Summer is here in full force... It is getting HOT here in florida, and from what people tell me soon the highs we are seeing right now will soon be the lows. Woot woot, Sacrifices for the lord. I already have some pretty sweet tan lines going on on my feet and arms. I cant wait to see what they look like at the end of the summer haha.
This week was great. I cant believe its been a week already. Each day goes so fast and is full of so many life lessons to be learned and so many prayers answered. I am so grateful for it, and so very very blessed.
Alright... story time:
#1- One of the YW leaders who is over the beehives from this ward has felt for the last little while very strongly that the younger girls need to be around and get to know older people that they can look to for an example. So a couple weeks ago she asked us if we would come do an activity with the beehives. We agreed so she asked us to come up with a list of ideas of things we could do and she would let the girls pick one. We did our activity this week with them and it was so fun. I came up with this idea that I adapted from a game Ive played a couple times at bridal showers where you get a roll of toilet paper and you have to create a wedding dress with it. So we first talked about modesty with them and then had a bunch of different things (like colored tissue paper, and ribbon and toilet paper) and they had to create a 'modest dress'. Then we talked about being temples for the spirit and taking care of ourselves inside too and had smoothies. We took pictures and found some good modesty quotes and as a gift from the sister missionaries we are going to make them a cute picture frame with the quote on it. It turned out to be way fun and now the other leaders want us to do activities with them too. We are having an activity tonight that we co-planned with the priests. We are having a mini MTC.... member training center. We invited the whole ward to come and find out how to be better member missionaries. It should be really good.
#2- I have been thinking this week alot about how important it is to have faith in people. There is a lady we are teaching. Jackie. She is the sister of one of the ladies in the ward and she lives with her. She has been taking lessons from the sister for like 3 years. We stopped teaching her for a long time because she wasnt going anywhere. She called us a couple weeks ago and said she wanted us to come back and teach her some more, so we did, and we had a great lesson about faith and told her that as missionaries we teach the people that want to exercise their faith and make changes in their lives. We told her that the only way we could come teach her was if she started to make changes. We talked to her about giving up her coffee and her smoking and many other things that she needs to change, but she said "Girls, I am never going to be able to be a mormon because I will never ever ever give up my coffee. I just cant" So we told her to start small and just come to church for now, and she did. She came to church and then watched conference. Well this last week we went back to talk with her and started talking about faith some more and what she has been thinking about and praying about and we asked her if she was willing to try to give something else up. We talked about giving up coffee and she said she was willing to try but that what she really wanted to give up was smoking. She has never expressed anything close to this. Without us having faith in her, she would never have the chance to try. I have noticed that sometimes people are around for so long that they lose faith in those around them, they see that someone has been less active for 2, 5, 20 years and has never tried to change so why would they change now? This experience we have had with Jackie and with a few other less actives in the ward has taught me that it is so important to never allow your faith in people to die, that it only takes one experience for people to decide to come back to make the change in their lives to come back to church or to begin repenting again. The Lord never gives up on us... as it says in the Book of Mormon "but his hand is stretched out still"... So we should never ever ever give up on anyone.
#3- I was thinking this week about how to bring the spirit more in our lessons. For the people we are teaching, it is the first time they are hearing the first vision or the plan of salvation. For us, it is the 100th time we have taught it. So I was trying to figure out how to make it more meaningful, how to make it more than just words. Because sometimes I recite the first vision and its just words. So I started praying this week for it, and we had the BEST lesson yesterday. It was the most spirit filled lesson I have been in in a while. It was with a guy named Ken. He started to tell us about his life story and his search for God that he has been on all his life. He started to tell us about when he was 14 and how he started going to different churches but none of them felt right to him and how he has been searching for it for a long time.... Sound familiar? I was so excited to then say, "ya know your story remind me of another story I know. It was about a boy named Joseph smith who also was 14 searching for truth..." it was incredible to feel the difference between really teaching it with the spirit verses just saying the words that sometimes tends to happen. It was incredible. Sister Siefert and I walked away from the lesson so full of the spirit that we didnt even care that it took most of our dinner time to tell him about Joseph Smith. :)
I love this gospel. I know that its true. I love being a missionary. I know that God wants to give us every righteous desire of our heart. We just have to ask in faith.
Have a great week!
Love you all,
Sister Webb
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