New Transfer!

Hello!

Happy Memorial Day yesterday! The libraries were closed, so I'm emailing today. :)

This new transfer is going to be amazing! My new companion is Sister Quintero, and she's from Spanish Fork. She and I get along really well, and the two other girls in our apartment are sister Whitten and sister Angus, and the 4 of us have a lot of fun. We are always laughing, but we work really hard, too. It's great.

Yesterday since we had more time for P-day we went to the mall. It was a pretty bizarre feeling going there - I haven't been anywhere remotely like a mall since I left for the MTC.

After we came home and went out and worked, and we went and visited a less-active member. He's just 18 and lives pretty much by himself. It's sad, but he's super cool and we had a great conversation. As we were about to leave, he said "hey do you guys want a papaya?" and he went and got a papaya for us from his tree. Papayas supposedly really aren't that great, but everyone here gives them out. So we thought it would be funny to give them to the other sisters when we got home. We walked in the door, and said "We have a present for you!" Sister Angus was like, "Is it a papaya?" and then sister Whitten said "We have a present for YOU!" and they brought out another papaya that one of THEIR members had given them. So now we have 2 huge papaya on our counter. Yay for Texas.

The past few weeks had been pretty rough with finding people, but we've been working really hard and are finally seeing some progress and results. It's been such a miracle to FINALLY start finding people again.

I love Texas! I'm just so very happy here :) Miracles are going to happen this transfer!
Hope all is well :)

--

Hermana Reynolds

Hollah!

Hey family!

 

Man, this week was a whirwind. We did pretty normal things for the first couple of days, and then my companion got called to be an STL so she had to go to training in McAllen, so I was in a trio with the two other girls in our apartment, sister Bentz and sister Whitten. We had some great adventures traversing around Brownsville together.

Also, after the training, our district leader gave us the challenge to use better referral questions (instead of things like "do you know anyone on this street" to  things like "do you know anyone who has lost a job"), and also talked about the importance of using the Book of Mormon. He gave us the challenge to come up with lots of new referral questions to have ready so that we can use them, so we spent a lot of time coming up with those. We got pretty dried out of ideas, and we settled that we just need to start asking "who do you know?" and go from there ;)

But, yesterday we contacted this house and the lady was super not interested, but sister Pickett asked "do you know anyone who is sick who maybe needs some help?" and she was like "Yeah, actually, I work with sick people all the time! Let me give you people you can visit!" So we went in while she was writing down names and stuff, and then I was thinking, if we were already in her home we should share a message from the Book of Mormon. So we pulled out the Book of Mormon, and asked if we could share something. At first she was super apprehensive and was like "why would you use more than the bible? I don't understand!" but we talked about it, shared a story, and left her with a Book of Mormon. It was super cool, because she went from being totally anti other religions to committing to read the Book of Mormon. Pretty cool :)

 

Ever since the change of areas, sister Pickett and I have been doing lots of work with less-active members of the ward, and have made some really great frienships and things, but not a lot of progress as far as returning to church. We had been fasting and praying a lot for investigators and less actives to come to church. Yesterday morning it seemed like everything had fallen through, and we didn't have anything.. but we went to church, and it was so cool. SO many of the people we've been working with came! And the husband of one of the families came, who wasn't a member, for the first time in years. It was such a miracle to have our last week together be a week when we got to see some fruits of our labors here :) The Tender Mercies of the Lord are real!

 

Love you all!!!
--

Hermana Reynolds

This week will be short, but here's a quick story :) The other day we had plans to contact a less-active member, and so we went there and he wasn't home, but his wife was and so we started talking with her. She was pretty cold at first and said that she was a "non-denominational Christian along with her daughter," but we kept talking and then started talking about baptism - we explained that we help people prepare to be baptized and asked if she'd be interested in learning more, and then from behind the door we heard a "yeah, I would!" Her daughter had been listening to the conversation from behind the door and wanted to be baptized! Yay for miracles!

 

Next week is transfers, so things are probably gonna change up again. It's pretty exciting!

--

Hermana Reynolds

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....

Probably the most exciting thing that happened this week was a zone exchange - everyone switched companions for 2 days - it was pretty crazy! I ended up with another greenie, so for two days we got to practice being not greenies, which was great because in 2 weeks I'm done with 12 week and can graduate greenie-hood! Yay! It was great - we even managed to teach in Spanish without our companions, and we saw lots of miracles.

Okay, I just remembered that there were a lot of other exciting things this week.. so enough about the exchange. On Friday, we exchanged back in time to do weekly planning. We went home, and sister Pickett and I started planning. All of a sudden we heard weird things happening with the other two sisters who live with us, and we heard sister Benz say to sister Whitten, "okay, go lay down!" and then she came in and said "Guys, sister whitten is high from her medication. I'm serious!" and... she was. She had been having kidney problems so got some antibiotics or something, and for some reason she had some crazy reaction and was crazy. She kept saying "I know I'm a missionary, and I know we need to do weekly planning, but I just feel a little weird," and then would start laughing hysterically and telling sister Benz not to call anyone, and was having her take pictures of her eyes because she thought they were dilated and stuff. She wouldn't stay on her bed, and whenever sister Benz tried to talk to us about it she would say "YOU GUYS ARE TALKING ABOUT ME!" and come in and get mad at us. She was super coherent, but just crazy. We eventually got things worked out and she finally went to sleep. And then we went to our next lesson... It was with a guy named Steven, who was baptized a couple years ago but never confirmed. The other Elders had been teaching him since he was in their area, so we were going to talk with him and kind of do a trade-off lesson. Evidently he had had a lot of weird ghost/devil experiences before and claimed to be able to talk in tongues. so we were talking about confirmation and the gift of the Holy Ghost, and all of a sudden he started talking in tongues (like... speaking some made up language.). and it was freaky. He said that it was a gift of the spirit and he knew that he already had the gift of the Holy Ghost because he could talk in tongues.. Yay for Texas! Things like that happen pretty often here, evidently.

Also... I'm gonna be 20 this week. That's all.

Love you! Can't wait to see your bright, smiley faces on Sunday! Yay!

Love,

--

Hermana Reynolds

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.