Sorry about the lack of
letters for everyone last week! I spent all my email time Skyping with
my family and basically trying not to lose it and cry at our members'
home. But it was really great to see your beautiful faces! I hope you
all know how much I love you and miss you even if I kind of stink at
writing people back.
I have two weeks of miracles to update you all on!
First big miracle: our musical fireside! Remember how I said we had to
pull it off in less than two weeks? Well, we did. We really felt like
this fireside was something we should do, so we put all our effort into
making it happen and getting our ward members involved as well.
Thankfully, so many people were willing to participate! We asked a
handful of members to provide musical numbers, all of whom were totally
willing, and Sister Vakalahi (our Relief Society first counselor and
every missionary's surrogate mom here) worked with us to put together a
program and make flyers. With everyone involved, we put together a song
list, organized performances, wrote a script, scheduled rehearsals, made
flyers, and spread the word in a matter of days. The whole process must
have been facilitated by the Spirit, because everything went so
smoothly!
We were a bit worried about getting a good turnout due to the short
notice and the fact that it was Mothers' Day, but on the evening of the
fireside, the chapel was packed. The crowd filled up to the overflow!
We even had some less active members who probably hadn't been to a
fireside in years attend, as well as some investigators! The Spirit was
so strong throughout the whole evening and I suspect that there were
very few people who didn't shed at least one tear. Our bishop gave our
closing remarks and bore his testimony of the Savior through tears. I'm
sure everyone who heard him was moved.
One of the part member families we have been working closely with
(the mother is a member, her husband is Muslim, and her children are not
baptized) attended! Even the dad came, which was such a wonderful
surprise! After the fireside was over, the dad pointed to Bishop and
said, "I like him. He is a good man." He may not be open to learning
much about the gospel yet, but I do think he was able to feel the
Spirit!
The whole fireside was such a miracle. Our ward has talked of
nothing else since. There's already been talk of putting on another one!
I'm really grateful that I could be part of this experience and be able
to facilitate so many people feeling the Spirit and drawing closer to
their Savior.
This Monday
and Tuesday was Sisters' Conference, where all of the sisters in the
mission gather together for a day of service and a day of training from
our sister training leaders and the APs. It was so cool to see all of my
fellow sisters gathered in one place! Even the Tassie sisters got to
come up, which meant that I got to see Sister Kruyer for the first time
in what felt like ages! She is loving Tasmania and totally tearing it
up. Everyone says such wonderful things about her, and I know they're
all true. We had some really nice training on working with members,
recognizing success, companionship unity, and the importance of finding
and teaching families. The training on finding families was especially
inspiring to me. The APs pointed out that in Preach My Gospel, the same
wording is used to describe the gravity of the Atonement and the
importance of families. Both the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the
family unit are central to God's plan for our happiness. I had never
really thought about the family in that way before, and it really
inspired me to work harder to find whole families to teach. Often times
we settle with just teaching one member of a family to seems to be
progressing better than the others, but really this work is about
bringing families into the gospel. Our ultimate goal is to help God's
children enter the Celestial Kingdom in the family unit, so we should be
teaching according to that goal!
We had Zone Meeting the following Thursday, which
was just as inspiring as Sisters' Conference. Our Zone Leaders told us
that we need to focus on finding new investigators, not just new
contacts. In other words, we should find and teach people at the same
time, and share the gospel with them as quickly as we can. Sister Leota
and I really took that to heart and tried to apply that in our finding
this week, and it worked! We met a Vietnamese man named Tun, who has a
wife and three children. We knocked on his door and he invited us in,
and we eagerly taught him about how God is our Creator and Father and
how much He loves us. Tun is Buddhist, so he doesn't know much about God
or anything about Jesus Christ. He drank in everything we taught him
and totally felt the Spirit. Unfortunately, his wife speaks pretty much
no English, so she and her kids weren't able to sit it. But! We
contacted the Vietnamese missionaries who work in the area next door to
us, and we invited them to our next appointment with Tun. They were able
to talk with Tun's wife and teach them both! We decided to hand Tun's
family over to the Vietnamese elders so that the whole family could be
taught. So even though we aren't teaching them ourselves, I feel so
blessed to have been able to find them!
We also have started meeting with Shony and Hone, a
Maori couple from New Zealand. We met Shony at church, when she was
attending her cousin's baby blessing. They are both very religious and
Hone is actually an evangelist at their church. We had just decided to
stop by and see if Shony was home, and both she and her husband welcomed
us in and talked with us for over an hour about their faith and how
they came to find God. Hone shared his remarkable conversion and how
much both of their lives have changed since they gave their lives to the
Lord. The invited us over for lunch a couple days later, and we had a
great discussion about how much Jesus Christ loves us and how grateful
we are for His Atonement. Shony and Hone's beliefs differ a little bit
from ours, and Hone is very passionate about those things that do
differ. He strongly believes that all you need to do to be saved is
"give your life to the Lord," or just pray and confess with your mouth
that Jesus is your Savior, and believe in Him, and that's it. He doesn't
believe you need baptism or that faith requires any kind of works,
which could prove a challenge. Hopefully we can come to help him see how
baptism really is a necessary step to salvation and how faith is made
manifest in our works. Shony seems more open and in tune with the
Spirit, so hopefully she can be our gateway to helping them receive the
gospel. But we're excited to keep meeting with them! They are really
awesome people.
We have still been meeting with Elizabeth, who is
really grateful for our visits but still seems to lack the desire to
come to church or read the scriptures, which are things she said she
knows she needs to do. She just doesn't feel very urgent about it, but
hopefully if we keep coming over and helping her to feel the Spirit that
she'll gain motivation.
These last two weeks have been so awesome! But Satan
is certainly working hard to stop the work progressing. As soon as we
get onto something good, he tries even harder to make us feel down about
ourselves and to distract us from our purpose. We just always have to
remember the importance of the work we are doing and power and authority
of our callings!
I love you all! Thank you so much for your prayers!
xoxo Sister Larsen
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