Sunday, February 5, 2017

The Week of the CRABS!

 January 16, 2017

This week Sister Heaton and I had a pretty "stretch yourself" goal of having 30 lessons in one week, then something horrible happened. Every single person in Brookings got sick. Okay so maybe not everyone is sick but we had so many lessons cancel this last week, and at times it was a little discouraging. We ended up having 17 lessons, and we tried our hardest to try to at least get to 20, but not so much. Oh well, so the cookie crumbles sometimes!

Something really weird happened this week. But it was more like a cool kind of weird. Sister Heaton and I were in Correlation with our Ward Mission Leader and he gave us a referral to someone who he knew in town. So the next night we went and tried to contact her and she told us to come back in a week, well that's fine, we didn't think much of it. Well that night while we were syncing our ipads at the church we got an email about a referral from the church, it had the same exact address of the referral from Brother Johnson, but a completely different name. So we decided to go back there first thing the next morning and sure enough the referral from church headquarters was the other referrals roommate! But the one from church headquarters referred herself! I had never seen that happen before. Apparently she is a member of the church and has recently decided that she wants to come back to church. We are so excited for her!

This week we were able to meet with some new investigators who we found last week! It is a cute little family, a single mom and her 2 girls. And man I love them so much already. They were so excited to be able to learn about the gospel and so involved in the first lesson. When we invited them to come to church they were SO excited. Then on Saturday night we got a text from the mom saying that her and her girls were sick and they weren't going to be able to come this week. Sister Heaton and I were so sad. But we are excited for them to be able to try and come next week. We are going to be talking to them about baptism this next week and hopefully be putting them on date! We are stoked!

This week Sister Heaton and I were able to spend a little bit of time in Gold Beach, which is about an hour north of us, to do some tracting for the Senior Couple who is living there. We were able to find a few people who were interested in talking with us, and honestly it was a beautiful day so Sister Heaton and I just soaked in the sunlight as we were walking around tracting. Although we did meet one interesting fellow. I don't even remember his name, but he had some interesting views on the missionary work aspect of religions. He told us that it was like we were an NFL team drafting our players into our religion. Interesting notion that he had there. As you can tell, he really didn't want to talk to us!

This next week we are going to be going up to Coos Bay in order to have Zone Conference with President Russell, which we are super excited for. The other exciting thing about it is that we have car inspections. But this isn't a normal car inspections because the mission is getting a bunch of new cars, and so the cleanest car in every zone is getting a new car. Soooo you could say that Sister Heaton and I spent a good hour and a half today really deep cleaning our car. It looks very very nice.

The other night, Sister Heaton and I were really struggling. We were trying to contact people and everyone that we could think of we went to and they were sick. So we stopped and said a prayer at one point and I decided to try and call a recent convert, who we have been trying to get ahold of for weeks. She went out of town with her husband, who we are also teaching. And we had called them every day for 2 weeks, and nothing had happened. So reluctantly we called, thinking we would get the same response, but NO! This time she answered and she was SO excited to talk to us. We were able to talk to her about her trip and then she decided to invite us over for dinner because we didn't have one that night, and guess what they were having? CRAB. So we were able to help her finish making the crab, she taught us how to cook them so that they don't scream in the pot, and then taught us how to crack the shell open so we wouldn't have food flying. It was a good night at dinner. I liked the crab a lot, Sister Heaton didn't really liked it, they kept offering her more and more and she kept trying to find excuses until she finally said no, lol. But it was a good night and we were able to teach them a little lesson. It was perfect!

Yesterday during my studies I was really struggling, and I wasn't sure why. I was trying to figure out what to study and just nothing was feeling right. So I decided to open up to Preach My Gospel and it referenced the scripture Mosiah 3:19 which reads:

19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a childsubmissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

When I went on to continue to study what a natural man was and who a saint was I realized that a natural man took on the form of a man who is of the world, or a sinful man. While a saint is a man who is set apart from the world and who is trying his hardest to become like God. Obviously we can't reach that point on earth, but it was an interesting thought. But then, it is interesting because we aren't all perfect. But it says we can become a saint as we use the Atonement of Jesus Christ every day. Then it lists a bunch of Christ like attributes. It is important that we take upon ourselves the atonement so tha
t we can become the saint that we know our Heavenly Father wants us to become. 

I was thinking about this a lot yesterday during sacrament meeting, and then we had an AMAZING sacrament talk by a lady in our ward. She got up and showed her vulnerability, and told us that she had felt like she shouldn't prepare anything for the talk she was about to give, but to trust in her Heavenly Father and that the spirit would direct her. And I am not kidding, this talk was fantastic. She was able to bear powerful testimony about how the spirit has directed her in her life. About how receiving revelation from God is his way of trying to get a personal relationship with him. About how Heavenly Father truly is her best friend. About how we can have personal conversations with our Heavenly Father through prayer. And how prayer is the way that we can call home. Sometimes on my mission I have had moments that I have really just wanted to call home, just for 5 minutes, how can that hurt? Obviously I haven't done that, but I am so grateful for the knowledge that I can ALWAYS turn to prayer. I can kneel down and pray to my Heavenly Father in seconds, and he is willing to answer because he wants to have that PERSONAL relationship with me. I love my Heavenly Father so much, and I was so grateful for that talk yesterday!

Thank you so much for all of the love and support from my fan club, I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week!

---Remember who you are and who God EXPECTS you to become.---

Love, Your Favorite Sister Missionary,

Sister Harrison
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I love how HAPPY she is!!
and how BEAUTIFUL, inside and out!
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