Week #22 - Baptisms are nice

Hey Mom and Dad!
So I have some FABULOUS news!!!! We had a BAPTISM this last Sunday!!!!!! AHHHHHHH!!! Erma Zendejas is now officially a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints!!! (wow that is a lot of exclamation points... they are such helpful tools to express my excitement!) Erma had her interview this last Thursday and then was baptized and confirmed right after church. She was super nervous because she had a near death drowning experience when she was little and has been afraid of water ever since. But she did it! She looked so beautiful dressed all in white and she really was glowing.

Anywho...that was pretty much the highlight... nothing could beat it.
Have you ever heard of "The 'Official' Book of HUGS" by Martha Bolton? It is super cute you might want to try and find it and read it for a cute little laugh.

We had Specialized Training this last Wednesday. It was super good and all over the place. Usually they have a central theme. But this time each speaker talked about a different topic. The Atonement, Disaster plans, using our planners/ area books more effectively, talking to everyone... it was super good though and I am really grateful that they talked about using planners and area books better because I really needed it. And after being able to use some of their suggestions I can really plan and make the necessary notes for successful planning in the evenings and for the week.

After Specialized Training Sister Smith and I went on exchanges with the Sister training leaders. Sister Miller is pretty much amazing. And it was fabulous being in the Warren area without Sister Smith just to see for myself how much I do know our investigators and their needs (just because she has been in Warren for 5 months and has found all of these investigators herself) Plus I had a realization that I have been relying on her Spanish language skills more than I have to relying on the Lord and the gift of tongues. So I guess I got called to repentance on that one.

On Thursday we exchanged back and Sister Smith and I were able to go to Sister Bryant's home for dinner (have I told you about Sister Bryant? She is pretty much amazing and she is an Aroma Touch therapist through Andoterra (is that how you spell it???) and she is also the one who introduced me to carrots dipped in peanut butter. Talk about yummy!) lol anyways she fed us Navajo Tacos, which are essentially tostadas on fried bread. And then she let sister Smith and I make some! teehee we made pi, and the iron rod, and a goblin (from goblin valley Utah), and an arm from a Lamanite that Ammon had smote off, and doughnut. Yeah it was super fun.

We made a baptismal program for Erma on Saturday and we had an awesome day where we were able to teach 5 lessons! Que bueno.

Sunday was fabulous. I forgot to tell you that the branch president asked me to speak Friday night... May I just say that the writing process for a missionary without a computer is very scattered and confusing not to mentioned rushed because you don't really have enough time to just sit down and write and rewrite a talk for a 4 hour stretch and breaking up your writing process makes it difficult to get/stay in the groove. But I made it work and on Sunday I gave a talk about how to recognize spiritual promptings and then following them...I hope the spirit was able to touch whoever it needed to touch because it was super stressful and I was such a scatter brain. My mouth was moving but I honestly have no idea what I said...

Sunday evening Sister Smith and I decided to be adventurous and actually try the can of pork brains that we had purchased.... yes you read that correctly, Pork BRAINS!!! I can honestly say that they are not very good and I took a little video of our eating experience.

Sunday was just rockin' because we were able to actually start teaching in unity! It has taken a while but it is finally starting to click. We were able to visit one of our investigators that had tried to drop us via text...(we weren't going to let that fly, if she was going to drop us she had to do it to our faces.) But we were actually able to pick her back up as an investigator and invite her to make her own commitment to pray to know if the Book of Mormon and Bible are the words of God! We are super excited to follow up with her.

And then after that we were able to go and visit Rabbit and Anthony and they are really starting to understand the whole Restoration, priesthood and authority bit. And they got pretty excited about being sealed together for eternity! So as soon as we can get them married and baptized I know for sure that they would make it to the temple!

Soooo...yeah that was our week! Pretty stellar if I do say so myself! Heavenly Father is so amazing and is truly aware of each of his children and how to best help them to progress.

I love ya'll so much!
I am praying for you! Keep up all the great member missionary experiences you are having. Tell the sister missionaries in our area that I am praying for them too and that they really do have an awesome area of people to teach (because everyone everywhere are Heavenly Father's children!)

I am super excited to see all of your beautifully colored pictures! Tell Grandma Caye and Judy hi for me! I love them both lots... (also tell them that my responses to their letters might come next week....I have a lot of mail to respond to... but they WILL get letters!)

Good job on all the family History work! I can't wait to get into the family history party with you! Keep up the awesome work!

Love,
Hermana Ives
D&C 18:151! (that is pretty much the theme of my week!)

Week #21 - And another week has flown by!

Hello family!!!

I am glad to hear you made it home safe and sound! Sorry to hear about your cough! Sister Smith has a cough tambien...she only sounds like she is dying, but she says she is fine.
Japanese Udon Noodle Soup sounds absolutely fantastic! I am really missing real Asian food (they have a lot of Chinese buffets down in Arkansas...but it isn't nearly as yummy as homemade real Chinese food!) Oh pretty neat food discovery this week was that carrots dipped in peanut butter is SUPER addicting! Just try it I know that I was pleasantly surprised!
How is Grandma Caye doing! I haven't heard from her in a while! I am super excited about all of the temple work you and dad are doing! And I can't wait to get on the action when I get home! Family History work is so amazing and is just as important as full time missionary service! So proud of you! Keep up the great work!
Spanish sessions!!! Yeah! Que Bueno! Estoy muy animado por ustedes! Gracias por su ejemplo para mi!
Cade Hartshorn is going to be an awesome missionary! I am SOOOOOOOO excited for him! and he is going to have to give me a list of places that I need to visit while in England (after my mission, after I have a job, after I have saved enough... he will probably be home for 5 years before I am ready to go...but still!)
Catching up on Downtown Abbey, Studio C, White Collar, and BBC Sherlock are all on that list right?!? They need to be.
Wow, by your description I would thing that our ward Primary is better than the Tabernacle Choir! Great description! lol, it made me really happy to read.
Have you had a chance to talk to Mary Simpson? Just wondering how everything turned out.
I like your bathroom cleaning strategy... if you are going to put a cleaner in a toilet and let it sit I would actually invest in a Lysol or Clorox toilet cleaner... (but that is just me)
As for the ward action plan, I think that it is pretty neat that you are able to get the ward thinking about being more involved. I might try having people sign up for a day of the month that they have to help the missionaries (kind of like a meal calendar but for lessons). I will keep thinking about that action plan...

Alright, so here is the latest adventures in the promised land of Warren Arkansas! Are you ready???

P-day. I decided that it would be a fabulous idea to make a homemade scripture case for my Spanish Scriptures because they are/were homeless... so I gathered my scissors, cardboard, markers, and tape! What an adventure. It turned out super cute actually....but it is also about a centimeter too small...I can make my scriptures fit but you really don't want to wrestle them out unless you absolutely HAVE to...so I might try again...I am not sure yet.
Thank you so much for the package! It was super yummy and I LOVED your missionary experience! I will keep praying for you! You are such a great example for me always!
So...We have a member of our branch named Nora and she has a friend named Johnny that she brought to church and we started teaching. Anyways, at church Johnny made some comment about marriage (to Nora), Nora laughed awkwardly and no one else knew what to say, so after a little too long period of silence we resumed Gospel Principles. After class Nora comes and talks to us, "I don't want to get married! I've only known this guy for a week!" (so Sister Smith and I thought this was pretty funny)
Next evening we get a call. It was from Nora. She excitedly announced, "I'm getting married!!!" Couple days later she calls again. "Can ya'll be bridesmaids?" (we didn't know the answer to that one so we asked President Petersen. President said, "yes, if it helps you fulfill your purpose." Nora is marrying one of our investigators their family are not members. This is going to be a great missionary opportunity! So we are going to be bridesmaids!!! I think it is awesome that we get to be bridesmaids while on our missions! Que bueno!
We went Spiritual Harvesting this week. We knocked at this one house and I had to take a double look! I could have sworn it was Uncle Allen! Does Uncle Allen have any family in Warren Arkansas? The guy's name was Chris. It was just funny, same hair color, beard, body build, everything!
There was stake conference this last Saturday and Sunday. So we had to travel 2 hours up to the stake conference in Little Rock and then back. On Saturday we thought we would have a lot of investigators so we found a member who had a bus because a lot of our investigators don't own vehicles. So we were able to ride to Little Rock in a brightly painted school bus because the bus was used to pick up kindergartners we have lovingly given it the nickname of "the fun bus"
We were able to listen to the entire stake conference translated into Spanish...There is a ton that I don't know.... but I have also learned bunches! So it was pretty cool.
Yeah.... that was my week. We are on bike week right now so that is pretty.... interesting.
The weather here feels like it should be the end of March. it is really pretty warm.
Loves,
Hermana Ives

Week #20 - Awe yeah! Gotta LOVE missionary work!

Hey family!
So this week has just a bunch of funny happenstances in it...
Let us start with last Monday. So you know how we have to wash the car every week??? Well the weather last Monday was -6 C... but we wanted to be exactly obedient! So we set about washing the car.
So if we think about this logically it makes sense that water freezes at 0 C and it is currently below the freezing point... that the water is going to freeze.. and I don't know the freezing point of soap, but we did discover that it does in fact freeze. So after spraying down the Lord's car and now having a thin sheet of ice and rubbing frozen soap over that gives you frozen bubbly soap scum and then if you try to rinse it off you get a thicker sheet of ice...
Needless to say the car looked about ten times worse than it did before we started out on our obedient quest... But hey we "washed" the car... and the ice didn't melt until Wednesday. (yeah we maybe needed to think that one through a little more...but we didn't)

The Laundromat is called, "The hole in the wall" ...I think that is enough description on that.

We were able to have a mission wide conference call with President Petersen on Tuesday! He is the coolest mission president ever! So you know that we are getting a new mission president in June/July and the stake won't know who it is until this Sunday. But he told us who it was in this call! I am so excited!

Oh great stake news! The North Little Rock stake is going to be split! We are going to have a new stake in Arkansas! It has been a super long time since that has happened and everyone is super stoked! AND L. Tom Perry is coming at the end of January and we will be able to hear him speak! (I am quite excited!)
This last year we got 521 baptisms in our mission! This year's goal is 636 baptisms for the year 2014!

So I learned something really awesome on Wednesday. There is no word for awkward in Spanish...so now whenever something is awkward we say the word uncomfortable... it is super funny (but I think you might have just needed to be there)

I love the Book of Mormon SO much! And it is so amazing that we have the opportunity to share this awesome book with so many. To be able to testify of how it has blessed my life has really helped me realize how bountiful those blessings really are. I love being able to testify of the peace and calm that has come into my life as I made time to read and study the Book of Mormon.

did you know that mini M&Ms taste 10 times better than normal ones? I'm not quite sure why, or if maybe it is just a mental thing.... but it is totally true!

Ummm...I broke the word of Wisdom! (on my mission!) I was looking at the Kashi cereal I had bought and realized in the ingredients was "decaffeinated green and black tea extract"! Who puts that in cereal! anywho, it didn't cost very much and didn't taste much better so I ended up throwing it away.

Have you ever smelled alcohol on someone before? It is the most uncomfortable smell ever. My stomach was queezy for 25 minutes afterwards.

I love lessons that are totally guided by the spirit! We are teaching a couple Rabbit and Anthony - we went into the lesson thinking we were going to be teaching Plan of Salvation but then Anthony said he couldn't stay and we didn't want to move forward and have to catch him up so we decided to just read the Book of Mormon with Rabbit so we started reading 1 Nephi 2 and Anthony comes back in to join us (and ended up staying) but we read the entire chapter and talked about the importance of faith and following the Lord's plan for us and that lead beautifully to the third lesson, The Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was awesome to be guided by the spirit and talk about baptism and testify of the Savior's love for them!

We had Zone Meeting on Friday. Super good.

I love my companion! Hermana Smith wants to be an engineer. (she uses practically the same vocabulary that dad uses and totally freaks out about math and science.)  So it is pretty awesome. She took 5 years of Spanish and then has been the only truly Spanish speaker here in Warren for 5 months so she is super good at it and I am totally not. It is a little frustrating but I am really learning a lot so that is great.

This last Sunday we had 4 investigators at church! One of our investigators called us Sunday morning and said, "hey...I am getting my daughter's hair ready for church...but I am going to be late, is it still alright if we come in 30 minutes late?" Hermana Smith and I were super excited because she had earlier told us that she couldn't come at all! 
And then Rod and Erma came to church! They couldn't stay for all three hours but the branch president talked to Erma after church and she said that she wanted to be baptized next week! She totally set her own baptismal date! We are SO excited!

We had a branch potluck after church. That is pretty fun not to mention yummy! teehee

Coolest thing I learned this week is that: all of the Christlike attributes lead to action. God does not want you to be passive but wants us all to be continually progressing.

Yup, that was my week. Not bad if I do say so myself!

Love ya'll,
Hermana Ives

PS - and remember! The gospel is true. But it is truER in Spanish!

Week #19 - 2014 the Lord's year - week 1

So this week has been pretty much amazing!
I found out that I was being transferred on Monday. So I tried to go and visit all of our branch members and investigators....super sad that half of them where sick with the flu so they didn't want us to come over...But I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to associate with such awesome people. I most definitely had some family away from home in Pocahontas.
Especially Sister Land, she made sure that I was going to continue to keep in contact and said that she might have to come to my new area and go shopping with me on some p-day! (little did she know that I was being transferred to Warren...)

New Year's day was transfers....2 1/2 hour drive from Pocahontas to Bartlett Tennessee, and 3 hours from there to North Little Rock....and then 2 hours down to Warren Arkansas... (It was a SUPER LOOOOOOONNNNGGGG day of driving but totally worth it because my new companion Sister Sylvia Smith is totally amazing! We are in a zebra companionship (and she pretty much speaks fluently...sooooo, my tag is the one in Spanish....but she is the one that can actually speak and understand.) But I am super excited to finally learn and memorize the tenses in Spanish. Not to even mention that she has such a strong testimony and loves to just go and do! Not to mention we are able to truly laugh about how humorous our Heavenly Father is sometimes and how great this missionary work is!
I am starting to figure out where some of the streets are. And the members of this branch have such strong testimonies! This spirit of fast and testimony meeting was overpowering and completely energizing! And we were able to have 4 investigators at church! Boo-yeah!  I am so excited and grateful that I have the opportunity to serve such amazing people in such an amazing place. I can't say that I know very many of our investigators yet but I am excited to work with them. And we have had the opportunity to go finding this last week. Spiritual harvesting is such an inspirited tool and Heavenly Father really is aware of each of His children and exactly what they need and when they need it. We were able to find a lady named Maria and her 7 year old daughter Maiah. They are so choice and I can't wait to go back and share more of our Heavenly Father's love for them and help them to develop that relationship with Him.
Oh, okay so I live in a second story apartment...super old...above a smoker...aaaaannnnddd there are cockroaches in the kitchen....(I have managed to only scream twice! an accomplishment that I am super proud of! But if you have any ideas of how to get rid of those...that would be super nice because they are really starting to give me the creeps.
To let you know the Own 1 a Day program is a thing that our mission president created where if we go through all of the scripture studies and activities in PMG and memorize 2 scriptures for each of the lesson points you receive a Liahona! If you only memorize the scriptures your receive a "hold to the rod" sculpture...(I have been working on it so that I can receive both before our mission president leaves.)
A little side note:  Chapter 1 in PMG is so amazing. Our sole purpose is to help our family, our spiritual brothers and sisters who are struggling right now, who are searching for the truth, and who our Heavenly Father is reaching out to. I am really starting to realize how vital having the spirit is when teaching. And how silly it is to try to go it on our own. In John 16:13 (i think) it talks about how the Spirit is our guide to all truth. When we have the option of having a guide to teach us the correct principles and to help us pick out the truth why would you deny that help? He is never going to lead you astray.

Yup yup
Hermana Ives