June and July for Jesus

This week we had a Zone Leader Training meeting where they introduced us to our theme for the transfer which is the title of this email. They challenged us as a mission to read the 4 gospels this transfer and to focus on the Savior in all we do. It was a great meeting which I will refer more to later in my email!

This week couldn't have gone by any faster, no joke! We got a mini-missionary this week. Her name is Hannah and she is 17 and from O'Fallon, IL stake.  The stakes around here are super into getting the youth involved in missionary work so they do mini missions every year. Hannah kicked it with us for the week and did everything we did. Because she was here, we were able to get some of the young single adult sisters to come out with us on splits. It was honestly sooo great to see the members get involved and to see how effective we were with our time! We got some really solid potentials and the members enjoyed working hard. Now, we are going to try to get the sisters to do splits with us every Saturday! Hannah stayed with us from Tuesday to Saturday and it was actually really sad to say goodbye. When she first came she said she wasn't sure if she was going to serve a mission and at the end of the week she said she was pretty sure she was going to go now because of us! That seriously made my whole life. I loved that we were able to help someone decide to go on a mission.

This week was so chaotic! First, Wednesday night we did splits and the YSA sister said she had a nonmember friend coming to her house that night for a bonfire and she wanted us to meet her. So we stopped by on our way home, met her, stole some marshmallows, and then shared a spiritual thought! Then when we got home, I realized that the house key wasn't on my key ring and I had lost it at the bonfire. We texted the members and asked them to look for it while we tried to figure it out. They couldn't find it and it was getting late so we exhausted all of our options (which included sleeping in our car or getting a locksmith because our apt manager won't open apts in the middle of the night).  It was 10:15pm and we went back to look for it at the bonfire. We said a prayer and asked Heavenly Father for help. When we got there we found it within 5 minutes! Talk about a miracle! We felt really bad for being out so late but I know the Lord answered our prayers!

The other miracle happened Friday night. In the evening, when it was getting too dark to tract, we went to go visit a part-member family. They weren't home and I was kinda like this stinks. Well, as we were getting in our car, the Parkway 1 Elders called us with 5 referrals!!! The Lord truly works everything out and this is His work!

Since I have passed my halfway mark and now have my year mark looming before me, I have been thinking a ton about where I have been and where I am going. At the Zone Leader Training meeting, we had a training by the STL's. It was about becoming the people that God wants us to be on our missions. They compared our mission to our mortal lives in that in the scheme of eternity our mortal lives are a small dot and in the scheme of our lives, our missions are an even smaller dot! Something that the sisters said really struck me. They said that in the pre-existence, we learned and grew sooo much and that when we came to this Earth, we agreed to forget all of it just so we could have the chance to become like our Heavenly Father! I loved that! And everything we do now is to prepare us for eternity! In comparison, everything we do on our missions prepares us for the rest of our lives. Heavenly Father has been giving me an eternal perspective lately about how much my mission has changed me into who He wants me to be. I am so grateful for my mission and I know I wouldn't be who I am right now if I decided not to serve.