Sunday, June 19, 2016

Counting on Change

June 13, 2006

Hey, y'alls.  This email's probably going to be kind of short because we are in a hurry to get to the beach party.

On Tuesday night, I got to meet a woman named K and her daughters.  Sister Anderson has been teaching her for awhile.  She wants to be baptized into our church, but her husband is against it and she has a teaching commitment with her current church.  She is amazing and has two beautiful daughters that I also got to meet.  She is really good friends with a member who lives only a few houses down. :)

On Wednesday, we went to see a guy that we had talked to last week.  He was standing outside when we walked up and waved at us and said he had not had time to read the Book of Mormon.  We invited him to church and he wanted to come, but needed a ride.  Sister Anderson remembered a member who lives in the neighborhood and called him up.  He said he could give him a ride and that we could come over and introduce him right then.  It was so awesome!  We didn't see him at church, but I think he'll remember the kindness of that man.  Later he called us and said he had started reading and asked us a question that he had. :)

Then on Thursday, it was so awesome!  We visited A and invited her to be baptized!  She wants to be baptized and she thinks her husband and two oldest daughters will want to as well.  I love that family so much.  Unfortunately, we will not be able to teach them anymore :(  Because…

On Sunday we had a huge meeting with almost all of the wards in the Brandon stake and ward boundaries were changed.  They dissolved a ward and created two new wards, the Providence and Lithia wards…can you guess which one we are in? :)  We got a call from the Assistant to the President that night that we will be in the new Lithia ward.  We will be losing a lot of our investigators, which is really sad, but Sister Anderson says we can still go to A's baptism because her ward will meet in the same building as us.  We were able to introduce her to some members yesterday, so I'm sure they'll take care of her :)  Brother and Sister M speak Spanish, so we brought them to a Spanish lesson yesterday on A's street.  It was really good to have them there and they are amazing.

Last night we were a little confused about what we should do, because we had changed our original plans to be able to teach people and some of them had canceled on us.  It didn't make sense to go back to our original plans because they were far away.  So we prayed, and we felt that we first should go to a neighborhood that we had planned to go to the day before but hadn't had time to.  After that, we felt we should go see a few people that we had talked to in another neighborhood.  We only had time to see one person, but he was there!  He is a teenage boy named T.  The first time we saw him, we gave him a Book of Mormon.  While we were talking to him, his mom called him.  He said, "I'm gettin' a Jesus book, mother!"  Haha, we thought that was funny.  Anyway, this time, he got off the phone to talk to us.  We had a great lesson and were able to tell him that he can go on lds.org and listen to the scriptures if he finds it hard to read them.  We invited him to come to church as well.  He even said a prayer with us!

Sister Anderson said something that she realized early on in her mission that pretty much sums up my mission so far.  "The only constant in my life is Jesus, my pillow, and change."  Every week, I have had a crazy change.  It has almost been like a transfer every week.  But it is so good.  I know that it is God's will.  The ward boundaries changing will be hard, but it means that the church has grown a lot in this area.

Anyway, it has been a good week.  God is good.  Off we go to the beach party!
--
Sister Porter

P.S.  The tropical storm was just a lot of rain, thunder, and lightning.  The sky turned a dark purple that night which was really weird.  Other than that, not too bad.
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Pictures:
We went to Dunks last week to get quarters to vacuum the car.  At least that was our excuse :)


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