Holli - March 14, 2016

Three Missionaries in Arcadia all from Eagle, Idaho

Sister Dunn, Elder Campbell, Elder Van Wagenen

Hello Everyone!

This week was pretty great! We have met lots of amazing people. It's such a privilege to be serving here in Arcadia. The hard part is helping the people progress towards baptism. President has received inspiration from Heavenly Father that we can do amazing things - our mission motto is that we teach repentance daily and baptize converts monthly. It's hard when we aren't seeing the baptisms each month -
part of me gets pretty discouraged but I also know that I'm trying as hard as I can to bring others to Christ and when we're doing all we can do, that's all the matters. We had a wonderful church tour this week with Christy. She has three children and her oldest boy Shawn is the one who is actually “investigating”.  Christy stays pretty quiet as we teach. We know that she feels the Spirit at  certain points but she is so busy all the time and has so many trials in her life so we don’t know how sincerely she wants to investigate. But Shawn asks all of these questions and sincerely wants to come to church and everything. I  just love this family! Please pray for them - especially Christy!

We had a less active member Dorothy (she’s from Jamaica and has the most  awesome accent ever - even though she’s kind of hard to understand sometimes) fall the other day and she ended  up shattering her elbow and knee. Poor thing was 

in the hospital and had surgery right away. Her daughter Tracey isn’t a member of the church but we were one of the first she contacted. She even said she wanted to call more people from the church but she didn't know who. Poor Tracey also works full time and just has a lot on her plate so we feel for her. But everything is all right now and they’re moving Dorothy to a rehabilitation center soon.

One of our young woman (Kyara) brought her friend to have a lesson one day at the church. It was pretty awesome teaching her. Her name is Eileen and she is super sweet. She doesn't have much of a religious background so it was cool teaching her a little bit about God and how we can communicate with Him.

Yesterday we had a lesson with Maria and her family. They are from Egypt and they are pretty stubborn in their beliefs but we help her children (Angelina and Daniel) with their English homework. So we try to sneak in our message through the service sometimes :) So we brought some members (the Foresters) over to try to fellowship and it was
pretty hectic because the Foresters have three children (Zoe, Lucy, and Xander) all under 8 so amid games of four square, catch, and tag we taught the Ten Commandments (a safe topic we thought). Then Sam (the husband) came in a little bit later and we had tried showing the kids the new Easter videos but they were a little bored by them so Sam
pulled up a bible video! It was super awesome and just helped me remember the real reason of why we are out here. It's all for Jesus Christ.

We taught David on Sunday. He is this really smart businessman who had an LDS friend and really admires and respects the Mormon people, but he has a couple issues with certain commandments so he told us he will probably never join. We had one lesson previous to this and he is a really interesting guy. He knows the bible front and back and he just has lots of questions about our beliefs. So he started throwing them at us and we realized all of his questions led back to the main lessons we teach: the Restoration, the Plan of Salvation, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So we pulled out the pamphlets as he asked the questions and basically walked him through the lessons. At the end, it was a little sad, but he told us thank you for our time and said he
had learned quite a lot but he probably wouldn't meet with us anymore. We ended up asking him why he had an aversion to reading the BofM and he said he believed we didn't need anything other than the bible. We were able to give him a copy however and invite him to read and pray about it.

Elder Hamala came for a surprise mission conference on Saturday and that was a wonderful meeting. The Spirit was so strong and Sister Barney and I were taking notes like crazy! He talked to us a little it about how we can receive revelation and then he turned it over to us for Q&A so it was pretty great. One Elder asked "How do we respond to
someone who tells us that they have received an impression that their church is the right church?" (Haha, that's most of our investigators right now) and Elder Hamala said that his reply would be "Ok."

We kind of laughed - is it really that easy? Sometimes we work and sweat and pray and worry over how in the world we are going to convince someone that our church is the true church but then I think the most important thing we tend to forget is that the Spirit is the converting power and if we can help them feel that than we've done our job but it's up to the investigator to act on that impression.

There are so many amazing experiences that missionaries have out here. So many growing opportunities. I know that if we serve the Lord faithfully, everything will work out. I love you all so much! Have a wonderful week.

Love, Sister Dunn