5.26.15

Hey Fam!

As usual, don't have a whole lot of time to write.  :( but this week was pretty crazy busy!  I was really sad to be missing all of Ashley's graduation festivities, but I knew that the Lord would bless us extra for our sacrifices and boy was that true!  We had such a miracle week!

Yes, the people here love their Packers THAT much!

A few highlights:

We FINALLY got back in contact with our investigator Linda.  She is the one that was a HQ referral.  She was all excited to work toward baptism, and then we fell out of contact.  Then she randomly showed up at church a few weeks later, and then we fell out of contact.  But this week we were finally able to teach her again!  She has had a lot of opposition which I think is the reason that it has been so crazy.  But she has been reading from the BofM every day and she told us that she received an answer that it is true!  So we are super excited to continue working with her.

We have a Laotian investigator named Thim that has been working with the missionaries for a long time.  She had to cancel one of our appointments this week and felt kind of bad about it so she ended up inviting us to a family birthday party that they were having.  We got to eat SO MUCH delicious hmong food and then most of her extended family members asked for copies of the Book of Mormon.  Us and the Hmong elders in our ward have now started teaching much of Thim's extended family! 

My favorite miracle of the week was that we met this really cool girl named Jamaylah the other day and gave her a BofM and she invited us back to teach her more.  Well, went we went back yesterday to teach her, she was in the middle of a little emergency and had to leave right when we got there.  So we started talking to her older sister.  We ended up teaching her an entire Restoration lesson and it moved her to tears.  She accepted a baptismal invitation and a date to be working toward!  And invited us back to teach her husband and 3 children (who are all above the age of 8 might I add :) )  later this week! 

There were definitely a lot of ups and downs this week, but the ups always outweigh the downs and the downs make the ups taste that much sweeter.  

 

 

Don't have a ton of time- but here is a quote for President Uchtdorf's last conference talk that I LOVE:

I marvel to think that the Son of God would condescend to save us, as imperfect, impure, mistake-prone, and ungrateful as we often are. I have tried to understand the Savior’s Atonement with my finite mind, and the only explanation I can come up with is this: God loves us deeply, perfectly, and everlastingly. I cannot even begin to estimate “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height … [of] the love of Christ.”

I know that the Savior really does love us!  I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to share that love with others and feel it more abundantly myself as a full-time servant of Jesus Christ.

Love you all so much!  Until next week!

Love,

Sister King

Hey Fam!

Can't believe that another week has already come and gone!

We have been pretty busy and seeing so many miracles!  It is the best. 

The highlight lesson of my week this week was definitely with our investigator Rachel.  She is actually a lay minister in her Lutheran church.  She is a very good Christian person- probably one of the most Christian people I have ever met!  She was on her church's Facebook page the other day and someone posted something along the lines of "Please pray for the ____ family!  They have chosen to leave the Mormon church and we are so glad that they are finally able to escape.  We need to pray that they will be able to find the truth and to stay away."  Isn't that soooooo sad? Yeah.  Rachel thought so to.  She commented on the post and said, "Please remember that Mormons are God's children too."  Within 3 minutes the Lutheran pastor deleted her post and sent her a personal message about why what she said was wrong.  Well that just didn't sit right with her.  So she decided that she wanted to find out why everyone thought the Mormons were "so terrible"and she also wanted to understand the doctrine of the Mormon church so that she could correct any misconceptions next time she was in a conversation and Mormonism came up.  So she started meeting with us!  :)  We answered all of her questions and taught her about the Restoration of the gospel through the Prophet Joseph Smith and the miracle of the Book of Mormon.  The first few times we met with her, she was very stand offish and made it very clear that she was only there to gather information- not to convert.  Well we invited her to be baptized anyway!  haha.  And we invited her to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it so that she could know for herself.  The first couple of weeks she hadn't been reading.  But when we met with her this week, something was different and you could tell right off the bat.  Her countenance was different. 

When we asked her how her Book of Mormon reading had been going, (expecting her to say that she hadn't and then to just move on) to our suprised she whipped out her Book of Mormon and a study journal where she had been taking notes!  All she had been doing was reading just one chapter every day and you could tell!  We spent our entire lesson just discussing the Book of Mormon and the amazing plain and precious truths that she had learned about just in the first few chapters.  Then, we asked her if she had been praying about it.  She told us that her and the Lord had been "chatting" about it a lot lately.  And that the whole time she has been reading from the Book of Mormon she has had a calm and peaceful feeling.  She knows that it is true! All this time she told us that she was not interested in converted, but now she has been considering and praying about the decision to be baptized.  She told us that she really wants to be, but she is just concerned about leaving her Lutheran church where she is a mentor for a couple of the girls.  So please be praying for Rachel that she will not only receive an answer, but that she will have the courage to act on it.  I feel so good about her!

Also- just wanted to point out that The Book of Mormon never ceases to amaze me.  It is the BEST tool to have as a missionary because if people don't really want to listen to us or if they have a lot of questions or concerns, we just give them a copy and let the book do the work! The Book of Mormon is a book with a promise.  Everyone can come to know that it is true for themselves.  So as a missionary it is so awesome to have a little book full of truth!  We have the ultimate trump card!  haha. 

Also- this week was...... my last zone conference.  Yeah I know, it is super weird.  At a missionary's last zone conference President Cutler invites the departing missionaries to bear their testimony.  i remember at my very first zone conference seeing all the missionaries that were about to go home giving their testimonies and thinking to myself 2 things.  First, they must know everything!  And second, that day is never going to happen to me.  well that day came, and I don't know everything.  Not even close.  But I have learned a lot though.  I bore my testimony of the Atonement.  You know, the Atonement is a pretty incredible thing.  I NEVER would have been able to get this far on my mission without it.  It has changed me and enable me to do things that I never could have done on my own.  I am so grateful for the Atonement. 

This Zone conference was focused on something very interesting.  It is a very important commandment that I think we don't take as seriously as we should.  Keeping the Sabbath Day holy!  I love this commandment!  I thought that I understood it, but President and Sister Cutler really opened my eyes. 

 In Ezekial 20:12 it says,

12 Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.

That is kind of an interesting phrase.  That the sabbath is a sign between us and God.  But what is it a sign of?  It is a sign to God of how much we really appreciate the Atonement.  The most important thing we do on the Sabbath day is to partake of the sacrament as a reminder of his sacrifice for us.  With the sacrament, we renew our covenants.  People tend to think that the sacrament is only a renewal of our baptismal covenant.  But that is not true.  Modern day prophets have taught us that the sacrament renews ALL of our covenants!  So that is pretty neat.  President Cutler also taught us that all or the ordinances that we do in the church we only do for ourselves once, and then we do them for other people.  For example, we are only baptized once and then when we do baptisms for other people in the temple.  Except for the sacrament!  The sacrament is the only ordinance that we repeat purely for ourselves over and over and over!  That is how important it is. We need the power of the Atonement in our individual lives so badly.  We can not make it back to live with God again and with our families forever without it!  I love this quote from Elder Petersen:

Our observance or nonobservance of the Sabbath is an unerring measure of our attitude toward the Lord personally and toward his suffering in Gethsemane, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead.

So think about the Sunday that you had yesterday.  Were you showing God just how grateful you are for the Atonement of His perfect Son?

Definitely an area that I need to improve!  haha.

I am so grateful for how much I am learning.  I have learned so much!  And grown so much too.  But I know that I still have a long ways to go.  That is why I am so grateful for the Atonement.

I love you all so much!!!  HAve a great week!

Love,

Sister King

Greatest moment of my life and I wasn't there!

Family,

Can you even believe how amazing the tender mercies of the Lord are in our lives?  I know that the Lord loves us and is so aware of us!  His hand is in the details of our lives!  Ashley meeting Kendall is one of the greatest moments of my life and I wasn't even there!  Haha.  So amazing! 

So transfers are on Wednesday and we just found out transfer information.  I am going to be staying here in Wausau.  My new companions name is Sister Karlsson.  I don't know hardly anything about her...  But I hear she is from Sweden or something.  So that should be interesting!  Excited to get to meet her this week and get to work.  A little nervous to take over the area.  I have done it a few times now but this time I am going to have to show her the ropes with leadership stuff.  So hope that all goes well. 

So last week for p-day we hiked Rib "Mountain."   Here are some pictures.

Sister Weaver is getting transferred to Madison 1!!!  I am so stoked!  She gets to go meet all of my very favorite people!!!!!  And Sister Kelley got transferred to be a Sister Training Leader in Green Bay so I will get to see her at MLC and stuff like that.  So lots of fun and exciting things happening with this transfer. 

So JT got baptized this week!  We weren't teaching him, the Elders were.  But we have gotten to know him pretty well and his story is pretty amazing!  He has been a flaming atheist his whole life.  The Elders met him tracting 6 months ago.  He told them not to waste their time because he didn't believe in God.  But the Elders were persistent and finally convinced him to come to a baptismal service a few months ago.  He felt the Spirit and couldn't deny it.  He has spent the last couple of months changing his entire life and entire way of thinking to now believing that there is a God.  And he is SO HAPPY!  When he bore his testimony at his baptism he said, "I have always sort of been a lone wolf, but I now have found my pack!"  He also said, "Now, it is REALLY hard for an Asian to say the word LOVE.  But I can honestly say that I love you guys and I love God!"  So that was pretty neat.  So grateful for JT's example to me.  He is a kingdom builder! 

We also got to have our interviews with President Cutler this week.  He talked to me about the importance of powerful personal prayer.  As I was studying and preparing for this interview, there was a line in PMG that really stood out to me.  It says, "No one can know of spiritual truths without prayer."  It really is so true.  God can't give us answers if we are not asking Him questions!  Heavenly Father wants to hear from us.  I know that the power of prayer is real.  I couldn't get through a single day of my mission without it. 

Sorry that I am running short on time again but I have to be quick because of transfers this week.  I love you all and CAN NOT EVEN WAIT to get to talk to you on Sunday!

Love you!

Sister King

Prayer is a supernal gift of our Father in Heaven to every soul. Think of it: the absolute Supreme Being, the most all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful personage, encourages you and me, as insignificant as we are, to converse with Him as our Father. Actually, because He knows how desperately we need His guidance, He commands, “Thou shalt pray vocally as well as in thy heart; yea, before the world as well as in secret, in public as well as in private.” ¹ 

^{-Elder Richard G. Scott}