"Planting Seeds"

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!

     How is everyone?? I miss you all so much and I hope everything is going well!!! This week was so good here and I'm so excited to tell you about it!!! On Tuesday we had dinner with the Baileys.  The husband is a neurosurgeon and went to school for 26 YEARS and the wife runs a Montessori school from their home and it is so cool! She took us on a tour of it and I totally want to send my kids to a Montessori school.  Their daughter Sarah has Downs Syndrome but they have her involved in a lot of stuff around the community and one thing she has done is bake bread! They gave us a loaf of her bread right out of the oven and it was so good!!!! Really good. 

     On Wednesday, we visited Jane (less active) because she had surgery the day before and she is seriously my favorite.  We read the talk "Forget me Not" (which by the way I'm obsessed with that talk and probably read it like atleast 2-3 times a week) and she really liked it.  We also talked about having prayers answered or feeling the Lord's love and comfort through other people and how important it is to make sure you're doing the right things in your life so that you can be an answer to the prayers of others.
     So anyway, basically this last week was going SO slow and we were kinda down just cause either no one would be home, we had no referrals, no one wanted to meet with us, etc. etc.  But no worries... just keep reading!!

     On Wednesday at district meeting, Elder Christensen had us draw our favorite scripture story in 6 squares on a paper and then tell the story from it and apply it to our lives.  I'm pretty sure I did this in primary mulitple times but the point of it was to simplify things and how important it is to apply things to our lives so that investigators get the most out of lessons. 

     On Thursday morning, Sister Johnson had a new trainers meeting since we are getting a new companion.  All the sisters are going to be in threesomes... anyway. While the companion that was going to be training was in the meeting (Sister Johnson), their companion (me and like 15 other missionaries) got to tract.  The day before, we had heard about how there was supposed to be a crazy snow storm and they shut all the schools down for Thursday.  Anyway, as soon as we started driving to the meeting it started blizzarding and then when we got there and Sister Johnson was in the meeting, the rest of us tracted in the freezing cold cold cold snow!! Haha I was with Sister To'ala (she's from Samoa), Sister Crandall, and Sister Woodward (from the MTC).  We had so much fun though!!! Sister Toala and Sister Crandall are going home soon.  But it was so great, we went to every door all together with the four of us and people were surprisingly super nice and would let us in their house cause they felt so bad for us that we were in the snow.  Anyway, sister Toala is so hilarious and she made it so much fun even though we were freezing cold.  So when we got back, the assistants to the president took everyone from the meeting to lunch.  But then they all got back from lunch and the roads were TERRIBLE.  They told us to go straight home and park our cars for the rest of the day and until tomorrow afternoon.  The roads are terrible for a few reasons:
  1. no one knows how to drive in the snow because it rarely snows here - mostly rains.
  2. They don't have a very effective process for plowing the roads.
  3. the snow here is super icy. 
Sister Johnson and I started driving home and people were sliding all over the place and I think the top speed we reached the entire time was 12 mph.  It took us 2 hours to drive home and it is a 20 minute drive.  But on our way home, the windshield wipers were iced to the windshield so i got out to fix them and I forgot I had put the phone in the door.  Like 20 minutes later I couldn't find the phone anywhere in the car and realized that's probably what happened.  So... ya I lost our phone.  But on the way home we probably got stuck at least 3 times but luckily we made it home alive!

     On Friday we got a new phone! They were so nice and we even got to keep our same number.  But the bad thing is... we lost all of our contacts.  We had weekly planning on Friday also and we're down to basically 3 investigators.  We felt kinda stressed about that. After weekly planning we went out to our car and it was stuck in the snow and this other guy was trying to get his car out of the snow also.  So we went and helped him and then he helped us and then we started talking to him and he said he would be interested in hearing more! So we got his number and we will see what happnes - his name is Majeed.  We went to visit Grace and Ethan and as we were walking to their apartment, a little dog ran out of this ladies' apartment and came right up to us so she went chasing after it and ended up right next to us.  We were kind of in a hurry and stuff but we told her her dog was cute and then I was just like, we teach lessons about our church, would you like to take them? (Ya, probably the worst way I have ever worded that) but she was like Sure! She (Jade) told us she had been kicked out of like every other religion so she would be very interested in learning about ours.  SWEET!! But like seriously, we were like where did she come from? We had been feeling so down and then she just came running out of her house so were excited to see if it actually goes somehwere! That night we also had dinner with a member and she took us to this really good mexican restaurant called Mi Ranchito.  It was so good!  Earlier that day we had been reading an article from the Ensign from Elder Ballard about pre-judging others and how we don't know who the Lord has already prepared so we shouldn't pre-judge others on whether they are ready to hear the gospel or not, she we should just be confident and tell everyone! I really liked it and I think sometimes I do judge others based on their appearance whether they would like to hear something or not. 

     Saturday we were still kinda down because even though we had 2 new potential investigators, we still only had 3 investigators and since we lost all our contacts we had no idea how we were going to get Tom's number.  But literally like an hour later, TOM CALLED US!!! He wanted to make sure he had the right address for the church.  We love Tom.  We also had a lesson with Eugene scheduled and we had a member that came with us and everything and we had called him that morning to make sure it was still a good time and we got there and he didn't answer the door (we know he was inside cause his van was there).  And he just keeps on using us to do service for him so we really think we are going to drop him.  He started smoking again and you can just tell he doesn't even want to meet with us.  So, anyway, later that afternoon we stopped at Target to get some cleaning stuff for our apartment and while we were there, we met his lady Pam whose mom is in the hospital.  We told her about our church a little and gave her the address and she said she can't come this week but next week she would really like it.  She told us shes supposed to be Catholic but never goes and I think since her mom is in the hospital she is looking for something.  We told her we would pray for her and when she said that she started tearing up and was like thank you so much and walked away.  We got her number and stuff so were going to keep in touch with her.  

     Well, I think that's really it!! Sorry if this email made like no sense! But I've been thinking and I decided that when the temple in Rome is dedicated we should all go to the open house!! Sound like a plan? Okay cool.  Well, I hope everyone has a super great week!!!! I love you all SO SO SO SO SO SO MUCH and I love hearing about what is going on at home and in your life.

I MISS YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Taylor