It's always a great week in Missouri

We made orange rolls with a member's neighbor, Brenda... and taught about Joseph Smith as well. She has this awesome bird and some really great cooking skills. It was a great Saturday!

Whew. What a week. It's always a great week in Missouri. Seriously though. I feel like I am going to look back on these emails and every one of them is going to start with "another great week in Missouri", or "we had so many miracles this week", or "this week was the best!" I'm not complaining. It's just amazing to me how much the Lord has blessed me on my mission. Every week we see miracles.

This week I was exhausted on multiple occasions. I don't know why. Probably because the Missouri weather messes with my blood pressure and this week we went from it being 3 degrees on Monday to 65 degrees on Sunday.  We got a bunch of snow this week and then it rained all day on Saturday and all of it melted. So basically for whatever reason I was pretty tired, but I kept pushing through it and prayed my guts out that I would be able to just get to work and not complain, and guess what? Every time we went out to work, no matter how miserable I felt, I ended up feeling great. Saturday we had planned to go tracting and I was SO tired and didn't want to do it, but I knew we needed to. So we go and I get to the first door, give out a Book of Mormon, and all of a sudden I feel like a million bucks. Who even needs doctors when I can just do missionary work? That street was a goldmine though. We taught 7 lessons in an hour and found 2 new investigators. I am just so grateful that I sucked it up and got to work. That is probably one of the greatest lessons that I have learned on my mission, when we are not enough, the Lord will make up the rest. He always does. He helps us fulfill his purposes and be more than what we could be on our own. I'm so grateful for some of the health challenges I've had over the past couple years... they have helped me to dig deeper and realize the power of the Atonement. It is so real! 

I've been thinking about trials recently in terms of a well. Our faith is that well and those trials make us dig, and dig, and dig... and sometimes we feel like we are in too deep, like we can't get out of this hole that we are in. If we rely on the Lord and trust in him, that well is filled with faith, and we have an even greater reservoir than we had before, because we have been forced beyond our comfort zone. I have truly learned that trials help us to know that depth of the Atonement, and they help us push our faith to greater levels. I'm so grateful for that! 

Things are going great here in Clinton. It has been a busy, wonderful week. Here's a miracle! We finally met with our investigator Eric again. He has cancer and has been out of town and it has been hard to reach him. His wife is a very active member of the church and he has taken a lot of the lessons before. We were teaching the Plan of Salvation and really felt like we needed to teach out of the Book of Mormon, so we did. He was eating it up. Half the time he wasn't even listening to us, but was reading ahead of what we had read in the Book of Mormon... not a bad thing right? We had a great discussion and read some more and by the end of the conversation he was like "I really need to find out of this is true and I need to do it soon." He realized that he needed to act! And be baptized! So we set a date for him to work towards for February 14th, which is their wedding anniversary. Hopefully he feels well enough! It is hard to keep appointments because he ends up feeling sick a lot of the time. I am super excited for him to progress! So there is a huge miracle of the week.

Oh, our car was rear-ended this week. It wasn't a big deal at all. We were stopped and the other guy had slowed down quite a bit, but couldn't stop because the roads were snowy. It was pretty funny because Sister Penman screamed and I did nothing. It was like time stopped and I casually thought, oh we just got hit by a car. The guy was really nice and we gave him a mormon.org card. It was probably the most friendly/casual collision in Clinton history. We had to fill out a ton of paperwork and things online. That was annoying.

We also found a great new investigator named Amanda. She had so many awesome questions, and I was super grateful for ALL of the personal study time I've had on my mission because I was able to answer them. It's amazing to look back and see how much I have learned. I feel like I didn't know anything about the gospel before my mission, which of course I did know quite a bit, but that is how much I have learned. I still have so much to learn and principles to deepen my testimony of though.  I have gained such a testimony of scripture STUDY. It is so important to actually study and feast upon the word of God. One of the greatest feelings is to be studying the scriptures and to have the Holy Ghost come and teach you things that you need to learn for yourself and others. Oftentimes these things aren't even written on the page. It's the best.

This email is pretty random. Oh well. It was a great week.