Thursday, May 31, 2012

Week 60 - Thursday, May 31st, 2012

Dear Family, Friends and all other acquaintances,

This week has been one of utter chaos. In the best way possible? Okay so no, there hasn't been utter chaos but it seems very busy. It started out with some of our investigators moving off the street! Yay! but now it's harder to see them because they are working for one of our recent converts who's son isn't too happy with us coming over... But no worries, we're still plugging away. Another one of our investigator's husband decided he didn't want us coming by.... and a family we're working with, the mother's a member and the ex husband is not, well we saw them yesterday and the dad showed up really unhappy with us because we were teaching his children to pray and ask God for answers... Okay so he was probably mad for other reasons. But it made me so sad that the dad was so angry in front of his kids. He was trying to argue with us and put down our faith in every way possible. Fortunately, Heavenly Father blessed us with clear minds and we were able to answer his questions in the nicest way possible. I feel so bad for children who's parents are of different faiths and who basically fight about it constantly in front of their kids. It made me so sad to see this little 8 year old who is trying to please both parents be so confused because there is so much contention. We invited the dad to just listen to the missionaries to see what we really believe but he refused to and stormed out. It was a very sad meeting indeed. So we decided to play a cup game with the kids to lighten the mood. It helped a lot and we're actually going over today to just make flowers and bows with them for pday.
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As for our other investigators they are doing well, but none are progressing. :( We're currently praying for miracles and trying to find more people to teach. We meet with a lot of less active members who are coming back to church, including the one who was in the car accident, her name is Lacey. She is so neat. She has been reading the Book of Mormon and so desperately wants to come to church to take the Sacrament. She reads everything we give her! And she loves when we come over. In fact she told us that all her life she has been stand-offish to the "mormon church" but now that she's received this answer to prayers she feels as though she's just barely learning her culture and wants to know everything there is to know about it! It kinda reminded me of how we don't remember what our life was like with Heavenly Father before this but every now and then the spirit touches our spirit and helps us remember things that have sounded "familiar." We desire greatly to have that appetite filled and my job is to help people satisfy that quenching thirst with the "Living Water" or Gospel of Jesus Christ. :) It's the coolest job ever. And I'm not even getting paid! I'm paying to be out here. BUT getting so many blessings from it.
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Which reminds me, so this whole week has been a bit of a downer with people taking steps backword, both investigators and less actives. So it's been hard. But Heavenly Father had me learn a lesson from it this week. Starting on Sunday when we had stake conference with Elder Perry. It was a great conference and he and the Temple president and our stake president all spoke about ways we can become more converted and strengthan our testimonies. It was really good! Of course Elder Perry called the missionaries out for not teaching as many lessons as we should and he reminded us to teach the doctrines. Will do. Well that night I was discouraged thinking I was doing a terrible job and that I frankly wasn't perfect. The next morning sister Turner told me about satan's tools. He uses doubt, discouragement, and pride to keep us from coming nearer to the Savior. We started thinking about what ways we can combat those tools and found something really cool. Doubt is really the opposite of having faith, so to overcome it we must have Faith. Discouragement comes when we forget where our Hope comes from, the Savior, so we must have Hope. And pride comes when we lose love for our fellowman, so to overcome it we must have Charity. Faith, Hope and Charity.... Sound familiar anyone? I think Mormon already figured it out so I'm going to study Moroni chapter 7 more. And then on top of that Sister Turner said that we should always look to see how far we've come in our journey. One time her family was crossing the plains. no not by handcart, by car. There are no landmarks there, no windy roads, just a flat plain. Which means after a while you don't feel like you've gone far at all. Well her dad drove for 2 hours towards this one cloud that was in the sky and he thought he was going crazy because he just Never got closer to that cloud. Sister Turner compared it to our lives. We have to look at the odometer once in a while to realize that we have actually made some progress. So we made a list of all the things we've learned and accomplished on our missions. It was really good and we have a greater excitement to go out and do the work!
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Well I love you all and I'll try to keep you as updated as possible! :)
Love Sister Maureen Davis

PS mom- give all the girls a hug and a kiss from me! I love them All so much!

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