Monday, August 5, 2013

Sisters Conference

Hello everyone!
This week we had a Sister's Conference. All of the 45 sisters in our mission got together (we are getting a few more sisters in a couple of weeks!) and we had some training, get to know you stuff, lunch, and a slideshow of pictures of the sisters. The Conference was based on President Uctdorf's talk at the young womens broadcast "Your Journey Home." If you haven't read this talk go read it NOW! It is so good! It's definitely on my list of all time favorite talks because there are just so many great parts and I love the way that President Uchtdorf says things. Anyways the conference was great because I got to see all of my MTC buddies and some of the other sisters I got to know last transfer. So this week was busy but we had to drop a lot of our investigators. Leslie hasn't been keeping her appointments and Aaron we haven't been able to contact in a really long time. Our other referrals weren't interested. Finally we went to try one of the referrals for the last time before we were going to drop him. He answered the door and we ended up giving the first lesson. And at the end he agreed to be baptized! But then we found out he's 18 and just graduated so we had to hand him over to the elders in charge of the singles ward. So basically we are back to square one and we are just trying to find people. We have been challenging the members to hand out mormon.org pass along cards. Also we have been really trying to talk to everyone! Its hard because sometimes we see someone across the street or getting out of their car or something where we have to really go out of our way to talk to them even if though it might be easier to justify passing by. We haven't gotten any return appointments yet but we have been able to talk to a lot more people and teach them more about our church!! We met this Korean preacher the other day who was really nice and we ended up clearing up a lot of misconceptions he had about the church so at least we are helping people to understand mormons better.
Well our schedule is like this
6:30 wake up (every day-no sleeping in :/ )
6:30-7:00 exercise, Our mission is a running mission so we have to run for our exercise. We go to the high school track by our school and run (well walk and run because Sis Reinsch has even less endurance for running than me but we're working on it)
7:00-8:00 we get ready and eat breakfast
8:00-9:00 is personal study (I just started the book of mormon again and sometimes I read talks too)
9:00-11:00 companionship study (It's two hours long because I am still in training but once my training is done it will just be for one hour)
11:00-1:00 out working
1:00-2:00 lunch
2:00-3:00 PMG study (Since I'm in training I have an extra hour of preach my gospel study but once I'm done with training we will be out working right after lunch)
3:00-5:00 out working
5:00-6:00 dinner
6:00-9:00 out working
9:00-9:30 go home and do our planning for the next day
9:30-10:30 get ready for bed (we can go to bed as soon as we are ready after planning we just have to be in bed with lights off by 10:30 at the latest)
So ya our days are pretty busy. Mondays are different because of p-day and Thursdays are different because we have district meeting and weekly planning. There are about 200 active members in our ward (out of like 500 something) so I guess it is kind of small. It's bigger than some of the other wards in our district though so I guess it sometimes feels bigger than it is. Ya we have a set of elders in our ward as well (the zone leaders). So that is really nice because they help us figure things out and how to best work with the ward. The ward is split in half so we each are in charge of half of the ward. Our ward area is pretty big in general. Just our half is 3x as big as most sister's areas in our mission. Over the years a lot of people have moved out of the ward and a lot of korean, chinese, and indian people have moved into the area so the ward has gotten a lot smaller I guess. One of the less active families we visited this week have the cutest kids!! The dad is from taiwan and the mom is half japanese so they are teaching their kids chinese. Chinese is crazy! The dad was explaining that for the word "ma" there are five different pronunciations and depending on how you pronounce it, it means a different word. We also visited another less active family that is from the Philippines. They fed us lunch which was chicken adobe (a popular chicken dish in the philippines) and also they had some really good mangos. I usually don't really like mangos but these ones were really good. They were yellow instead of red and green on the outside so maybe I just like this kind better. They have a five year old daughter who is a really good singer!!! She sang "girl on fire" and "what makes you beautiful" for us. She is opening for a famous philippino singer who is coming here to perform so that's pretty cool. Oh and another cool story. This week we were knocking on a certain street that we had felt prompted to knock. Only one lady had answered and she wasn't that interested. We got to the last door before we were going to go home for lunch. The lady who answered the door said that she was trying to get back into religion. She said her daughter had a friend who was mormon who is home for the summer and that she really wanted her daughter to join the mormon church. She lives in Cypress (which is out of our area) but works for a lady there on that street. Even though we won't teach her since she lives somewhere else, it still seems like a really good referral for some other missionaries!! I really know that Heaveny Father is guiding us in everything we do. Even if things don't always work out or we can't always see an immediate benefit from what we are doing, I know that he is preparing us and leading us to people to teach.
Thanks for all of your prayers!!
Love,
Sister Washburn

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