April 7th 2014

Sorry, that randomly sent on me and I wasn't even done. Technology is such......a blessing...lol.

Anyways, we challenged Mahala and Eric to teach us a lesson about families instead of the other way around .  It was hilarious - they read the Family proclamation and acted it out with stuffed animals. It wasn't the most well-prepared or spiritual lesson, but we had fun and it helped me to chill out a little bit.

-We met with Ruth for the first time and she is awesome! She asked us what she needed to do to be baptized, it was amazing! She is so prepared! She is praying about being baptized on May 3rd, and she is already in 2nd nephi in the book of mormon. We will see her again on Wednesday with some members. I am so excited for her. In this experience as well the Lord is teaching me humility - we literarlly did nothing to find or prepare her, we were just trying to be obedient and diligent missionaries and Heavenly Father is using us to help on of His children to gain eternal life and live with Him forever, and hopefully bring her whole family with her. It's so exciting to be a part of this work!

-We went tracting again this last week, the first time we met two really awesome potential investigators who we plan to follow up with this week. It's crazy - tracting actually does work :) The second time we went we ended up talking to a southern baptist lady for 45 minutes - she seems to kind of be the neighborhood mom and so she came up to us while we were knocking doors on her street and asked if we had accepted Jesus Christ as our personal savior. At first she was kind of scary, but once we said that we do accept Jesus as our personal Savior, her whole demeanor changed and we had a nice chat and she took us over to her house and showed us her chickens and her garden and her congregation's "ward directory" which was really spiffy and invited us to her church's breakfast the next day. Unfortunately we couldn't go because of Conference (maybe we should've gone...?) but she is awesome and she accepted a pamphlet and said we could come back and she is going to share her beliefs with us and we are going to share ours with her. So cool!

-Finally, of course, there was conference. Oh my goodness, every talk touched on something I had been praying about. I just felt so much that God is aware of me and was sending me what I needed. One talk in particular, the talk by Elder Teh, hit me hard. It wasn't really the words he said - I think I got something totally different than what he was trying to express. But the Spirit was teaching me throughout the whole message and it was amazing. I continued to ponder on what I had learned this morning during personal study, and through this talk came a lot of the correction and guidance I needed desperately to help me move forward. 

Man, I just love the gospel. And I love you guys! I loved Elder Ballard's suggestion about families sharing with their missionaries what they've been learning from Preach My Gospel. We should totally do that! Next week I'll include something that I learned and hopefully if yall have time you can do the same. :)

Love you more than all the seashells in the sea!

-Sister Chausow