Hola mi familia y amigos!
I can't believe I've already been here for three weeks!! It feels like I've only been here for like week. It's pretty crazy -- a third of my time here is already over!!! I'm sure by the time week 6 or 7, probably even 5, I will be dying to get out of here though :)
We got a new district last week and it's a distric of 7 Elders, we didn't get ANY sisters which made me sad :( But the Elders are super cool and way nice. They're all so happy all the time and they always make sure to say, "Hola, Hermanas!" They're all really good kids so it's fun to have them here with us! I don't think we're getting a new district this week, but hopefully next week we'll get some more hermanas. Next week we have a district leaving and I'm way sad because two of my favorite Elders are in that district!
Here is my cool experience of the week:
To give some background to make these story that much cooler, me and my companion, Hermana Johansen, have been having a really hard time asking good questions to our investigators and getting them to understand the importance of the gospel and how it applies to them, personally, in their every day life. I haven't been too frustrated about it, but I definitely have really been wanting to improve, but Hermana Johansen gets super frustrated when we get feedback from the people we teach and they tell us stuff to improve on. I try to get her to understand that we're not just all the sudden going to know how to teach and the best way to teach, that it takes practice and it takes 100% relying on the Holy Ghost to guide you in what principles you teach, what questions you should ask, what experiences you should share. So anyways, we've been having a really hard time with teaching 100% by the Spirit and a lot of that is because we make these detailed lesson plans of exactly what scriptures we want to share, exactly what questions we want to ask and exactly what experiences to share - which is good, you have to have a plan or else you'll just fail - but we try to stick to our plan TOO much and we don't rely on the Spirit enough.
So they do these things called TRC and basically it's just an opportunity for you to practice teaching (even though 90% of the time that's what we're doing anyways! HAha :)) But for the TRC they have volunteers from the outside world come in and just volunteer to be an investigator. Last week there weren't enough volunteers so we just taught some of the Elders in our disctrict but they didn't really take it seriously so it ended up being lame. But this week Hermana Johansen and I had an actual volunteer. When we pretend to be investigators though, we ARE investigators. We're not just missionaries pretending to be investigators, so you feel the way investigators would feel, you think the way real investigators think and you ask questions that real investigators would teach. It's really like you're teaching an real investigator and that's how we take it.
You know absolutely nothing about the volunteer as a person, you only know their information as the "investigator" Our investigator was Maria and her and her husband had seen a Joseph Smith show on TV last week and they were unsure about modern day prophets and they were afraid that anyone could claim to be a prophet. So our task was to teach her and her husband more about Joseph Smith and help her know how she could find out for herself that Joseph Smith was a true prophet.
So we started just by getting to know more about her and her family, what their religious background was, and then we asked her about her concern of latter day prophets. So this time as we started teaching the lesson I set my notebook aside and tried to not be worried about following the plan EXACTLY how we had laid it out, I just set it aside and referred to it when I needed different scripture references. So we're teaching her and I don't know that she had felt the Spirit, as the investigator, a ton, but she had a little bit. We had already had her read like 4 scriptures and next we wanted to read Joseph Smith's first vision. I was about to read it because I felt like we had already had her read too many scriptures, but I was about to read it I just had this thought that I should have her read it. So I asked her if she could read it and after she read it she just smiled and I asked her what feelings or thoughts she had while she was reading it, and she just smiled again and said, "I have goosebumps all over me! I feel really good, what is it?" So I explained that it was the Holy Ghost and that He testifies of truth. When we get that feeling that's confirming that what we're reading is true.
We continued teaching and the Spirit was soooo unbelievably strong and we asked her to pray, right there and this with us, if she would pray to know if everything that we had taught her today was true. We asked her if she got the answer that waht we taught was true, would she be baptized. She said if she received that answer she would be! So we had her pray and she started crying so much and smiling so much and then after the prayer I asked her, "Will you follow the example of Jesus Christ by being baptized by someone holding the Priesthood Authority of God?" And she immediately says, "yes!" And then she kept crying and we ended our lesson with her praying and she kept crying all through that. So once we were done and she was out of character she was like "I LITERALLY couldn't say no when you asked me to be baptized! It's like there was literally something that pushed me to say yes and I felt the Spirit so strong that I just had to say yes!" It was so awesome to have that experience and it made me exciting to teach more!
Sometimes I get so sick of teaching because that's what we do 90% of the time, but I realized that if I teach 100% by the Spirit and if I invite others to come unto Christ then teaching is fun and exciting! It feels SO good to have that feeling of knowing that you helped someone come closer to Christ. Even though she's just a "fake" investigator, it affects the volunteers life and it's a good feeling know that you helped someone. I just need to keep teaching and learn to rely solely upon the Spirit to guide me through our lessons.
Well, that took forever to write, but it was my favorite thing that happened this week!
I have turned into Dad since being here -- I literally fall asleep in every single meeting that we have! I'm so tired all day, but I can do ok if I'm talkin to people and moving around, but once I have to be quiet and sit down I fall asleep and I don't even realize it... I don't know how I'm going to make it through General Conference this weekend! Luckily they put the conference talks on LDS.org so I can print off the ones I accidentally sleep through :)
Well, I have to go to lunch and then we're off to the temple (I also fall asleep during the session every time...haha)
Keep writing me letters - they make my day!!
I love all of you SOOOOOOOOOO much! :)
-Hermana Roberts
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