Greetings from MADTOWN!

Hi family!  

So I am officially in Madison, Wisconsin and I have absolutely LOVED every second of it so far!  Let me start off by telling you a little bit about this area.  It is very similar to West Allis in some ways, and very different in other ways.

First of all, there is a TON going on here.  We have been crazy busy and I absolutely love it.  We have a lot of pretty neat investigators that we are working with.  The ward is so super awesome.  So many of them are missionary minded and drop what they are doing to help us out so it is the biggest blessing.  Sounds like you know that the Durtshi's are in this ward!  They are so awesome!  He is in the bishopric and she is the Relief Society president.  I am super excited to get to work with them some more.  

There is also a Thurston family in this ward!  It is one of Norm Thurston's sons that just moved out here with his wife to go to graduate school at UW.  So I've got family here which is pretty cool.  Plus Sis. Thurston is the coolest.  She is a return missionary and she drives us around pretty much everyday and comes to lessons and stuff.  So that has been AWESOME.  The ward here is actually half Spanish.  So at church on Sunday they say one of the sacrament prayers in English and the other in Spanish.  And there are four sets of missionaries in the ward.  FOUR!  2 sets of Spanish missionaries and a set of English elders and then us.  So that is pretty crazy.  But the ward takes very good care of us.

Sis. Brewster and me with the Thurston's!

We are pretty much in the heart of Madison.  So we are on the University of Wisconsin campus a lot.  Like right now I am e-mailing from a library on campus.  Everyone here is super duper liberal.  Even more so than West Allis.  So that has been a little different too.  The buses here are WAY better than Milwaukee.  They get us pretty much every where you need to go and they have these transfer points where lots of buses meet at so that you can switch buses there if you need to.  So the buses here really aren't that bad. 

My new companion's name is Sister McKenzie Brewster and she is the bomb.com.  She is seriously the cutest.  She is 20 years old, from Phoenix, Arizona and has been on her mission for about 15 months so she is winding down.  In fact we think that I might even be her last companion.  She goes home in December.  I just asked her what else I should tell you guys about her and she said to tell you that she is smoking hot.  So yeah, we get along pretty well.  :)

 

As for the week- it has been crazy!

Tuesday was full of a lot of goodbyes and it was really hard.  In the morning I got to see Sarah and we ate lunch together and watched the Testaments.  It was hard to say bye to her because I am going to miss her, but I do feel so confident that she is going to stay active in the gospel.  So that made it a little easier.  I spent the rest of the day finishing packing up and saying goodbye to some of my favorite families.  At the end of the night, Sis. Stewart drove us home and saying bye to her was pretty rough too.

I am really going to miss being so close to the senior office missionaries.

Saying goodbye to Sarah and Elizabeth :(

Oh and this is a mammoth tooth... haha

Wednesday was transfer day!  We got up in the morning and headed over to the church around 9.  We met with a bunch of other missionaries there who were either being transferred or waiting for their new companions to come.  What they do is have everyone meet together in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin, and they disperse back out to the different zones that they need to go to.  It was fun because on the ride of up Oshkosh, I got to sit with Sister Osmond!  #tendermercy  I got to Madison probably around 2 and met Sister Brewster!  We hit it off pretty fast.  I absolutely love that girl.  It's been a pretty smooth companion-wise transitioning so I am very grateful for that.  Especially because it was so hard to leave West Allis.  So I am grateful for Sister Brewster.  When I got here, I didn't even have time to unpack!  We got right to work!  It was great!  We had some appointments with less active members.  But I was grateful for that because immediately I got to get to know some of the people that we are working with.  Then on Wednesday nights we help the Spanish elders teach an English class so that was pretty fun.  And then a bunch of the Spanish members and less actives stay afterward to play indoor soccer.  I really wish I had paid a little more attention in Spanish class in high school.  If you know me, you know that the only thing that I remember is "Yo tengo queso en mi pantelones" and that doesn't get me very far.  But hopefully I will be able to learn some more Spanish while I am here! 

 

Thursday we had a really long weekly planning so that Sis. Brewster could tell me all about all the people that we are working with.  Like I said before, we are working with a lot of people!  So I was glad to get to know them a little bit better.  Then we got to go over to the Durtshi's house and take one of our investigators to a card-making class that Sis. Durtshi teaches.  It was really awesome and you will probably be getting some really cute cards in the mail sometime soon. 

 

On Friday's here in Madison, we go to a food pantry called St. Vincent's to volunteer in the morning.  It is super fun!  I am excited to get to start doing that some more.  Later we had a lesson with an investigator named Charles.  We got to teach him the Restoration and it was mine and Sis. Brewster's first time teaching the Restoration together.  I thought it went pretty well!  I will let you know more about how Charles is doing next week.  We also got to go and visit a recent convert that lives in an assisted living center.  She was having a really bad day so we took her down to the activity room and I played the piano for her and we sang some songs.  She loved it and lots of the other residents there came and joined in!  It was awesome and the Spirit was really strong.  Hopefully we will be able to start teaching some of those people soon. 

 

Saturday morning we had our missionary correlation meeting with our brand new ward mission leader.  His name is Brother Delorey and he is so awesome!  I can tell that is going to do a lot for us so I am excited for that.  Then we had a ward soccer tournament!  It was awesome.  Because the ward is half Spanish, there are a lot of people that like to play soccer.  I actually played really well at the tournament and scored 2 goals- one off of a header.  So now all the little Spanish children think I am pretty cool.  haha.  We had a few other appointments that day and on the way home at the end of the night we were walking through this park and met this guy whose name is Sam.  He has a really cute little family that he loves so much so we taught him a little bit about the plan of salvation and he got really excited!  So we will be meeting with him and his family this week.

Sister Osmond

Sister Packer

Sunday was awesome.  I got to meet a lot more of the members in the ward!  This ward is pretty much a young married couples ward.  Lots of the members are recently married and going to school at UW.  So that has been fun.  They are all really cool.  After church, we got to have a lesson with our investigator Stefanie.  She is from Germany and has a daughter who is a member of the church.  Her husband died a little over a year ago and that has been really hard for her.  So we were able to teach her about how she can be sealed to him and be with him forever.  She loved it!  I am excited to get to start working with her more. 

 

Monday we had a crazy cool lesson with our investigator Rachel.  She is going to school at UW right now getting her PHD in English.  So she is super smart and super intellectual.  She found the church because lately she has been studying mothers and is writing a paper on it for a class.  She came across the Mormon mommy bloggers or something like that and absolutely loved it so she wanted to know more!  We had a really awesome lesson with her about Alma 32 and how faith leads to action.  And then we commited her to be baptized on October 4!  It was one of the coolest lessons that I have had on my mission so far! The night before we were planning on teaching her the Plan of Salvation, but when we were praying about it in the morning we really felt like we needed to just talk to her about baptism.  That lesson was totally 100% by the Spirit.  And now she has a baptismal date that she is working towards.  It is so awesome!

 

So basically we have been crazy busy!  We are usually frantically running around from appointment to appointment and trying to catch buses.  I have been completely and utterly exhausted everyday since I have been here and I LOVE IT.  I wouldn't have it any other way.  I miss West Allis everyday, but I am so grateful to be in Madison and I know that this is where the Lord needs me right now.  I love this gospel and I love being a missionary.  Hope you all have a great week!!  Love you!

 

Love,

Sister King

6 months!

Another week come and gone in West Allis.  And it sure was a busy one.

 

Tuesday we were able to take Sarah to the family history center and help her get started.  It was super cool!  She was actually able to find a lot of information on her family.  Our goal is to help her find a few family names that she can take to the temple for the first time.  Wouldn't that be so cool?  It was really awesome because Sarah has had a hard family life, but you could totally see the Spirit of Elijah come alive in her as she searched for her family members!  Super cool.  Also, we were able to have a lesson with Tubree.  We covered the 10 commandments and the Law of Chastity which can be a little hard sometimes, but it went over so smoothly!  The Spirit was definitely there and Sarah came and you would not believe the power that her testimony added to the lesson.  It was great!  So Tuesday was pretty solid.  Tuesday was also my 6 month mark!  We weren't able to do anything too special because we were pretty busy, but we did pop those poppers that you sent me and that was super exciting.  Haha 6 months down and only 12 to go.

 

Wednesday was transfers but that didn't really affect us too much since we are both staying here together another transfer.  Just another day of hard work!  We were able to meet with Toya which is Tubree's friend that she brought to church last week.  We had invited her to read from the Book of Mormon everyday for 10 minutes and we met with her to follow up on that to see how she was doing.  She told us that she had been reading everyday which made me really excited!  But then she said that it wasn't really speaking to her and that she didn't understand and that it was confusing.  Ugh...  that always makes me so frustrated because I know that the Book of Mormon is so powerful so I hate it when that happens.  But we were able to read the first chapter of the Book of Mormon with her and go over it and kind of explain some of the events.  She said that it helped her a lot.  I think Toya is just going through a lot with her family right now.  She has been super closed off to us which makes me sad because if she would just open up then we could know how to help her!  haha.  But I know that the Spirit will stir inside of her as she reads from the Book of Mormon and reading that book is going to help her more than anything else.  We also got to have dinner at Sarah's house which is always nice.  We are continuing to help her work on personal progress and she is really coming along!

 

Thursday was weekly planning and a long day of finding.  We were able to meet this ssssssssuper cool lady named Sherri at the bus stop.  She recently converted to the Muslim faith which I thought was super interesting.  We told her what we do as missionaries and started teaching her about the Book of Mormon and she was super interested!  She even asked us if we could come to her house to teach her more!  haha.  So we got her information and then asked if we could pray with her before we left.  Right in the middle of the prayer........... the bus that she had been waiting for the whole time zoomed past.  I have never felt more horrible in my whole life!  haha we made her miss her bus just because we wanted to pray with her!  Luckily, she wasn't upset and is still excited to meet with us this coming week.  haha so pray for Sherri!

Friday was also a day full of finding.  We were able to find this other cool lady named Marie that invited us to come back this week too.  So that should be fun.  But in my studies on Friday, I flipped open to a verse in the Book of Mormon that wasn't even close to where I was reading but it really stood out to me.  Alma is talking to his son Helaman about some of the lessons that we can learn from the Liahona and this is what he says.  It is Alma 37:41

 41 Nevertheless, because those miracles were worked by small‍ means it did show unto them marvelous works. They were slothful, and forgot to exercise their faith and diligence and then those marvelous works ceased, and they did not progress in their journey;

 

Sometimes I feel like because I have been stuck in West Allis for so long, I have kind of just been going through the motions and maybe getting a little slothful and not so diligent.  But according to this verse, hard work, diligence, and faith is what we need to see miracles!  So that was a really cool experience and a wake up call for me.  There is still so much work to be done here!

Saturday was pretty crazy.  Our ward had a pioneer picnic to celebrate pioneer day next week.  It was so fun!  But the best part is, we got Tubree to come!  The ward has been so good to fellowship her and help her to feel more comfortable.  Her baptism date has been moved to August 9 and we are doing our best to make sure that it will happen on that day.  So please be praying for that!  After the picnic, we taught Tubree tithing.  Teaching this lesson always makes me nervous because I don't want people to think that we just want their money haha.  But it went sooooo incredibly well!  We told her about all the blessing that come from tithing and read Malachi 3:10 that talks about how the Lord will pour out blessing that we won't have room enough to receive them.  She was so excited and anxious to receive these blessings, that she wants to pay tithing before she even gets baptized!  Haha she is seriously so awesome.  After the ward picnic, there was a funeral at our building for a family in the Spanish Branch.  Sis. Stewart, the Relief Society president in our ward said that they needed a pianist last minute so she asked if I could play for it.  And of course I will always drop whatever I am doing to help Sis. Stewart because she is just so awesome and I love her so much and want to help her in anyway that I can.  So I was able to play the piano for this Spanish Funeral.  It actually turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life.  The entire funeral was in spanish so I had absolutely no idea what was going on the whole time.  But I will tell you this much, the Spirit there was absolutely undeniable.  It was a testimony to me that even though we spoke different languages, we can all understand the Spirit and how it works with us.  I know without a doubt that that is an eternal family right there.  The Plan of Salvation is so real and we will get to be with our families for eternity.  How amazing is that?  What a blessing.  I was so humbled and I just feel so beyond grateful that we have that knowledge and also that our family has been sealed.  We are stuck together guys!

Sunday was awesome.  GUESS WHAT!!!!  Sarah got her first calling!  She is going to be the wolf den leader for the cub scouts!  She is so excited about it.  I was freaking out.  Raising my right arm to sustain her into her calling is a moment I will never forget!  Also, we had a cool experience at dinner.  So apparently there is this program in Great Britain where if you are a good soccer player then you can come over here to America and run soccer camps all around the country and stay with host families along the way.  Well they are in Milwaukee this week and a family in our ward was going to be the host family for 3 of these 19 year old British soccer coaches and they invited us to come over to have dinner with them!  It was so awesome.  It was so fun for me to be able to talk soccer with all of them.  And yeah, their accents were way cool.  We started talking to them about the church and if they had ever seen mormon missionaries before.  One of them had actually been stopped by some missionaries back in England and given a pamphlet and another had stayed with a different mormon host family while he was in Arizona running a camp.  Isn't that crazy?  We taught them a little bit about the Book of Mormon and read a scripture about prayer.  So that was way cool

 

 

Over all things are going pretty well here.  We are staying busy which is just how I like it.

Keep up the good work family!  I love you guys!!

 

Sister King :)