This has been a pretty good week! My family had our Massey reunion. Thanks for all the pictures mom. I do wish i could have been there, but really i would have missed out on a great week in North Carolina! Hope the Massey family enjoyed Huntsville! :)
This week has been great! Sister Ibarra's last day for medication is today and then we will have to talk to our mission doctor and try to see a neurologist to make sure that she doesn't have any nerve damage! She has been so strong and extremely determined to serve God! I hope she can brush some it onto me and keep me motivated. It has been great of how loving and caring the ward is and always checking up on her and us and always trying to offer encouragement. Truly i just don't want to leave and this week is the 2nd to last week of the transfer and so i guess we will have to see. Tomorrow oddly enough is our goodbye Zone Conference. I never thought it would come to this part. I have to admit i was at the beginning holding back on trying to love or even allow President to help or really get to know him because i didn't want to then have to say goodbye, but really i have entrusted myself to him and have learned so much from him and asked for so much and really i am dreading and hoping that it will last as long as it can. I am excited to meet the new mission president but not too prepared for the possible change i will have to make. However, if there is one thing i have learned it is that this life we receive is full of change. We make changes everyday. We change our clothes into pajamas we change the style of our hair to down on our necks to up in a ponytail. Really change is everywhere. It is the way God has done things and really we have to experience change to return home! Change is in Repenting and to return home we have to repent.
We had a great lesson with our investigator this week! We talked about Joseph Smith and finished the Restoration. Sister Powers was our member present and shared her testimony of the Book of Mormon and of Joseph Smith. We didn't do much of the teaching. We did invite her to be Baptized. She said that if she read and prayed and felt it was true to would be baptized. It was great! We plan to teach her the Plan of Salvation this week. We had exchanges this week! Of course i got nervous and kind of freaked out and was kind of crazy the first 2 hours but once we started doing things we had a great time and i enjoyed it! We had a great talk and i just love all my STL! They are all so loving and so helpful and really they are what i want to become.
On Friday we meet a less active sister who just had a surgery which was major. I can't remember the thing that it was but the nerve by the eyes would send shape pain through her head to the center of her forehead. Something was hitting her brain and causing her pain. We didn't know she was in the ward and we didn't have her name in the roster. Bishop got a call about her and then we were asked to see her. She is amazing! She has had a hard time and had bad relationships and bad experiences in other wards who treated her bad. She was basically shunned and was forgotten because she got help by someone who was mistreating her. It was hard to hear but we had a great time with her and she is so strong. We are seeing her this week and making her lunch! I am so glad to get to know her more. She always says her short-term memory is always letting her down. I had to laugh because i feel the same ways sometimes. I haven't told her about my brain injury but i told her but i told her that i have a had seizures and for me to tell her the so try she had to let us come back. She was so good and was so happy. She is a strong women and so glad that she has been watched over all this time.
Saturday was full of service! I got to wear normal people clothes all day and it felt so weird. We helped the ward give a day of service to the town of Garner at the Garden. It was lots of work and luckily we had a lot of rain the day before so the humidity wasn't too bad. We were pretty smart when we decided to come early and start at 7. it was actually more bearable. WE had lunch with a sister and made her the food and cleaned her kitchen and vacuumed her house. She goes out with us a lot and is always serving others so we wouldn't let her help. We then helped a family get their in-laws house next door finished! I helped in the past and was excited to see the process and the completed projected. The in-laws are moving in today! We helped touch up the paint and put together some tables. I found a nail in the hard wood floor while sitting and got it caught on my new capris. I wasn't too happy but luckily they were only $7 at Wal-mart. I can still wear them i just have to wear a long shirt! haha :)
Now to the day that will explain my title of the letter. Sunday was awesome. I planned in advance for my fast and we had a great spirit during sacrament. We had a great lessons and had great meetings. We were invited to a bible study with a sister (Sister F) and her non-member friend from work. We have been going out with a sister every Sunday and she wanted to come so we had her come with us. We were so glad we did..... We got their and then we found out that the friend that was coming over to do the bible study. Then about a 10 minute wait two men from her church came and we talked and read from the bible. It was weird. Sister F wasn't expecting it. However, it was like we were put directly into the place of an investigators point of view. It was weird. We read from the bible a lot and talked about why the Sabbath day was really on Saturday and not Sunday. It was just crazy. It made me think about how i teach and if i do that. The older man did all the talking and the other just would hold his paper then his bible. Really it was helping me to see how important it is to have both teachers teaching. the non-member friend asked questions and they didn't answer. It was sad! I was kind of shut off at that. He was teaching and went through the discussion very well. However i felt very uncomfortable and wanted to say things and tell him he was wrong but i just felt like i just needed to listen. Overall the thing that freaked me out the most was the fact that i felt the spirit but din't fully feel it. I noticed that it was like the spirit was holding back. We would read scripture and i felt it get stronger then he would start talking and i felt it loose the intensity. We got to the end and he showed us a calendar and keep trying to convince us of the truth or something. He did however ask us if we as Latter-day Saints put the Book of Mormon ahead of the Bible. We said no they are one in the same. He didn't understand that really. He kept saying but in times or if something was to happen would the bible be above the Book of Mormon. We again said no they will be of equal. The sister who came with us told him her testimony of the Book of Mormon and told him the background of it and to show him that is just like the bible and has the same teaching but just with different people but learning the same thing with learning them through different experiences. I wanted to give him a Book of Mormon, but i again felt the spirit or something say no. We are planning on coming together again next Saturday. Sister F wasn't expecting what happened to happen, which i am glad to invited us to be their. After this little study we came home and Sister Ibarra and I said that it was weird and that it was more of a thing to think about in a way to gain and improve our testimony. What he said did stick but i remember when we realized what was going to happen i prayed to be able to understand and to show respect. I didn't want to understand and really i wanted to be contentious. I have never felt that kind of anger before. The way he taught it seemed like that was a goal. I can see know that as much as it was not something we expected it was something to learn from. I didn't question what i believed i questioned what he believed and why it didn't make sense. I felt the spirit but didn't feel the full impact i have had even at church because he didn't teach with the power of the priesthood or the Holy Ghost. I know what i know and that what i have is true. He talked with such potential. It made me sad that he could be a great general authority, but he doesn't have the priesthood and the Holy Ghost. It reassured me just how important it is for me as i teach others. I don't really understand all that we had just experienced and why it went like that might i know that God was giving us this chance to learn and grow from it. We have been talking as a companionship and have ideas we want to use to better teach and teach with the spirit. Really i am still shocked but i know God was watching out for us and knew that we could handle it and we did. He even allowed us to learn from it.
Well, this is my week! Hope y'alls week is great and that you can see the Lords hand in your life! I definitely saw his in mine this past week and can not wait till next weeks possibilities! Love y'all!!!!
Sister Tayler Farr
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Sister Tayler Farr
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