Monday, September 26, 2022

It feels good to be country 🤠

It feels good to be country 🤠

 ZONE CONFERENCE- Elder Alonso, becoming master inviters, Boonie Besties reunited!, Sister Hart's bloody nose, three days, love the Johns 🤩


GOOD NEWS (Good news is this charity place that takes care of the Seniors in Azle. They'll take them to doctors appointments, grocery shopping, and have fun activities for them)- silent auction, making cookies, trick roper, country songs, snowcones, chili hot dogs. I love my senior people 💙

MEMBER WORK- Sister Hart and I saw three new less active people come to church this week (different from the four that came last week!) God is good and we love seeing them here. We also got to teach the Priests this Sunday, that was super fun. We roleplayed some questions, and loved hearing their answers. 

SERVICE OUT THE WAZOO- building a shed and dumping out barrels of water, sweating like hogs 👍

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT- Our purpose as missionaries is to invite others to come unto christ. there is nothing more rewarding than living and sharing the gospel. Christ was the master inviter, and I invite yall to learn to be like Him. He invited people to join Him, can you commit to inviting someone to be more a part of you life this week? Share what's in your heart, share what makes you happy, and invite them to be a part of that. 

-last Pday we visited Capernaum Studios, the place where the Chosen is filmed! Sooo cool, I highly recommend watching 

Another Capernaum pic

-fun fact, Chewbacca is buried in Azle. Pretty random, but it was something fun for us to do. 

-I held three frogs this week, I think. One of them peed on me :(

-look at the lake

-a very blurry pic of us with the water barrels

-Sis. Hart kept getting bloody noses this week. This one was in the car wash, I could help but take a pic. 

- look at this cute bunny

-I got these cute boots for 7 dollars

-Boonie besties reunited! And I also got to see Sister Silos 💙



Monday, September 19, 2022

Wild West Fest

 Wild West Fest 🤠


Nothing too eventful this week, so here are the pics

-this dog was so hyper but it loved me so I have no problems

-this is a passion flower, they only bloom for a day! What a blessing 🙌 

-snow cones! Sister Hart's favorite. 

-Wild West Fest. I got dilly beans! I didn't think anyone but my grandma made those! Also, got to see a live action shoot out it was great. 

-Family history Booth with the Elders

-oooppppsssss. Tried to cook an egg on the ground and it didn't work

-someone left us cute notes on our door!



Monday, September 12, 2022

I thought this would be a short email

 Transfers this week- Sister Hart and I are staying in azle!


-Jo is getting baptized!?!? I heard from Sis liechty that our friend Jo in Decatur is getting baptized! I have no info other than that but I'm so excited! She's been so prepared and I know that when she commits she'll be committed for life 💙 I might be heading back to Decatur pretty soon for a lil visit!!

-a few steps from baptism for Marty. I don't want to say too much about Marty right now, but he's so close! Satan's really been working hard on him lately but he keeps fighting back. His desire to get baptized is testimony strengthening. 

-"Sting Fling" Sis Hart and I were outside for 3 hours and this thing. We got good food, a parade, and a weiner dog derby! Super fun! And we met some people too :)

-beautiful lesson with ima. It was really scary. On Tuesday we tried to meet with our friend Ima. She let us in and we were talking, but as soon as we tried to read from the Book of Mormon, she said maybe next time, got up and led us to the door. We were sooooo scared that that was gonna be it! But we were afraid for nothing. We went back a few days later and the first thing she does after inviting us in is grab her Book of Mormon from her drawer. We read 3 Nephi 17 with her and she loved it. I got to bear my testimony to her of Jesus Christ. I think that was the first time she realized we had the same Jesus because she said to us that "my Jesus is with yall" it's a step :)

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT- I got into a bad habit. I'm don't like to call myself a perfectionist, but when things aren't going my way, I go crazy!!! For a good part of this week, that's all I could see. Everything wasn't working how I wanted, and I couldn't see why God's will wasn't the same as mine. That's how prideful I get sometimes. BUT, God of course knew that, and he's been teaching me some lessons this week. 

I was thinking about Jacob 5. In the back of my mind there was always a part that was strange to me. Usually it's the Lord of the vineyard who wants to keep trying to save his vineyard. But there's one part when the Lord is ready to hew it down, and it is the servant that says to spare it a lil longer:

49 And it came to pass that the Lord of the vineyard said unto the servant: Let us go to and hew down the trees of the vineyard and cast them into the fire, that they shall not cumber the ground of my vineyard, for I have done all. What could I have done more for my vineyard?
50 But, behold, the servant said unto the Lord of the vineyard: Spare it a little longer.

I love how much this shows about the character of the servant. He knows its going to be hard, that this will be the hardest work in the vineyard so far, and yet asks to do the work. I think that's beautiful. The missionaries been hard, but there are people prepared for this gospel. 
-------------
Also, I loved this scripture in Joshua 14:12 about Caleb. He had so much faith in God that he said to Joshua "Give me this mountain" again, that's just beautiful to me. 

Anyway, these are my half baked thoughts haha. 

How can you increase your faith in God this week?

-you guessed it...another sunset!

-HUMP DAY package!!

-lil naked cat

-blue tongue!!

-big boy frog





Monday, September 5, 2022

The good, the bash, and the ugly

 HAPPY LABOR DAY!! 🥳🥳🥳

Don't have a lot of time and just want to get to the good stuff? 
-If you're looking for something spiritual, look at The Good and The Spiritual Thought 
-If you're looking for some action and grossness, skip to The Ugly

THE GOOD- We had a really good lesson woth our friend Rose, she's says we always bring the rain which is so cute. Lots of rain this week and it wasn't hot for a change! President John says tracting doesn't work very well in small towns (which is true, this lady came up to us this week and said we couldn't solicite anything in her neighborhood. Yeah, people don't like us just randomly coming to their door) anyway, because of that, we've been getting creative. Visiting members, taking walks at different parks, Facebooking. All very exciting stuff. 

THE BASH- You know, God works in mysterious ways. For some reason we felt prompted to visit this one guy that missionaries were never able to get in contact with. We found him and guess what? He hadn't lived in Azle since 2019 and he was only here for a week and somehow we caught him right before he was heading home. You would think this would be an amazing miracle, and maybe down the road it will be, but this guy actually thought that this was a divine meeting for him to tell US whats up. So yeah he kept trying to tell us that we were so young and just really immature in our religious journey. He kept saying that the 4 gospels was all we needed and that was it, no need for a Book of Mormon, and yet he'd never read it and didn't even know what it was about. We were as polite as possible and didn't keep it going. We bore our testimonies and left because thats about all he'd listen to.  

THIS UGLY- We texted a lady that missionaries had previously helped take leaves. We asked if we could help with anything and she said she would appreciate someone coming and doing her dishes and putting in some laundry. Seemed easy enough so we figure it will only take a few minutes and we'll just wear our proselyting clothes. Big mistake. We get there and she shows us the dishes and they are a LITERAL MOUNTAIN with flies surrounding the whole thing. It took up her whole sink, her counter, and her stove, everything was covered with dishes and anything that wasn't, you could see the crumbs, cat hair, and stains covering the counter. Anyway, I get down to business on these dishes and it's so disgusting. I'm washing them with a dirty towel so it feels like I'm trying to clean dirt with dirt. It smells really bad amd the sink keeps clogging up. To my right is a bread pan with a dead cockroach, this scene will forever be etched into my brain as a horrible memory. Anyway, lots of the dishes had maggots on them. I don't mean just one or two, I mean a whole colony of maggots sometime dead, but sometimes alive. I really don't know how I got through it. We didn't even get to finish all the dishes because we were there for 3 hours!!! She asked us to put the dishes away, there were dead cockraoches in there. Anyway, she also asked me to help her woth her laundry. I put a dirty load of laundry in and bring an apparent load of clean clothes in. I dump them out of the couch and start folding them. Guess what I found in her clean clothes? 3 big quarter sized beetles. I don't know how they got there, they were dead of course but still it gave me the Heebee Jeebeez!!! We finally got out of there. That night, I started washing our own dishes and even though we only had 4 dishes in the sink, I nearly threw the scrubber and ran away. So that's my fun adventure of the week. 

THE SPIRITUAL THOUGHT- My studies keep taking me to this one word, and that word is "INCONVENIENT." When people learn that the gospel is true, they have to change their lives and sometimes these changes are hard. But, the inconvenience doesn't stop there. As we live our lives as disciples of Christ, our lives continue to be inconvenient because we know there is only one way to do things and that way is through Christ. There is one way to gain happiness, one way to gain success, one way to love, and so on. As ecclesiastes 3 says, there is a season and time for everything and we must be patient. If you have time, I invite yall to listen to the talk called "Inconvenient Messiah" by Jefferey R. Holland. Why would Christ have us do things inconvenient for us? What's your take on that question?

- made a papaya smoothie. Three ingredients for anyone who wants to try. Papaya, banana, and fruit punch

-nature

-lake

-nature again

-surprise, another sunset

-frog

-the donut man came again, don't worry we gave 3 dozen of them away. 

-moth

-gluten and dairy free pizza 4/10 was crunchy tho

-look at how cold it is!