Liberty week 22

April 3, 2013

Gracias familia por sus cartas-Estoy MUY MUY bendecido porque yo tengo una familia de fuerza. No se porque mi Padre Celestial ha bendecido mi mucho en mi vida pero ahora yo necesito ayudar a los demas!

Hola!

Last week we met a family named the Handley's (did I tell you about them?). We knocked into brother Handley and he said we could come back the next day when his wife was home. We went back the next day which was sunday and he said "Girls you came back!" Their family is SOOOOOOO incredibly nice. The most christian people ever. We went in and talked a little about our beliefs and his wife is a very strong catholic and goes to church every sunday but they were willing to listen to us. She also had a question about baptism so I told here what we believe about baptism. A few days later during personal study I felt prompted to get a BOM and write my testimony and then write on a piece of paper how the BOM answers questions of the soul (chapter 5 of PMG). I did and we gave it to them. That was last week and then this past Monday we decided to visit them again because they said we could come back anytime. We went back and Sister Handley immediately let us right in and fed us her left over easter food which was YUMMY and her and brother handley sat down and talked to us. They both work as counselors for people with drug addictions and they actually both smoked cigarettes for YEARS (brother handley for 40 and sister handley for 35ish). Anyway they both quit (sister handley still uses a nicotine lazange). Anyway, they both thanked us for the BOM and brother handley said he had read a little bit (keep in mind brother handley doesn't believe in organized religion even though his wife goes to church every sunday) but sister handley said she hadn't had time. We asked if we could share the message of the Restoration with them and let me just tell you the Spirit was SOOO strong and the whole time Sister Handley just stared at me. I could tell she was really feeling the spirit. Brother Handley asked a lot of good questions and he seemed to understand! They didn't have any opposition to it and they both committed to read and pray. Man it was sweeeeeeet :) Pray for this family that they can find time to read the BOM!

We've been handing out a lot of fliers this week for general conference in hopes that we can get people to watch it! What a wonderful opportunity it is going to be for us to hear from our prophet. I can't wait!

Elizabeth and her family have been hard to get a hold of lately but the other day we were in Monticello tracting an apartment complex and we ran into Shauna! It was such a tender mercy because we haven't seen them in a while. Yesterday we went to visit Elizabeth and she let us in but then Shauna had gotten in trouble at school so she had to leave really quickly. It may just be that our timing as missionaries is off for their family right now because they have crazy lives. Their baptism date is still set but we can hardly ever visit them and they haven't been to church. Boo.

Yesterday we got to have lunch with the AP's and it was a great opportunity. Elder Fusco is from Sao Paulo and his comp Elder Hutchins is from Grantsville UT. They are nice and gave sister barlow and I lots of good advice! One thing we need to work on is speaking spanish. Poor Sister Barlow hasn't had any experience with Spanish and here we hardly ever speak in Spanish so it's hard for her to learn. That means it's up to me to help her! No pressure or anything...pray for us in our abilities to learn together and persevere to conquer the language!

Zone Conference March 2013 (I'm in the middle in the blue blouse.)

Zone conference was last Friday two hours away in Ossining.  The plan was for Sister Barlow and I to carpool with the other sisters who live 1 hour away in Newburgh. Unfortunately on the way to the sisters we took the wrong exit so we couldn't carpool with them. We decided to just drive all the way there by ourselves but since we took the wrong exit our GPS was leading us to a toll road. The only experience I have ever had with a toll road is when we were with dad in Baltimore. So I was like yeah okay we'll just pay the toll and get through. We got there and realized we had NO cash, only a credit card. We got up to the window and asked the lady if she would take our card and she said no only cash. Except we had no cash (it was only 1.25. 5 quarters.) so the lady started to get really impatient and she was rude. We explained we are both from Utah and aren't familiar with these roads but she didn't care, we had ruined her day because we didn't have 5 quarters. Sister Barlow and I looked at each other and said what should we do?! I got out of the car and started to walk to the person behind us to beg for 5 quarters but the toll bridge lady said "hey you can't do that!" So I was like well what do you want me to do! I mean we could have just turned around I guess and went against traffic. Yeah we totes could have done that. Anyway, she finally just ended up giving us a stub that said we had to send in 1.25 to the state since we couldn't pay. No biggie. We laughed about it after and now it's just a funny memory. People here in New York don't like missionaries/foreigners who don't know anything :D

So Zone Conference was good! We learned about how to begin teaching, teaching with pamphlets, and how to follow up on commitments using the pictures in the pamphlets. We went away with a better sense of how we can help our investigators progress towards baptism!

Thank you all for your emails! Les amo muchisimo!!

Hermana Richardson