Happy New Year everyone!!! Can you believe it's 2015? Wow. I
am so grateful for everything that has happened this past year. I was in
London, Ontario last year with people I love so much. I opened up my email
today and found a letter from Sister Alders from London, she came across my
email and sent me a message. I jumped through the roof. I love these people so
much. And I love you all! I am grateful for all of you and your support. You're
great!
Great things happened this week! At the end of last
transfer, Sister Mencarelli and felt very strongly that we need to put a big
emphasis on visiting formers. We have three HUGE binders of people who have
been visited my missionaries before from 2001-2014 that have AMAZING stories
and little info on what happened to them. This past week we were blessed to
find 6 new investigators, 3 of which were former investigators! And we have
appointments this week with other former investigators as well! T..., a
former, accepted to prepare to be baptized on February 9th and she is just
plain amazing! SO many times, people stop meeting with missionaries simply
because the missionaries are transfers and the people lost contact. We will
find them! Good things are happening here. This week was a GREAT start to the
new transfer and the new year.
Our mission started up a new thing this year. Every first Saturday of the month we are having a mission-wide temple trip where all recent
converts are able to come and do baptisms for the dead. And the missionaries
who taught them are able to go with them when they go for the first time! We
received a call from some senior couple missionaries that served in Churchville
YSA with Sister Mencarelli. They had some great news that three of Sister
Mencarelli's friends she taught and saw baptized were going to be there! We had
too many appointments to cancel that day so that both of us could go, so on
Saturday, while Sister Mencarelli was at the temple, I was blessed to stay in
the area and be companions with Clara Jo for the day. She is 18 and is
preparing to go on a mission! We had so many wonderful experiences of being
full purpose missionaries - visiting members for dinner, inviting investigators
to be baptized, working with progressing investigators, contacting potentials,
and spending time with members and getting to know their non-member friends. We
even role played and she was laughing her head off the entire time haha. Clara
shared her testimony yesterday in Sacrament meeting about what an amazing
experience it was for her, and she is so excited for her own mission! MISSIONS
ARE GREAT!!! Funniest experience of the day was after dinner at Sister Miner's
home, we had to bolt out of there to pick up Sister Mencarelli. Problem is we
weren't looking at which door we were going out of. We opened the door, ran
outside, and this alarm started going off. We stopped and turned around to see
what was happening. It finally registered in our minds that we were in the
backyard playground of the building. We didn't get the door on time so we were
locked out. We decided to run around the building to find an opening to the
parking lot only to find that we were fenced in on every side. No one was
coming into the building, and Sister Miner was in a wheelchair so it was going
to take some time for her to come down and help us. So we were ten minutes standing
outside in the rain, in the kids' playground, locked out of mankind. It was
pretty funny.
M... is doing so amazing. She is still going through so many
trials right now, it is so sad to see. But the gospel is giving her a true
light in her life. We called her this week to follow up on her reading the Book
of Mormon. She told us that she had been so busy and overwhelmed that she
hadn't been able to read in the past couple of days. So we asked if we could
read with her over the phone for a little bit. Starting in Mosiah, we read the
account of King Benjamin. We started by trading off back and forth in reading,
until M... started getting excited and just kept reading out loud by herself.
She stopped and said "goodness now I can't wait until I read what King
Benjamin taught!" We ended the call to let her finish reading and she told
us the next day that she ended up reading for the next hour. She loves the Book
of Mormon so much. The sad thing is she got the flu yesterday and she says that
this usually lasts for a while when she gets it. So PLEASE keep her in your
prayers!! We have faith that everything will work out so we can continue to
teach her throughout the week and help her reach her goal of being baptized
next week!
Well I love you all! Have a great week! Keep your
standards!!
Sister Bodine
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