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| Sisters' Preparation Day |
This week has been full of good adventures!
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| Interesting book title and magnet, don't you think? |
This past Friday, I got to go on exchange with the Hickory Flat Sisters. Sister Riley and I did some service, taught a recent convert, and even tried to go tracting. When I say "tried to go tracting," I mean it. On Friday morning, we picked a street to go to and even had a back-up street. Our first pick was not a residential street, and the second one was giving us both the "don't try talking to people here" sketchy type of street. We decided on a street to go to that wasn't too far away and it ended up being a country lane with only 3 houses on it. The first door we knocked on was not only answered, but we each walked away with a free book (written by the gentleman who lived there) and a free magnet of one of his favorite things to say to people (a quote from himself). We had quite an interesting conversation with him about God and what we as missionaries do, but he politely declined our invitation to learn more. By the time we finished talking with him, we had to go exchange back, and that is what it means to "try to go tracting."
Saturday evening was the General Women's Session of General Conference. My favorite talk was the first one, given by the 2nd Counselor in the Primary Presidency. She spoke on my favorite scripture, which is Proverbs 3:5-6! I highly recommend it to all. It was also interesting watching the choir and picking out the faces of people I knew from BYU. I only counted 5, but I'm sure there were some I missed.
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| Tie-dye fun! |
Today, we had a Sisters' Preparation Day! All 6 of the Sisters in my zone got together and tie-dyed shirts (or socks, in one Sister's case) and then we had a clothing exchange with all of the clothes left by missionaries who have recently gone home. We had a lot of fun all together!
It has been a pretty good week!
Spiritual Thought/Experience: On Saturday, we spent all day knocking on doors. I even got my first sunburn in the mission to prove it. We knocked and knocked and talked and talked. By the end of the day, we had contacted 20 people! It was awesome, except that I felt like I had forgotten how to contact people. As a new missionary who has been working hard on this for 5 weeks now, that was rather discouraging! Add on the bonus of me meeting my first (and second and third) ornery Baptists, and by the time we got to watch the women's session of conference, I was downright disappointed with my lack of boldness in missionarying for the day. Before going to bed that night, I felt like I had my first real wrestle with God during my bedtime prayer. I didn't understand how I had been working so hard and improving so much and then, in the snap of some fingers, it seemed like I had forgotten the basics of talking to people about the gospel. Come Sunday morning, I determined that I wasn't going to let the previous day get me down and that I was going to come back stronger than ever before. In each meeting at church and appointment afterwards, I heard something that helped me realize that I could indeed learn and grow from this experience. Each concern I had about the previous day and how I, personally, could improve was directly addressed by something somebody said or a video they shared or a song we sang. I have a firm testimony that when Heavenly Father tears us down, He will build us back up stronger than before! :)
I love y'all and hope everything's going great in your lives!
<3 Sister Houghton
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