♪Families can be together forever♪

Happy mothers day :) 🌹

Happy mothers day to all you wonderful mothers out there. Thank you for all you do :) and I'm so grateful for the chance I got to talk to my mom yesterday! And so many other great things have happened this week.

First off exchange miracles are so real. We are the only Spanish sisters in our Zone let alone all the neighboring zones, so we do exchanges with the English Sister Training Leaders. So I was left the lone Spanish speaker for all our Spanish work for the day, but it was incredible. We were able to meet with a referral we have been trying to talk to forever, Ramona. Her brother, Hno Cordero is high priest group leader. We were able to talk to her about the book of Mormon and she seemed a little hesitant to accept it, but she said she would read it and pray about it, because she knows that's the only way she can find out if it's true. And she also told us she would talk to her brother about it some more this week.

Bike day!

Biking in the rain, looking for a referral 🌧

We are trying to conserve our miles a little bit more this transfer, so we spent most of exchanges biking. Sister Wilcox got excited about talking to Spanish people, so she pulled off the road and started talking to some Hispanic people working on a roof. Long story short, they were not as interested in the gospel as they were in asking us if we were married and we both got proposed to. But we did invite them to church, so who knows, they might come someday. And it never hurts to talk to everyone. 

We are really excited because one of our investigators has come to church two weeks in a row now! Jonathan and Gina, his wife, a less-active/returning to activity member. She just had a baby a couple of weeks ago, and they've come to church since then, and they were able to have their baby blessed in Church yesterday. He stood right outside the circle to watch, and afterwards held the baby up in front of the congregation and he just looked so proud and so so happy. In our lesson this past week Jonathan told us he wants to get baptized, he's just reluctant to set a date yet because he doesn't know everything about the church yet. He's starting to read more often in the Book of Mormon, and has been learning a lot by coming to church, and we're really excited about the progress he's making, and hopefully he'll have a baptismal date really soon. The knowledge of eternal families and the huge blessing he has seen in his newborn son is really drawing him close to the gospel. 

There was a two hour marathon sacrament meeting yesterday, because our entire bishopric got released, and all the outgoing and all the incoming spoke, plus their wives, so it was a very long meeting. We're really excited about our new bishop, Bishop Wood. He is from an English ward in New Brighton, but he speaks fluent Spanish, and he has a lot of new ideas. And Hno Torres, our Ward Mission Leader, is now the second councilor in the bishopric. So a lot of big changes, but hopefully it helps us shake things up in this ward a little bit and see some more progress. Our biggest challenges in the ward right now are there's a small core of members who are really involved who are doing everything, and high priests who are home teaching ten families, and a lot of people come late to 1 o'clock church every week and end up missing the sacrament, and there are a lot of transportation problems because people don't have cars, or people have weird work hours, or people were offended ten years ago by something someone said in sacrament meeting. And there's a lot of work to do with the investigators and with the members and with the less-actives, and we're never not busy trying to call people or visit people or help coordinate rides to church or any other variety of things, but we're really excited because there is already a lot of progress happening, and we're not about to run out of things to do any time soon. 

I hope you all have a lovely week, and give your mom a great big hug and thank her for everything. I'm so grateful I get to be a missionary, and for the knowledge I have that families can be together forever, and how much joy that has brought me and that I get to share that knowledge with everyone I meet for the next 15 months. Love you all! Thanks for all the love and support!

"Soy una misionera de La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Días"

Achi is moving to Minneapolis 😭 but she promised us she'll invite us to her baptism