We Saw Ourselves a Live 'Possum!!!!!

Hello friends!

Well, first things first. This week one of my number one bucket list items actually happened. This is what my bucket list used to look like: 1. Be in a hurricane, 2. See a lighthouse 3. See a possum living and breathing. This what it looks like today 1. Be in a hurricane 2. See a lighthouse. I have seen more dead possums than I can count, but this week we saw the real, ugly little thing run across the road in front of us!

This was a miracle week! Last Monday evening, all of our plans had fallen through and so we were driving to find a less active. I felt a little miserable and I thought back to your email from last week. At that moment I decided that I don't have time to have bad days! I only have 2 transfers left! So Hna. Nyre and I made a goal to not have any bad days for the rest of our missions. We made a sign on our white board that says, "number of days since our last bad day" and then the number. We are up to 7 days. :)

I could sit here and tell y'all miracle stories from this week for days, but I only have an hour and a half to email, so I'll leave it at: We had a ton of miracles and Jonathan came to church this week!!!!

Oh, though one miracle that I do want to share happened on Saturday. So, there was a trailer park out in the country that we wanted to go visit so we started driving to where we were POSITIVE it was. Well, we didn't find it so we thought it must be the other way. Because we were in the country of North Carolina, there was absolutely NOWHERE to turn around! So we ended up driving around a couple miles trying to find somewhere we could turn. Before we knew it, we were out by the Relief Society president's house. Hna. Nyre had the thought that we should stop and do "secret service" so we went and it turned out she was rearranging her kids 'cramped room and was about to scream with frustration as her children ran around her legs getting into things! Perfect timing. As we were driving back to our next appointment what did we see? The trailer park that Heavenly Father blocked from our vision before - right where we drove past earlier that day. God works in mysterious ways! 

Changing our attitudes has made such a big difference for us. We had a couple times this week when things didn't go how we planned. Because we didn't get grumpy and upset, we were still listening to the spirit, and more than once we were put in the path of someone that needed our help. It was pretty amazing.

The Lord is truly blessing us in our area. A few weeks ago we only had two investigators and neither of them were progressing at all. As of today, we have 9 active investigators and a lot of potential investigators to contact this week. Sometimes I really don't feel like I deserve so many blessings, but I'm so grateful for them nonetheless!

This is the Lord's work and His hand is always here helping us along. I'm so grateful to be a missionary!

Have a good week!

Hermanita Fields

Stake Conference

Hello friends!

Have y'all had a good week? I hope so!

We had a great week here! 

This week we had a specialized training with President Baker. It was so good! We talked about the importance and benefit of role playing lessons. President opened the meeting by saying, "We're going to role play our little hearts out today." And we did. In total, we did 8 role plays of the Plan of Salvation and Family History and we watched 2 more. By the end of that 2 and a half hours my head hurt so bad! But it was really good!

We had the best miracle happen last week! We found a whole family to teach!!!! On Wednesday night we had planned a lesson with an investigator and found the perfect member to come with us and everything was going to be perfect! But then we got to her house and she wasn't home. I was so upset, I partly blamed myself because she asked us to text her an hour before the appointment and remind her, and we had totally forgotten. So, we started for our backup, a couple the we had met a few weeks ago Jose and Maria. I was still upset and didn't really want to go see them because they hadn't shown very much interest the times that we had talked to them before. Thank heavens I have such a great companion that made me get out of the car, because they were both home and they let us right in! We had a really great lesson with them and we found out that the wife had already been taught before and even had a Book of Mormon. They had a lot of questions about things like babies being baptized and why The Fall doesn't apply to kids under 8. We told them that we would come back with more answers. We are planning on showing them how to find the answers to their questions through the Book of Mormon in our next lesson. It's so perfect! It's incredible because I had just fasted the Sunday before that we'd be able to find a family! It just reminded me again, that I can't ever judge who I think is interested and who isn't.

The next day, we were eating with the Johnston family. Just a little over a year ago Sister Johnston was completely inactive and Brother Johnston wasn't a member, now they are both fully active and they just got sealed last week. While we were eating, Sister Johnston said, "I just can't even imagine if those missionaries never knocked on our door." That made me think a lot. I have only helped one person be baptized on my mission, and sometimes it's really hard to want to keep going when I feel like everyone always says no and closes their door, but I don't know what my actions will lead to. I can't stop just because I think the people will say no. Only God knows and maybe one day the people I have taught will accept the gospel, but if we don't try to share it with them we will never know and they will never have the opportunity to use their agency to choose.

We had Stake Conference this week! It was so amazing, I love stake conference! I theme that I noticed was charity. That's probably because I really just need to work on it and God was trying to give me a hint because the conference was actually about the 10 commandments...

President Baker said something that I really liked though, he said, "We all need more coaches and cheerleaders and fewer critics." That is very true. He also talked about the huge expression of charity it is letting others change and grow. I think that goes a lot back to forgiveness too, we all make mistakes and it's a huge comfort to know that I can forgive and forget about it because Jesus Christ, through His atonement, will make everything right in end. Anyway, conference was super good! The spirit was super strong and I learned a ton!

Here are a few quotes from our hilarious leaders:

"I'm so grateful that we get to sleep, because everyday I get to wake up and try again. Sometimes I wake up and say, "Get up and try again, stupid"." -Pres. Baker

"...I clutched the bag of chocolate covered potato chips to my chest and then thought, "how did I get to this point in my life?"" -Pres. Judd (stake president)

"Bears are big and mean and they have big teeth and claws and are all growly. Growly!" Pres. Judd

"Mom, I have fallen in love with the people of North Carolina!" -Sister Baker

"Last year I was at a Stake Conference and I reached out to give a sister a handshake and she pulled me into a hug and said, 'You're in the South now honey.  Here we give hugs!'" -Sister Baker

Good times... The best part is that President Judd is one of those people that says the funniest things with a completely straight face and just keeps going with his talk.

So anyway, it was a good week. I hope y'all had a great Valentine's day! We did! We watched the Restoration, in Spanish, and ate chocolate for language study;) #sistermissionarythings

Have a great week! 

Love y'all!

Hermana Fields

"And then there's our old friend the fat man walking"

Sacrament

Hello friends!

This week was a pretty good week. :) We went from freezing iciness, to 70 degrees today... It's pretty great!

I got some great news this week! I got accepted to BYU-I!!!!! I'm freaking out a little because school still really scares me, but I'm excited!

Here's my spiritual thought for the week:
This week I really learned the importance of the Sacrament. Our ward, like a lot of wards around, cancelled church last week because of the crazy storm. At first I didn't really notice a difference, but then I just kept feeling worse and worse all week. It wasn't like it was an awful week, things just never seemed to go well, and I just didn't feel like I had the spirit as much, and I was having a hard time wanting to be a missionary. Everything just felt too overwhelming! Then Sunday finally came back around and we had the amazing privilege of renewing our baptismal covenants. It was the best feeling ever, it was like the spirit flooded back into my soul. It wasn't because I was doing bad things all week long or anything, I just needed that renewal and cleansing again so that I could keep going forward. Because that was the first time in over 14 months that I have gone without the sacrament, I really took for granted the difference it makes. This work is so hard and I need the Lord's help every day to do it. I am so grateful to Heavenly Father for the opportunity that we have to be renewed every week and realign ourselves with Christ, and I'm so grateful to the Savior for making it all possible!

I hope y'all have a spectacular week! La Iglesia es verdadera!

Les quiero!

Hermana Fields

North Carolina Sky on Fire

Frozen

Something really awkward happened last week.... I never sent this email! I got on today and it was in my drafts... Sorry folks! Here it is a week later!

Hello friends! 

Buckle up! A lot happened this week!

So first off, we had an ice storm. I don't know if any of you have ever been in North Carolina in the winter, but whenever this sort of thing happens the whole world shuts down! They even cancelled church! The ice hardly touched the roads, so we were still out, but a lot of people were out of power this weekend because of all the tree branches that fell everywhere. The roads were fine, but everything else was COVERED in ice. I felt so bad because there isn't much I can do to help anyone in a power outage! I wanted to invite everyone over and buy pizza, but that wasn't really an option! We all survived though. :)

This was the craziest week of miracles! I said that last week, too. But the Lord is blessing us more and more every week! We currently have 6 referrals from members! We are going to work really hard to help them to all become new investigators this week! How did we get so many referrals? We met with 11 active families last week. The funny thing is that not all of the referrals came from when we were at their houses, some of them just sorta came out of nowhere! I know we have been so blessed because we are working hard to find investigators through our members. 

Examples: 

One night, while we were planning, we felt like we should go visit an active member named Sister W. She's old and lonely so we visit her every so often, but we weren't going to be in her area that day so we decided against it. The next day, while I was studying, I felt again like we needed to go see Sister W. Then, we were doing some service for another member and Sister W. called us! She just wanted to make sure we were doing okay in the weather, but she was doing just fine. Later that day we felt again, like we needed to go see her! So, we finally did. She was just fine.  I was a little confused why we felt so strongly that we needed to go see her, but then as we were visiting, she told us about something that had happened with her next door neighbor earlier that day. She told the story and said, "I can't understand them very well though because they are Spanish." We have never knocked, or for some reason ,ever thought of knocking that neighborhood! So we said that maybe we should go knock on their door and she got excited and thought that would be a great idea. She then told us that they have really big family of 12 that almost all live in that same neighborhood! If we hadn't gone to see her that day she probably wouldn't have mentioned those neighbors to us! It was pretty amazing! 

Another evening, we were eating dinner at a family's house and there were some random kids we didn't know. After we shared our message we asked who the kids were and the mom told us that their dad had gotten in an accident that day and so she was taking care of them while their parents were at the hospital. She also said that she really wanted to take us over there to visit them when they got home.

Last night we got a call from the elders in our ward telling us that they had just given a blessing to a member's grandma and that we should go try her. Apparently she only speaks Spanish! We didn't even know that member had family around! 

So great things are happening, and this week will be a whole lot of following up and teaching first lessons!

This week we also had a world wide training from the General Authorities. It was sooo amazing! A lot of people gave trainings, but something that I really loved was a story Elder Anderson shared about an experience that Elder Scott had when he was at a stake conference somewhere giving a talk, and afterward a women shook his hand and gave him a letter. In the letter she told him how much she loved what he had said and thanked him for his remarks, but then she said that she had come a long way to hear his witness of Jesus Christ and he didn't give it. He realized that even though he had talked about a lot of important things, he forgot to testify of the Savior. After that, he made a goal to always have the Savior's name on his lips. One bit of revelation that I received was that I need to cut out Babylon. I have a really bad habit of quoting movies and just being distracted by stuff like that. So, to be able to have Christ's name always on my lips, I need to get Babylon off. So I have been working on that this week. It's amazing how much more focused on the work I have been! Hermana Nyre and I have made a deal that if either of us starts quoting anything worldly we start singing, "Oh Babylon, oh Babylon we bid thee farewell...." and that puts us back on track! I have also made the goal to always have Christ's name on my lips. Sometimes it's easy for us to get distracted by all the things we have to teach people about, but the foundation of it all is Jesus Christ and I need to always be testifying of Him.

So, that is my week at a long glance...
I hope you all have a wonderful week, and that you all stay warm! (except you, Andy.  You need to stay cool! ;) )

La iglesia es verdadera y Jesus es nuestra luz en la obscuridad! 

Les quiero!

Hermana Fields