July 9, 2013

Hola familia y amigos!

We finally got an investigator! Wahoo!! We have been tracting, getting referrals and contacting them, pulling from the area book, doing all kinds of finding techniques like crazy, and finally we got one!  He name is Ann........., and apparently she has been going to church for a couple of months now.  Her son is a member, as are many of her friends.  She grew up Jehovah Witness, so when she moved to Utah 20 years ago she swore she would never become Mormon.  But things change!  She loves everything about the religion.  We sat with her at church on Sunday, and it was way cute...she told us, "I was so proud to be sitting next to my missionaries!"  She came in to the Visitors Center for us to give her a tour/lesson yesterday, and it went well.  We started at the Christus and talked about how God loves us, and tied that in to prophets and apostasies, up until the coming of Christ.  Then we took her to the Savior of the World room, where it has paintings of Christ's life, starting with His birth and going through when He appeared to His disciples.  She had tears in her eyes as my companion and I taught her about the Atonement.  It was powerful!  Afterwards, we began to teach her about Joseph Smith, and we had her watch the shorter version of the Joesph Smith movie (about 20 minutes).  She was a little overwhelmed by Joseph Smith having seen God, but we invited her to pray about it and she said that she would that night.  I hope that she got her answer!

There are lots of Spanish visitors in the VC!  I am always getting pulled into other rooms to give a tour.  Which is really helpful for my Spanish, especially since I am in an English area.  Some of them ask questions that are hard to answer in a different language though!  "What qualifies someone to enter the temple?  What does "worthy" mean to you?"  "What happens inside of the temple?  Why can't other people go in?" All kinds of stuff!  Sometimes I have to work my way around words.  But that's okay, they understand.

Slightly embarrassing moment--these two ladies were in the back of the VC, where my companion and I were, and they were speaking some foreign language that sounded like French, so I asked them if they had had a chance to speak to a French sister yet.  They looked kind of confused and said that they didn't speak French, they spoke Spanish!  Ooops!  So I switched to Spanish and asked them where they were from, and they said Costa Rica.  I hadn't spoken to someone from Costa Rica before, and boy do they have a different accent! It seriously sounded like french, until I listened more closely.  How embarrassing!

Something neat that happened--there has been a drought in the area (I think all of southern Utah at least has been going through a drought), and the Bloomington Hills stake fasted for rain this last Sunday, and by the time that we left for Church there were already rain clouds in the sky, and it was rainy throughout the day!  Fasting works!!

For the 4th of July, we got up and went to the city parade at 7:30.  Only the Sisters were allowed to go, so that we could contact people and give out referral cards there.  It was fun :)  After that, we had Zone Training Meeting (ZTM), followed by our VC activity, where we did the balloon thing (I explained that with the pics), played some games on the grass, and then went inside and played signs.  After that, we worked in the VC for a bit (it was only open for a couple of hours), and then we had dinner (we ordered from Jimmy Johns, I got a lettuce wrap).  That night we had our District activity, where we played volleyball for an hour and a half, which was a BLAST, and then played signs until we had to go home.  It's so fun to be able to spend time with other missionaries!

Well I hope you had a great week!  I love you all so much!!

--Sister Burner

 Sister Burner has the only mission truck.

Sister missionaries at the 4th of July parade!

Cows from the Chick-Fil-A float :)

At our VC activity, they gave us each a balloon and had us think of something that we needed to "let go of" in our lives, and then we let the balloons go!