Holli - January 4, 2016

FHE with Tyler and Morgan

Hello Everyone!

We had such a cool week!

So Sister Maughan and I will be staying in Arcadia for another six weeks which is going to be awesome! We are both super pumped about it :) This Ward is amazing and we are so excited to be working with them :)

We finally met this less active couple (the Lopez's) a few nights ago. They are super funny and awesome. They are actually getting ready to move and have been very busy with work and everything so they haven't had much time to meet with the missionaries. It's kind of funny but Sister Lopez was telling us one of the main reasons they aren't at church (minus their jobs) is that they don't fit the stereotypical
Mormon so for her Relief Society is kind of torture. In our Ward especially there are lots of older ladies so she feels she wouldn't mesh very well. The thought came to me from one of the ladies in our Ward when speaking of her conversion. She said: "I don't go to church to worship the people." I loved that because it helped me think of the main reason we all go to church. It can be hard when we feel as if we don't
belong but I think the more we go, the more opportunity we give the Lord to change our hearts and the more we will want to go out of a desire to follow Him.

So this really cool experience happened last night. Sister Maughan and I feel as if we've been working pretty hard, talking to everyone and taking every opportunity we have to share the gospel and there hasn't been any super solid people that we've met that really want to try out our message. But last night we met this guy named Anthony as we were
looking for a former. It was late at night and I had some weird foot thing going on so I was kind of hobbling down the street while Sister Maughan held my crutches (haha, funny story) and Anthony was just about to get in his car when he saw us and asked about the crutches and then started telling us about his broken knee and how he needed to be on crutches too and then we happened to start talking about
missionary work and he told us about his beliefs and it was awesome! His mom goes to one church and his grandparents go to another and Anthony used to go to church but now he just reads the bible. He has a strong belief there is a God and he has read multiple translations of the
bible all the way through. He told us it's crazy how much confusion there is - how all of these translations are just people's opinion of the bible. We were like, aaaahhhh! So we gave him a BofM and he said he was stoked to read it. Then he told us he had two friends who were LDS and they never really had talked about the BofM before so he said
he would start talking with them about it. We were like, this is so cool!

We met this guy named Rafael in the park one day. Sister Maughan asked if we could talk with him for a minute and we ended up teaching him the whole restoration lesson. Pretty awesome! So now he has a BofM as well. He was raised Catholic but he said Catholicism was the only thing he knew. We challenged him to read the BofM because one of his
questions was, "Why are there so many churches?" So hopefully he reads it!

Haha, we were walking to the park to park contact on New Years Day and there were these planes up in the sky that were writing negative propaganda about Donald Trump - haha, everyone was taking pictures - kind of crazy and an interesting way to start the new year :)

So we visit this older couple every week (the Wheelers) and Brother Wheeler was baptized about 4 years ago. Sister Wheeler and their entire family/extended family have been members since forever but Sister Wheeler has Alzheimers so we read scriptures with Brother Wheeler and keep Sister Wheeler company :) But we were walking to an
appointment one day and Brother and Sister Wheeler drove up and gave us In N' Out cards as a New Years present- sweetest couple ever!

Sister Maughan and I were walking to find some potentials when we ran into Jun. He was smoking out by his car but we started talking and because it was fairly cold he asked if we would come back during the day sometime. So we did and taught him the Restoration and it was pretty awesome. He doesn't believe in God - he told us he was from Japan and I think their main religious belief is just in nature - maybe nature gods. Anyway we taught him how to pray and gave him a BofM so it was awesome :)

Haha, we were walking down the street one day (our adventures always seem to involve walking) and we hear this loud crunching noise. We look up and there's this car that ran right into this yellow sign in the meridian and it was pretty intense. He ended up getting his car off the meridian and pulling over. We asked him if he was ok - he looked
super shaken and told us he had just gotten his drivers license that morning. I was like, "No worries, this stuff happens to me all the time" #thetimewhenibackedthesuburbanintothegaragedooronaccident. So it was kind of scary but kind of funny - Sister Maughan and I couldn't really stop laughing.

We had 2 FHE's this week with Tyler and Morgan and then the Ludwigs - we did the Armor of God lesson so pretty fun. I'll send you pics - they're awesome.

One last miracle - Yiwei and Amanda came to church yesterday! First time they've been at church but they seemed to enjoy it and are planning on coming next week! So excited! The Ward totally enveloped them and it was just amazing :) Haha, we haven't had an investigator at church since like three months ago so we were pumped!

Alright that's about it from here in Arcadia! Hope everyone is doing well and enjoyed the holidays! Thank you for all your prayers and support!

Love, Sister Dunn

Our District