Monday, August 15, 2016

I can't believe it's been 6 months....

Hello everyone! :) I hope you have all had a great summer so far! :) It hasn't felt like summer here too much lately. We've been getting buckets of rain on a daily basis for quite some time now... but supposedly it will be a sunny day all day today, so I'm looking forward to that! :) 

This was a great week:) 
We started it off AMAZING by taking a trip up to BANFF!!! 
We went with our ward mission leader and the other sisters in our district! 
Like previously mentioned, it was a rainy day, but we felt so blessed because it wasn't ever too hard of rainfall, and there would be a few minutes without rainfall every once in a while! Also it was a fairly ward rain, so it didn't ruin the trip in the slightest:) 

We had a lesson with our investigator Emanuel on Tuesday, and at the end of the lesson Sister Ence invited him to be baptized on the 27th of August and he said yes!! It was so exciting! If you have seen the district, Emanuel reminds us SO much of German! We love it! :) 
Some missionaries in our zone had a baptism on friday, so we invited Emanuel to come with us so he could see what his own baptism would be like- we arranged for a member to pick him up and take him to the baptism, and he seemed excited to go. But... Emanuel has a reputation for being hours late for things so he only made it to the closing remarks of the baptism. So we just showed him the font afterwards and talked a little bit more about baptism, and invited him to come to church on Sunday, and to have another lesson Saturday night. He said he'd love to, but then once again, did not even show up for the lesson on saturday. We rescheduled for Sunday, an hour before church starts, and He didn't even make it to priesthood. Needless to say we're not exactly sure what to do with him right now. We're doing what we can to be encouraging and trying to help him understand the importance of time, and church, but we're not too sure what else we can do for him. 
We're optimistic that he will still be baptized, but we will most likely need to push the date back to make sure he understands the importance of it, and of attending church and lessons. 

On Thursday we had a little "Mini Zone Conference!" Which is basically just zone conference that lasted half the time it usually does. It was a great meeting, and I loved everything that President Miles taught us! He really focused on relying on the lord and involving Him in every stage of this work. I always look forward to hearing from President, and am really excited about applying all the things that he taught to our work. So far it has been going really well! We know there are many miracles God is just waiting for us to be led to them! :) 

We also sang at a cute old folks home as a district on thursday. There were about a dozen cute seniors that came down just to listen to us sing some hymns and children's songs. Some of them even sang along with us using the hymnbooks we brought. It was a really sweet experience to see tears well up in each of their eyes as we sang songs that testified of God, Jesus Christ, Prayer, and Their love for each of us:) In my opinion there is no better way to bring the spirit than by music:) 

On Friday we had a really neat experience. We had a lesson with an investigator fall through and we weren't sure what we were going to do with that time! In our rush to make it to the appointment ontime we left our directory, and binder of people to visit in the apartment which was a 30 minute drive away! By the time we would have made it back to our apartment it would have been time to turn back and drive right back through where we were to go to the baptism at 7! 
At that exact moment our STL's called us to ask about something, and also mentioned that we should try and drop by the Shelly family if we got the chance. (The STL's also cover the Shepard ward with us, which was the area we were in) And they had been the 3rd person to mention their name to us this week! So we took that as a sign and were able to get the address from the STL's. 
As it turned out, they were just a few blocks away from where we were! So we knocked on their door and Sister Shelly came outside and started talking with us. She told us they have been inactive for over 30 years, and had gone to church the other day because he husband John was recovering from cancer, and that was their way of thanking God. She then immediately informed us we shouldn't get our hopes us because they weren't being activated anytime soon! Then she asked us what our plans were for the rest of the night. We told her we were going to a baptism at 7, and she asked us if we were going to have time for dinner. 
Sister Ence and I had just been planning of grabbing something quick as we drove to the baptism, but in attempts of being invited into her home we told her we didn't have a place to go for dinner and didn't really have time to go all the way back to our house in forest lawn. She then offered us some protein shakes to take with us, and we said that would be awesome!:) Our tactics worked as she invited us to come in as she grabbed them for us! Her husband John was sitting on the couch right there and invited us to sit down for a little. So we gratefully sat down and were then able to spend another hour talking to and getting to know John and Kelly(The wife). They are both really sweet people and we are really excited to keep getting to know them and teaching them again! 
But that's one thing I love about the church. Even after being inactive for 30 years, we still knew who they were, and there have been people reaching out to them for years letting them know we love them, and haven't forgotten them. 

And then the last big news is on Sunday we got a new bishopric in the ysa ward! Which was REALLY unexpected because the bishopric had only been there since the ward was created in December last year! But we are really excited to start working with the new bishopric now!:) 

Phew! That's it! I love you all, hope you enjoy the last few weeks of summer! 
<3/ Sister Dobyns! 

Enjoy these amazing pictures of banff and other things:) 

No comments:

Post a Comment