Abbey's letter March 10, 2014

It is getting warmer here:) I am ready to lose all of the leggings and socks and boats and hats and scarves and gloves and coats. And show my white shimmery legs. I can't wait for spring:) Some time in the next few weeks we are going to be able to take a bunch of people to see the Hartford temple sight, which will be exciting. It is actually poking out of the ground now. This week has been a good one, with a few ups and downs. Our district is working on having more unity. They laughed at our jokes this week during district mtg. so that was a step in the right direction. James dropped us this week, he said that he wants to stay aloof from all of the parties like Joseph Smith did and really discover things for himself. So he wants some time away from meeting with us and doesn't want to come to church anymore. It hurts a little because I know that he knows that it is true but maybe he will come around again. He did show up to church 2 years after meeting sister missionaries and hearing about the Restoration in the UK, so I think that he will come around some day. We were at a members house for dinner, the Pecks when he called and dropped us. Their 15 year old granddaughter who they are raising in inactive and was just dumped by her boyfriend. So we were joking that we new what it feels like. She thought that was pretty funny. They fed us extra ice cream for dessert before we went home. None of our other investigators are really progressing, and are kind of at a stand still, so that is our goal for this month. To help all of our investigators really progress, and see where it leads. Sister Klecker and i really feel like there is something big about to happen here, we just have to find the people that are ready to hear the gospel.
This week we had zone meeting and they talked about extending our finding pools. We created a list of all of the people that are potential investigators and people that we can start working with. So we are excited to get that going. We also have a new ward mission leader, Brother West. He seems like he has a lot of new ideas and that he will be really affective. On Saturday we had a stake youth conference. The theme was mtc and all of the youth were missionaries. We got to help out and teach 3 half hour sessions on the Restoration. We taught it and then showed them how to role play it, and then they got a chance to role play. I was impressed by how into the role play they were. They are already such good little misisonaries:) Also this saturday Bill McCauley was baptized. It was just us and about 8 other members there. His wife was able to come see him be baptized. It was such a blessing to be there. He got the Holy Ghost and also the Aaronic Priesthood. He seemed to be glowing afterwards.

Yesterday we woke up, had breakfast, got ready for ward council and we were about to leave when we realized that it was day light savings day... oops. So we walked into Ward Council an hour late:) Every one got a kick out of it. Hey we got an extra hour of sleep and we didn't even mean to. Church yesterday was awesome. Don asks so many questions in gospel principles. This week we were talking about prayer and he asked a lot of questions about the memorized prayers that Catholics say, and why we can't just say those. He got the three ladies in the room who used to be Catholics all fired up. We came to the conclusion at the end that we need to have a relationship with our father and he wants us to come to him for our needs and we shouldn't be praying to Mary or anyone else. We can pray for them but we shouldn't pray to them. He seemed to be satisfied by the end. And I think that he finally gets the purpose of prayer. I sure love gospel principles class, it answers so many of his questions that we can't seem to answer. This week with Don we decided just to read the Book of Mormon with him. We read 2 Nephi chapter 2. And he got so much out of it and understand at the end that we choose our eternal destiny based on our actions. It really strengthened my testimony that the Book of Mormon is the answer to everything. It answers questions in such a simple way and we don't have to teach anything all we have to do is bear testimony which is how it should be. He started talking about Heaven and I asked if I could be his neighbor in heaven. And he started talking about how in the spirit world he wouldn't be able to feed me any cookies because we won't have any arms. (Cause every time we go over there he has cookies for us). And then he stock his arms close to his body with his hands flapping around imitating what i will look like in the spirit world. He sure is a funny man that one:)