Manna From Heaven and a New Hope

Family!

That's a pretty big ward...  That's pretty exciting about Katie!

This was a week full of miracles!  We had a member call us up who lives far away on the edge of our area.  She is a fluent Spanish speaker from Mexico City, and she had a referral for us.  She has been teaching her friend about the gospel for a while now, and her friend finally agreed to have the missionaries over!  We made the trek out there and had a very powerful lesson with this member and her friend.  It was so exciting to get such a solid referral!  The friend is interested, and we'll be going back this week to teach her and her husband with this member.  It was so weird for me to contact this referral for a few reasons.  First, because it's so far away, it's in a city that I've heard many stories about, but never been to before.  I've pretty much been in the same place my whole mission, so going somewhere new was a really weird experience.  Second, this was a new Hispanic member that I had never met before.  Again, because I've been in the same place for quite a while, meeting a new Hispanic member was pretty weird.  But I'm super excited about this referral.  a general authority who came to our mission a long time ago called referrals "manna from heaven."

We went out this past week with our branch president.  Right at the beginning of our time out with him, our appointment ended up falling through.  We went to go try a man that we had met a few days before, and he turned out to be there and ready to listen.  He gathered his family and we taught a powerful lesson with our branch president to this family who had never heard from missionaries before.  I had been praying all day that we could have a good experience with Presidente while we were out with him, and we did!  This was also a significant lesson because this family lives in an area that used to have a lot of progressing investigators, but most of them have slowly lost interest.  So this was a new hope for the area finding this awesome family!

We also had a chapel tour this week with a family of 7!  They've been taught by missionaries for a while, but just a few weeks ago we picked them back up and have been helping to read again in the Book of Mormon.  In the past the Dad was never very interested in listening to us, but recently he has been asking us lots of questions, and he came to the chapel tour this past week and participated a lot!  We were able to get out a lot of their concerns as we talked with them at the font and in front of the sacrament table.  I've got high hopes for them!

This week I also began helping to fix up another house in Dayton with a member.  This is house number 3.  Dayton Spanish district is rebuilding Dayton one house at a time!

When I think back to how this area was when I first got here nearly two years ago, I can't even believe the difference.  Two years ago we didn't even dream of hitting 20 lessons.  Now we're hitting almost 30.  Before if we had 2 member presents it was considered a pretty good week.  Now we're shooting for 10.  Back then if we got 1 person to church we were ecstatic.  Now we're disappointed if only 2 come.  The work really is progressing here.  I've progressed.  I'm so glad that I was sent back here so I could see the changes that the Lord has made in this area and in me.

Have a great week!

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