Wednesday, October 24, 2012

August 20,2012 letter

Hello world! Just writing you from rainy Tallahassee Florida. My companion and I have been talking this last couple days about why Florida is called the sunshine state, because it rains here SO MUCH~ usually it rains twice a day and when it rains here it pours. We have the morning shower, which if we are lucky happens in our morning studies or while we are inside eating lunch. and the evening showers that we LOVE it when it happens during our dinner hour. But most of the time that doesnt happen. It puts a real cramp in the work when you are assigned to campus with no car because #1- if you go out in it for 2 seconds you look like you just jumped in a pool and #2- no one is outside on campus when it rains. So... we end up sitting inside the institute playing book of mormon baseball, reading the ensign, helping the sr couple with things, eating WAY too many of sis Johnsons baked goods and watching old cheesy proselyting movies that the church produced in the 80's. Then the rain stops about 20 minutes later and we go back to work. I have a love hate relationship with this area haha. Love it cause I love talking to students, contacting rather than tracting (its just a nice switch up of finding) and its cool to serve in the singles ward. Hate it because we all want to be out working and instead we are stuck inside. Hopefully the rain will go away soon and we can work like crazy when all the students come back to campus in a week.

So this week was a good one, as all weeks are. We did alot of service again of helping people find their way around campus and moving people in. we are considering just wearing our service clothes next week and going from one apt complex to the next soliciting our help to move people in. Even if we don't do it all the time, I am sure that the next week will be spent moving heavy boxes and beds and random furniture into peoples apartments.

We FINALLY had an investigator lesson with someone that we found this week. We have been trying to hard to find people, but most people just say that they are leaving and that they'd be interested when school gets back in, so we have a long list of potentials but havent been able to really teach anyone these last couple weeks. It was a way good lesson and the spirit was really strong. We usually teach people in the institute building, which I LOVE because the environment there is already perfect for the spirit to come and testify. The girl we taught has been christian for the last 3 years or so and is part of a campus ministry. We gave her a BOM and she said that she had a friend that was mormon and wanted to learn more about it. So we taught her about the restoration and she seemed like she really needed to go home and think about the things we taught her. After talking to Karen (a recent convert of a couple months) about her conversion and when she knew it was true, she said that she knew the first lesson but that the new feelings of the spirit were so overwhelming that it took her a long time to just accept them and realize what they were and get use to them, I think that is what happened to nastasia. We hope to get to keep teaching her because she has really strong faith and a great desire to learn.

Church yesterday was really awesome. There is a guy that is leaving the ward soon because he just turned 31 and he gave an incredible talk. He was asked to talk on the sacrament but decided to take it upon himself to change the topic to something very loosely related to the sacrament...(thats just what he does haha)... he talked about the law of chasitity. He used alot of his talk from a talk E.Holland gave in 1988 called souls, symbols and sacraments. The most interesting part to me was when he talked about the temptation of breaking the law of chastity. He quoted the scripture from alma where he is teaching his son corianton and he tells him that nothing is worse than breaking it except murder and denying the Holy Ghost. Then he talked about how if we think about it, most of us will never be faced with the temptation to murder. Its something that will probably never come up in our lives as a question if we should break that commandment or not and if it does come up we would most likely look at it with disgust. as something we would never do, but the next worse thing.... chastity.... is something that almost all of us have or will face the temptation of. Why do we not look at breaking the law of chastity, or using the divine power to create life wrongly, with such disgust as well? I thought it was a really interesting thought and an awesome talk that he gave. Tyler and Elder Holland are much alike in their boldness and eloquence.

We also had a great zone training meeting (kinda like district meeting, but with the whole zone... different than zone conferences) and the zone leaders taught us alot about being positive and the outcome of having a good attitude. They challanged us to write down list of tender mercies in our lives each day and being grateful for them. This is something I had already started to work on this transfer so I was really excited about it. I would issue the same challenge to each of you...get a notebook and each night reflect on your day and write down some way that you saw gods had in your life. It will bring happiness and a new light into your life when we realize how dependent we really are on god. Here are some good references for reading if you want them:
Mosiah 2:19-24
1 Nephi 1:20
o remember remember by president eyring in october conference 2007

So that was our week. We are SUPER excited for the students to get back. hope yall had a great week too.
Love you lots!
Sister Webb

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