Hello from Graham, Washington!
This week was SO good! :) We saw a lot of miracles as we did everything we could to find people and to teach them. Here's a day-by-day breakdown (Sorry it's really long):
Monday: Nothing super exciting happened today. We had P-day and then we were able to see one of the Less-actives in the ward.
Tuesday: We had a fantastic District Meeting and one of the goals that Sister Parry and I set for this week was to make sure our Area Book is up to date on everything. We have a lot of Teaching Records that don't have addresses or phone numbers on them or the phone numbers that are on some of them are disconnected. When we got home from District Meeting, we pulled out all of our Former Investigators that weren't up to date or were missing some type of contact information and called all of the phone numbers and left messages for the phones that did work. Probably 30 minutes later, we received a call back from one of our Former Investigators named Dena. We ended up talking to her for about 30 minutes or so and found out that she is going through a really rough time right now. She is homeless and can't seem to get a job. She didn't know what to do. Her faith in God is weakening because she hasn't gotten any help with her situation. We asked her if there was a time that we could meet with her at the church building and were able to set up an appointment with her for Friday during the day. We also had a fantastic lesson during our dinner appointment with the Daines Family and got some really good feedback on how to teach the Restoration better. Brother Daines told us that he would definitely trust us to teach any of his friends and family. He is working with a coworker of his and said that he would have to arrange a time for his coworker to come over so that he could meet us.
Wednesday: We went and visited one of our Former Investigators, Melissa. We hadn't seen her for about 2 months or so and thought we needed to stop in this week. When we were there, I was getting ready to share a scripture from the Bible that I thought she needed to hear and she asked us, "Do you ever share anything from the Book of Mormon?" We realized that we had only shared a little bit from the Book of Mormon when we had been over there and for some reason hadn't put a lot of emphasis on the Book of Mormon. We had assumed (our mistake) that she had a copy of the Book of Mormon when we had gone over in the past because she has met with a few different sets of missionaries but she didn't have a copy! I don't know what we were thinking but we were able to giver her a copy and she said that she was going to read it and pray about it! :) We thought that she had a change of heart because she didn't seem that open when we had seen her in the past. Also, Sister Parry was blessed with what I call the "spirit of discernment" on Wednesday. We were looking at Sandra's teaching record, one of our Former Investigators, and this particular teaching record didn't have an address on it. The more Sister Parry looked at the "address" box, the more she was able to make out that the previous Elders had written something in the box but now you could only see the indents of what their pen had written. We were able to make out "blue house, chain link fence, on 37th, by Brother Sand." We decided that we were going to check out all the blue houses down that road to see if we could find our investigator.
Thursday: We went to go find Sandra. We didn't find Sandra but we found Dave, Jessica, and their girls. They haven't been to church for a long time. Jessica told us that her daughter was starting to ask them questions about God and who He is but it had been so long since being at church that they didn't want to tell her the wrong thing. We were able to set up an appointment for Tuesday to go over and teach them! We are so excited!
Friday: I'm pretty sure that I have told you about Scott and Tanya in past emails. Scott is directly related to Joseph Smith and he knows a ton about the Church and Church History. They are Lutheran but agree with everything that we have taught them when we have gone over. We were able to have dinner with them on Friday and it went great! We taught them the Restoration (which was a little weird teaching them about Scott's Great-great-great-great grandpa) but they for sure felt the Spirit. We have another dinner appointment with them on the 21st but they said we can come over before then! They definitely seemed more open this time around. Now we just have to wait for the Lord's timing. We also were able to have a church tour with Dena on Friday. That went really good I think. We were able to get to know her and we invited her to read the Book of Mormon. We need to call her and set up another time to meet with her.
Saturday: We contacted a referral that we had received on Friday and her name is Stacey. We have a return appointment with her on Saturday and she seemed really open to learning more about the Gospel! :) Can't wait to see what happens with her!
That's about it for the week!
Love,
Sister Megan Hills
Pictures: Sister Johnson has tons of hats (we think she is part of the Red Hat Society) and Chloe, the Johnson's granddaughter, has been trying them on each time they come over to visit. We had to take a picture with our hats on!
