! Get this! So I don't know if you remember Kaylee or not. But I wrote about her a couple weeks ago.  She was a friend of a guy getting ready to go on his mission.  We taught her the Plan of Salvation and it was golden. GOLDEN.  She accepted the invitation to be baptized and she set up the next appointment.  Then, boom. Nothing. We don't hear from her at all.  We called, texted, facebooked and even creepily found her address and tried her at home. Nothing.  I finally came to the conclusion that her friends talked her out of it.  She asked a lot of questions about the churches stance on homosexuality because she had a lot of friends that were gay. So I just thought that she told her friends and they talked her out of meeting with us. So, while I was on exchanges we decided to stop by her house because it was technically in their area.  As we approach the house, one of the Sisters is like, " are you sure it is this house?  Because i have definitely been here before."  We look it up and turns out Kaylee's mom is a member! HER MOM IS A MEMBER AND WE HAD NO IDEA!!! Get out of town.  Then it just so happens that her mom pulls up right as we get out of the car.  We start talking to her and she very bluntly told us to respect her decision and to leave her family alone....sad way to end the story.  BUT it was her mom! Not her friends! She could still be interested!!! And! We just planted a seed that is going to explode later in her life.  I should have been upset but I really wasn't because I knew I did what I was supposed to.  I feel confident that I followed what the Lord would have had me do and I did all that was in my power.  Maybe all the Lord needed was for me and Sister Steck to give her an opportunity to feel the spirit so that she would recognize it at some other point in her life.  The Lord has His finger on everything, and I know that everything will work out.  Right now I can't see it all, but I trust that He can and is using me to fulfill His purposes.  God is good. I love Him. 

We had interviews with President this week.  What a wonderful man.  He sat me down and he talked about my very first interview with him 11 months ago.  He said he knew I was a leader the moment I opened my mouth. :) TENDERS! Stop that! Although I am doing well and I am really happy, it was comforting to hear those words or reassurance that I am doing a good job.  

ANOTHER MIRACLE THAT I ALMOST FORGOT! Okay rewind to a month or two ago.  Sister Steck and I had dinner at a less active's house who was working on being reactivated.  She has some health issues so she has a nurse come in everyday and help her.  She invited this nurse to dinner with us and we had a really neat lesson.  Before we left I asked her if there was anything we could do to help her out in any way.  She said she was needing help moving her things to a new apartment and had no one to help lift the heavy things.  We quickly agreed and set  up a time to come help.  She was moving to an Elder's area so we invited them to come and help and hopefully get something going with her.  GUESS WHAT! We got a call the other day from the Elders and she is getting baptized August 16th! That's what I am talking about! Holla! Holla! Planting seeds for the win! That really just made me that happiest person evvveeerrrr.  

Earlier this week Sister Steck and I were walking back to our car one evening when we saw two guys working in a garage.  Sister Steck dared me to talk to them, and I totally didn't want to, but I couldn't go home knowing I chickened out. So I said hi and we started talking to them.  One of them was in his late 20's and actually is studying to be a Lutheran Pastor and the other was an older man that didn't belong to any denomination but just believed in God. we had the most wonderful conversation with them.  Sister Steck and i left both feeling really accomplished.  They both accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon and were really intrigued by the time we left.  It was really neat to be able to have confidence in all the answers we were able to give them to their questions. We were able to bear testimony and confidently talk about the Book of Mormon.  Sister Steck and I have been praying to find a family to teach and we both felt very strongly about the Lutheran Pastor. Cross your fingers that he is the one! He's got the evidence in his hands.  Let's just hope and pray that his heart is open to it.  

Okay family I best be going. I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH! The gospel is real and it changes lives. I know this, because it has changed mine. I am so thankful for the knowledge that I have. Dad, you always talk about faith and living by faith. I was reading in Ether and the Lord does not and will not always require us to live by faith. Faith is just the stepping stone to knowledge.  But that is what is difficult for some people they want the knowledge to build their faith.  When in reality faith is the precursor for obtaining knowledge.  It says in Ether that the Brother of Jared's faith was so great that the Lord could not hold himself back from appearing to the Brother of Jared. And it says that he had faith no longer, for he knew, nothing doubting.  The test is if we have enough faith so that the Lord cannot keep us from within the veil.  We all have that capacity, but most of don't realize or believe it. 

Anyway, sorry for my wicked long tangent and email. I love you!  The church and the gospel are true! LOVE YOU!

Sister Holy Moley 

(a man thought my name was Holy Moley this week and kept calling me that. hahahahaha)