Transfer 4 Week 2 11-28-11

Hello Everyone!

 

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! The First half of this week wasn't all that exciting until Thanksgiving. We still got 17 lessons taught this week, although at least half or more of those are less actives.

 

For Thanksgiving, we had two dinner appointments and by the end of the second one I was soo full I wanted to puke. The food was really good though.

 

Ever since Thanksgiving I feel like I get full a lot easier and like I never want to eat again, haha. 

 

Friday was good, we picked a new investigator out of the former investigators along with a couple other lessons. 

 

Sunday was okay, I gave a talk in sacrament meeting about prayer. It was more focused towards investigators and I'm not kidding you we called every last one of our investigators to come and not one of them showed up, I even told them I was speaking in church, nothing. The elders had some investigators there so hopefully they got a lot out of it. The talk went really well, I was the first speaker and my talk connected really well to the talk that proceeded it. There was a sister in the ward to who gave a talk on testimony and about Joseph Smith and how prayer helped her gain a testimony, so it went really well together. On Sunday we also lost 2 of our investigators :(. We felt pretty discouraged yesterday seeing how not one showed up to church and we lost 2. The coolest part about Sunday, well two actually. One happened in Church; E. got the Aaronic priesthood and was ordained to the office of priest. One of the men in the ward told us that in his blessing it said that he would be able to communicate again and be able to share the feelings of his heart about the gospel of Jesus Christ. That was super cool to hear. E. will also be attending the temple trip this weekend for baptisms for the dead for his first time. It has been amazing to see the progress between E. and D. having taught them from the very beginning and now being able to see them having been baptized, received the priesthood and have their eyes and hearts set upon the temple. Even if I have no more baptisms for the rest of my mission, I will know that I made a difference in at least two people's lives in helping them come to the knowledge of their Savior and partake of the blessings that his church has to offer them. Later on Sunday, we had a dinner appointment with a Hispanic family in the ward (Dad's from Cuba, Mother's from Mexico). Brother M. is a convert who got baptized this past April 9th (bet you can guess why I remember his exact baptism date, haha :P). He is such a strong recent convert it's amazing! He basically gave the spiritual thought, ha. He had just gotten home from home teaching and sat down with us at dinner. We got talking and he pulled out this bracelet out of his coat pocket. He said that his daughter A. brought it to him right before he left to go home teaching and asked him why a certain bead on it was different than the rest. If you look at the bracelet all the gray beads look the same unless you really see that one of them was bright and more shiny than the rest and his daughter asked him why it was different than the rest of the worn down ones. He was telling us that he thought to himself that he asked that question a lot when he was investigating the church. "Why is this church different than all the other ones?" He then proceeded to tell us his testimony of the church and he also said that every time we (the missionaries) go knocking on someone's door or talk to someone that that is what makes this church brighter than all the rest (comparing it to the shiny bead of the bracelet in comparison to the other duller ones). It was really cool how he used that bracelet as a spiritual analogy. It really helped lift our spirits that evening because prior to that we had been fairly discouraged but being with Brother M. gave us new courage to keep going. It was awesome. I love that family! So that's this week in Syracuse, NY, haha. Have a good week everyone!

-Sister Gifford