Teaching Moments

Hey Family!!!!!!!!!!

     Thanks so much for your emails - I love reading them!! I think I say that every week.. but it's true!! My cut is healing which is great but like one of my stitches came out which kinda freaked me out but apparently it's not a big deal so that's good.  Also, we met this pretty cool guy tracting this week.  His name is Ken and we knocked on his door and he started talking to us and he told us how is Dad was Mormon and his Dad would always try to get him to join him and then he passed away but he had good feelings towards Mormons.  So we asked him if he would want to learn more and he was like "I don't know why I'm saying this but I'm pretty opened minded and I would be interested in learning.... My Dad is totally smiling down on me right now..." He was so cool! We are seeing him again this Wednesday and so we will see how that goes!  Anyway, I guess I will just start telling you about my week!

     Monday was pday and we went out to lunch and then just looked around some of the stores around Fenton and then that night we had a lesson with Mark on the plan of salvation and like we felt like it went pretty well. 

     Tuesday we had a lesson with Shannon and we had Sister Katseanas come with us so that her kids could play with Shannon's daughter and it went really well! Shannon still like wants to get baptized and she is seriously amazing.  Like she really believes the gospel is true and has noticed the difference the spirit has made in her life already - I love it!! I don't feel like a lot of people recognize that change of feeling right away like she has, so that's really neat.  She is getting married in August though and her and her fiance currently live together so that's kinda an issue... and it's not like it's a small wedding, it's pretty big and she is doing a lot of planning for it so we will see how everything goes with that because she can't get baptized unless her fiance moves out or they get married!

     Wednesday we were on exchanges and that night we had a lesson with John and we went over the plan of salvation and like it went pretty well but we aren't really sure what Johns motives are. 

     Thursday was pretty funny! Haha okay, so we went to visit a member of the ward that neither Sister Scott or I knew so like we go to the house and knock on the door (all we knew was that the people we were visiting were older) and this younger Mom opens the door and all her kids come running after her and as soon as I saw that I realized we were at the wrong house and so we just introduced ourselves like we were tracting but it totally took us off guard cause we thought we were at a members house but it was kinda funny.  Later that day, we contacted a media referral and a cute little hispanic woman answered the door and we introduced ourselves and then she told us that she has been waiting for us to come because her friends' son or something is dating a  girl and she doesn't want him to anymore so she wants the Mormon girls to knock at his door so that he will stop dating her and date one of us.  We could not stop laughing afterwards! Good thing that's what we are on missions for... haha not. 

     Friday morning we had a lesson with Virginia!! It was so cool! So we watched the restoration movie and then talked about the Book of Mormon and she had a ton of questions about where it came from and what it was about and then we told her to read the introduction as soon as we left and then pray about it and text us after she did that.  So like an hour later she texts us and is like "Hey... can we meet sooner than Sunday? I started reading and it all makes sense." How cool is that????? She ended up getting sick (thanks Satan) and we didn't get to meet with her but we were so excited when we read that!!

     Saturday we had a dinner theater at the church where all the youth were in a play called Jet Black (instead of Snow White) and while they did the play, they fed everyone dinner and it was cute! Candice came!!! Except I think she felt super out of place:(  Our ward has tons of families with kids and she is single and black and you could just tell she didn't really feel like she fit in.  The ward was great at getting to know her and stuff but I don't know... she ended up not going to church yesterday either. 

     It's supposed to SNOW tomorrow... GROSS!!! Oh also I didn't really explain my companion very well haha so Sister Scott is my same age, she went to BYU in the summer time and so she knows a ton of people I know from BYU too.  She has been out for 10 months and is from California.

     Anyway, I think that's pretty much it!! Thanks again for your letters!! I MISS YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH AND I LOVE YOU BUNCHES AND BUNCHES AND BUNCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Taylor

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Midnight Snack

Hey Family!!!!!

     Thanks so much for your emails - I love reading them! I hope you had a great birthday Dad!! This week has been pretty great - I got to go to Matt Westfalls baptism yesterday and it was so amazing.  You could just tell he knew what he was doing was the right choice and his wife was so excited for him too.  It was fun going back to the ward in Highland and seeing everyone!

  

     Tuesday morning we had a lesson with Arlene.  I think I started telling you about her? She's 85 and her 3 best friends growing up were Mormon and she isn't able to see them anymore so she thought that by learning more about Mormons, it would help her feel close to them again.  We taught the Plan of Salvation and I think it went really well! It seemed to make sense to her and she said if she were to start going back to a church it would probably be the Mormon church but she feels like she needs to keep going to her Baptist church because of social reasons but she hasn't been to that one in a while either.  She is so cute though and she loves talking to us.  Tuesday afternoon we had a lesson with Shannon and she is seriously AMAZING!!!! After we left last time she looked up stuff about missionaries onling and read about our schedule and what we do and she told us how impressed and grateful she is for us and then she also looked up and studied the 10 commandments on her own.  She was confused about the 2nd one about graven images and asked if it was okay for her daughter to have dolls and after we told her it was okay she was like "oh, good! I was about to burn all of her dolls because I didn't want to be breaking any of the commandments!" She also told us that she prayed the night before the way we taught her and she said she felt so much happier and woke up with a different kind of energy. She is awesome!! We went over the Plan of Salvation with her and she really liked it.  She thanked us multiple times for teaching her.  She said she has always felt like she had an old soul but she hasn't started searching until now.  We just need to get her married (she lives with her boyfriend) !!!

     So... EARLY tuesday morning... around 2... I woke up super hungry and I couldn't go back to sleep so I go into the kitchen and I saw a can of chicken noodle soup and decided that sounded good! So I pop the tab to open it and in the process of doing that I cut myself so I quickly run it under cold water and then I turn my hand around and I can clearly see it's WAY more than a small cut.  Blood was like gushing out and it was super deep and it scared me so bad! I had no idea what to do! I kept running it under water and trying to apply pressure and stuff but it was just making it worse so I wrapped a paper towel around it and found a first aid kit and it said to raise the injury above your heart so I did that for a few minutes and it helped a little but it was still bleeding super bad and I didn't know what to do because Sister Minyard was sleeping and like who eats soup at 2 in the morning? I felt pretty dumb.  Anyway, it finally slowed down a little and I went back to sleep and I wasn't planning on telling Sister Minyard just cause the next morning was transfers and I was just going to let it heal on its own but she saw my finger wrapped in a bandaid and asked what happend so I told her and she looked at it and said I should show the mission nurse so I did at transfers and she said I needed stitches! So, after transfers I got 8 stitches on my finger! I was super scared to get them actually.  Moral of the story... don't eat soup at 2 in the morning?  Anyway, Wednesday was transfers and we had (2) 30 year -olds come in to the mission! Crazy right? Sister Minyard is with one of them now.  I'm with Sister Scott and she is great! She's from California and she went to BYU the summer before I went and so we actually know a lot of the same people. 

     Thursday we had a lesson with John and his wife Nicole was there this time and it was the most awkward/uncomfortable lesson of my life!!!! Usually Nicole is sleeping when we have lessons because she is kind of addicted to perscription drugs apparently but she was awake this time and she just started talking about all their marriage problems while John was sitting right there and then she went off about how rude John is to her and how he doesn't care about her and you could tell John was super annoyed but he didn't say anything.  Anyway, Nicole apparently wants to learn more but I guess we will see how that goes...

     Saturday morning we had another lesson with Arlene and we talked about the Restoration and I think she was a little confused but we asked her a lot of questions to help clarify things so hopefully that helped? It's always different adjusting to different missionaries teaching styles too. Yesterday was Stake Conference and the theme of it was hastening the work (surprise!) but they focused a lot on like visting and home teaching and service which was great.There was a super cool statistic that one of the speakers told us too.  He said that if every single missionary in the world were placed in China right now, each companionship would have 30,000 people to teach.  HOLY COW!!!! I thought that was pretty sweet! We had a lesson with Candice last night and we watched the Restoration DVD and she said she would come to church next week!     

     Anyway, I think that's pretty much it!! Happy St. Patricks Day!!!! I hope you all have a super fabulous day and week.   I MISS YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH AND I LOVE YOU BUNCHES AND BUNCHES AND BUNCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Taylor

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14 months!!!!!

Hey Family!!!!

     How are you?? Thank you so much for your emails - I love to hear from you!! I hope the weather is way warmer there than it is here.. church was cancelled yesterday because there was a predicted ice storm but it wasn't even bad like at all.  Anyway, I guess I will start telling you about my week! It was actually kinda a slower week in some ways.   It's a little frustrating because we weren't able to meet with ONE of our investigators and trust me... we tried!! They either cancelled or weren't ever home or wont get back with us or just have a lot going on right now.  President Morgan wants all the leaders to have "model areas" and it's hard when none of your investigators will even meet with you. But we will keep trying!!

     So on Monday evening, we met with a less active member Ashleigh and her husband pretty much is always traveling for work and he isn't a member but she has been coming almost every week lately.  Anyway, she has like a 2 year old I think? She's had a pretty rough life.  She is only 19 and got married when she was 16 and doesn't have contact with her parents like AT ALL and when she got married, her husband only spoke spanish so she learned spanish and now she's a mom and looking at her you would think she was 30.  It was just so crazy to me that she is younger than me and stuff but she still recognizes how important the gospel is in her life. 

     Tuesday I was on exchanges in Sandy Creek and those sisters wrecked their car last week so members pretty much drove us around all day but we weren't able to meet with very many people!

     Wednesday we visited a couple less active members and they went pretty great! We have been trying to meet with Jen H. basically all transfer and we finally were able to catch her at home!  She is so awesome.  Her family was Mormon growing up but they were basically all offended a little bit so none of them are active anymore and her parents live in a nudest community (she told us alllll about it... it's interesting how much people tell missionaries sometimes).  Anyway, her son is actually being taught by the Elders in our ward right now and he wants to get baptized and I think that is going to help her come back to church.  She's so much fun to talk to and be around - our ward needs her!! We had dinner with Linda Cox again that night and I just really like her!! Her granddaughter lives with her and she's 6 and she likes that 'Cups' song from Pitch Perfect and she kept doing the part with the cup and I already knew it but Sister Minyard didn't so we tried teaching her but the granddaughter didn't think she was very good so she was like ... "maybe you can just be the audience".  It was pretty funny!

     Thursday we had district meeting and I gave a training on extending invitations to investigators (funny that none of our investigators want to accept our invitations right now).  So I hope it went alright!

      Friday and Saturday we didn't have much going on.  But Saturday morning we had our Stake Women's Conference and President and Sister Morgan spoke at the beginning and Sister Morgan told a story about a woman who said she wanted to be buried with a fork because whenever you are at a dinner and they are like "keep your fork" you know something better is coming!! (dessert!) So she wanted to be buried with a fork.  The whole theme was like enduring to the end and I just really liked that!! Also, this one lady that spoke used a ton of quilts that she had made as part of her object lesson and she has made a mission quilt for all of her kids that went on missions and I thought that was a good idea! Like it's super cute too not just one of those lame ones with a ton of squares sewn together.   

     Yesterday since church was cancelled we walked to the Matheson's for Sacrament meeting and the Elders came too and it was really good.  We had the sacrament and our own testimony meeting.  I've never done that before and it just was really neat to me that the priesthood can make that happen - I'm so grateful for that! Afterwards, we watched Johnny Lingo and The Phone Call.  Hahahaha if you haven't seen The Phone Call... you have to!!! It's hilarious and super cheesy and old!!! So for some more of the afternoon we tried tracting some of the houses on our walk back to our apartment (it was FREEZING!!!!!) and no one was really interested they mostly thought we were crazy for being outside.  But then, after lunch, we decided to go back out and the first 2 people we talked to became new investigators!! It was so amazing!!! We are supposed to find 2 new investigators each week and we hadn't found any this week PLUS we hadn't had any lessons with our investigators and I was stressing out and then the first people we talked to became investigators!! YAY!!!

     Anyway, that was pretty much my week! Thanks so much again for your emails.  I hope you all have a super fabulous week!!!! I MISS YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH AND I LOVE YOU BUNCHES AND BUNCHES AND BUNCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,
Taylor

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