We're Not Tan, We're Just Permanently Covered In A Mix Of Mud And Bike Grease

Wow! As always so much has happened the past couple weeks. We just got back from all the craziness of transfers, and I'm follow-up training!!  I'm going to miss Hermana Hill so much, but I'm SO excited!!  My new companion (and stepdaughter) is Hermana Jorgensen and she's so cute 😄

My last two weeks with Hermana Hill were awesome!  After six weeks of dropping people over and over again, we finally have some solid truth seekers that we're teaching.  It's like they all came out of hiding this past week.  One woman, Stephanie, came up to us on the street. She told us we had met her a couple weeks ago and shared our card with her.  A little while after that she had surgery and went into a coma. Immediately after getting out the coma she tried to call us but she couldn't find the card we gave her, so she just started praying that God would send us her way again.  That day we caught her right as she was walking out to her car, and now we're teaching her!  She loves the Book of Mormon even though she hasn't even read it yet and she has two kids that want to get baptized!  And the only reason we were in her complex to begin with was to visit a member referral (who turned out not to live there anymore). Members are key!!

So is following the Spirit. Hermana Hill is SO good at that, and a majority of the appointments we've had in the past two weeks have been a result of her following promptings. All she has to say is "I have a feeling we should..." and I'm ready to go.  Every time we happen to get there right as the person is getting home.

We finally figured out how to use Pick Up Sticks in lessons!  We've used it twice with families in the ward for a Noche de Hogar (FHE) to teach the Restoration and they love it!  It really helps people to visualize the apostasy, and it helps to keep younger kids entertained and focused.  Thanks Grandma and Grandpa for sending it! 😊

Más que nada we've done SERVICE this week. Hermana Hill and I helped a member for a combined total of 12 hours in setting up for youth conference. It was SO awesome!  (Pictures attached!)  And the blessing of serving members: she calls us about every other hour now asking where we are, if we're okay, and if we need her to pick us up or bring us food.  I love loving the members 😁

I love this area.  With all the rain lately it feels like we're off-roading on our bikes.  I literally had two inches of mud caked on my tires at the end of the day yesterday.  But I LOVE the rain!!!  It cools everything off and makes people more sympathetic to letting us into their house. Sort of... 😂 but really this area has so much potential, I've just come to the realization that it takes WORK to bring that potential to light.  Something I already know about Hermana Jorgensen is that she's a hard worker, so she'll help me be more diligent and I'll help her learn Spanish 🙂 I'm so excited for this upcoming transfer.  President Hall leaves in a couple weeks, 7 areas just got closed, and almost all of my favorite missionaries just went home. LOTS of changes (every companionship in my district is training), but I'm excited to see how they play out and what happens with the mission and the work!

I love you all!

-Hermana Thunell

Studying by the pool in our apartment complex! 

REAL Root Beer!

Youth Conference Decorations (a member in our ward PAINTED that Liahona!)

Flowers that look like butter!

These little guys are called charales and I ate about a hundred of them!  You just roll them up in tortillas and eat them. Or you can eat them by themselves. They're all dried up so they're like little fish chips and they're so good! 

Jesus is My Chicken Nugget

Just got back from the zoo! P-Days in this area are so great, there's so much to do!

This week we saw SO many tender mercies. I also fell off my bike again. Apparently this is going to be a weekly thing 😂 luckily we have bus passes so when it gets really bad (and REALLY hot) we can take the bus to our appointments.

We found some AWESOME people to teach this week! One of them was a referral from a member (#memberworkisthebest). We stopped by one night to meet her and talk with her for a bit and when we left and thanked her for her time she said "No I should be thanking you. You're trying to help me change so I can be better!"

I think change is a good theme for this week. Hermana Hill and I have been working SO hard to change ourselves to become better missionaries. We've been working on obedience, positivity, and MEMBER WORK (clearly it's starting to pay off because we've gotten a few referrals this week).

We also found this kid Marco just walking around on the street. He just moved here from Honduras and upon meeting him he told us he had lots of sins and really just wants to know how he can change and be clean. It's like Heavenly Father dropped a piece of gold right into our lap! Luckily for Marco, that's exactly what we do as missionaries 😊

We also got pulled over for speeding on our bikes.

Okay not really (though apparently that's happened to President Hall twice). We pulled up into the church parking lot for a water/playing the piano break and this police officer pulled in behind us. He asked if we were okay, told us he was a member from another stake, and then offered to buy us dinner! We went to Chipotle which I haven't had in 6 months and it was SO GOOD 😋 he also gave us his phone number and said if we ever need anything or find ourselves in some sketchy situation to give him a call and he'd send the troops running 😎 so now we have the police on our side, which makes me feel a lot better because we get hit on by lots of creepy dudes.

Less-Active Member Experience this week:

Member: Hey did you hear they're getting rid of chicken nuggets in 2020?

Me: Who?

Member: Like the whole world

Me: That doesn't sound right...

Member: No it's real. You're going to have to get chicken strips at Chick-Fil-A now

Me: I don't even like chicken strips...

Member: It's the same thing, just in strip form

Me: They taste different. I just want my chicken nuggets...

Member: That's right, you don't settle for chicken strips over nuggets, just like you don't settle for boys, only Jesus. Jesus is your chicken nugget.

(Just to explain the title of my weekly.)

I think that's all the crazy stories I've got for this week. Thanks for bearing through my Chick-Fil-A obsession!

-Hermana Thunell

Christianaries

Whelp I jinxed it. I fell off my bike this week, right into the middle of the street!  Thankfully I didn't get run over, but my watch got destroyed so there goes my tan line, I guess. It's okay, this week I'm working on getting a CTR shield tan line on my finger instead 🛡 it'll be so much cooler.

So we pretty much dropped ALL of our investigators this week, but amazingly the work has actually picked up!  Because we dropped everyone that's not really progressing, we had time to visit the 3 or so that are and we taught more lessons than we ever have this week!

One of the investigators that we considered dropping was Janet, but we had a return appointment with her on Friday.  We decided that if she didn't answer the door on Friday for our appointment then we would drop her.  We went to her apartment on Friday and knocked the standard 3 times. We waited for a couple minutes and no one answered. We were about to leave the complex but because we had just biked a TON to get there we decided to sit on the stairs for a second to take a break and contact some people. We sent one text and all of a sudden Janet came walking up!  She had just gotten back from picking her daughter up from school and invited us in even though she didn't have a ton of time.  Our lesson with her was short but went SO well, and she gave us watermelon after!! 🍉

 

Backtracking a little bit here but on Thursday WE WENT TO THE TEMPLE!!!! It was so amazing, I've missed it so much!! And the Houston temple is BEAUTIFUL. I'm so grateful to the member that drove us (even though we almost died multiple times), she even took all of our district out for tacos after!

This week has been a really interesting one. Lots of ups and downs as always. Of course dropping people was a bummer, but our zone has had so many baptisms this week! I'm confident that Hna Hill and I are getting closer to contributing to that. 

My district leader seems to know exactly how to push me out of my comfort zone, because he keeps giving me assignments that I don't like: leading the music at a baptism, giving the closing prayer at said baptism, giving the discussion at district council (that's all in Spanish by the way), he even volunteered Hna Hill and I to speak in sacrament meeting on Sunday. Saturday night came around and neither of us had written our talks yet, so we tried calling a member of the bishopric to see if we could do a musical number instead of speaking. Well that backfired because then he asked us if we could do both 🤦‍♀️ it all worked out though.  I did A LOT of praying, we wiggled our way out of the musical number, and Heavenly Father helped me pull my talk together just in time. As in I finished writing the last word literally 2 seconds before I got up to speak. 

Bonuses of being Spanish speaking missionaries: we came across this guy Faisal this past week, who seemed super cool and interested, but also seemed like he just wanted to bash us. In the middle of our first lesson with him he called his friend and asked him to come over to talk to "those christianaries". We skedaddled around that time-mostly because it was 8 at night and it takes us about an hour to bike home-and then we referred him to the English elders, who gladly taught him. Apparently it went well because Faisal texted us last night and thanked us for sending more missionaries his way. We come across a lot of creepy dudes around here, but I'm super grateful that the elders are always willing to take them off our hands.

Weird experience of the week: a recent convert in the ward threw an acorn at me because I asked him to say the prayer at the end of our lesson. I get it though. Had I had an acorn at the time my district leader asked me to lead and say the prayer at their baptism, I would have thrown it at him 🌰

I'm so grateful for the tender mercies and miracles we've seen this week. There have been SO many, and they all stem from us following promptings from the Holy Ghost (well mostly Hna Hill following promptings and me following her). I can't even explain how cool it is to look back on our week and realize that all the little decisions we made during the day were directed by the hand of God. I really do feel like I'm becoming a tool in His hands.

I also LOVE biking 😄🚴‍♀️ just thought y'all should know. 

-Hermana Thunell

Walk a Mile in My Shoes...or 6

Hi everyone! 

Sorry there was no weekly last week. We went to the museum!  It was SUPER fun but it literally took up our entire P-day. On the bright side, now I have two weeks worth of stories to share!

I'm LOVING the bike area so far! I haven't fallen yet (🚪✊), but somehow I had six bruises on my leg after the first day here. Like GNARLY bruises, but they've all healed by now. Out here in bike-land it's trendy to have a watch tan line and I'd say mine is coming in nicely 🤣

The young women had a garage sale/pupusa sale on Saturday as a fundraiser for girl's camp and we (the missionaries) took shifts as companionships running a Book of Mormon stand where we offered free copies and gave church tours. The elders didn't have much luck with it, but Hna. Hill and I passed out 5 Books of Mormon and gave 1 church tour!  We also got to eat free pupusas, connect with the members, and do lots of service.  After our shift was over we had a lunch appointment with a less-active member, but we didn't have our bikes with us so we ended up walking a mile to get there. When we finally showed up he told us his wife wasn't home.  After about 10 minutes of trying to tell him that it really wouldn't be okay if we broke the rules "just this one time", he finally brought some chairs outside and we ate and talked just outside of his apartment.  Definitely one of the weirdest appointments I've had.  When we were done we walked the mile back to the church where we helped clean everything up from the garage sale. Thankfully we were able to get a ride from a member to our next appointment. 

After that, we still didn't have our bikes and our bus passes are out of money.  We managed to sneak onto one bus that took us most of the way home, but the other one was going to take a half hour to pick us up and Hermana Hill was dying of heat stroke so we walked the rest of the way and made it home at the same time the bus did. 

Yesterday I taught relief society for the first time!  And in Spanish too!  Thankfully members in Spanish wards have LOTS of stories to share, so they pretty much taught the lesson themselves 😊

Favorite Finding Adventure of the Week:

Hna Hill: *knocks door*

No answer. 

Me: *knocks door again a minute later*

20-Something Dude opens the door: *chewing on something* "Hey could y'all stop knocking, thanks." *slams door*

Five minutes later when we're already down the hall

Dude: *opens door again* "And I don't care that my mouth is full!" *slams door again*

I guess I can't blame him though. I'd be grumpy if someone interrupted me while I was eating Chick-fil-a (we have 3 of those in our area so basically I'm in heaven).

I'm learning so much from this area:

- the gift of tongues is SO REAL

-Jimmy John's can make deliveries to the church

-ALWAYS wear good walking shoes, even if you aren't planning to do much walking that day.

And lots more. I've got a great spiritual thought brewing so stay tuned for it in an upcoming email!

I've only been in this area for 2 weeks but I already feel like it's helped me grow so much. I'm so excited to see where else the Lord takes me!

-Hermana Thunell

Saying Goodbye to My Birthplace...and My Car

That's right, I've been transferred to a biking area 🚴 Texas summer, here I come!  I'm just grateful that I have a little bit of an idea of what I'm headed into, so maybe I won't melt completely into a puddle. 

The last week of the transfer (and with Hermana Jensen) has been pretty great. We found lots of cool people, spontaneously invited someone to be baptized on June 2nd (he said yes) and drove ALL OVER the boonies of our area, thankfully with a full tank of gas this time. 

Yesterday we had stake conference with Quentin L. Cook and it was super weird to go to church in English, but it was awesome. Everyone that spoke was so powerful and really invited us to act on the messages being shared. I've decided to take the invitation to have more compassion, because my sarcasm this transfer has been getting unruly. I feel like I'm being refined from this really craggy rough rock, to a super smooth shiny rock, and sometimes it's not super fun and it involves lots of sweaty helmet hair or holding back super funny witty comments, but I'm glad to know that the Lord has something better for me in mind. 

This past transfer has been really hard, but one day President pulled me into his office for an interview to talk about why I'm not happy. I told him all that I felt was going on and when I was finished he just looked at me and said "Hermanita, get off the dumb struggle-bus. You know what you need to do, so do it."  At first that made me even more sad, but after I left his office I realized that he was right.  I don't know everything, but I've been out here for almost six months and instead of being daunted by all that I need to do, I just need to do it the best I can. I've been happier ever since.  And of course as soon as I really started to LOVE my area and throw myself into it, I got transferred. Oh well, now I have a new area and a new companion to love. 

Wish me luck in biking all day every day...in a dress! 

-Hermana Thunell

Oh! Susanna! Oh Don't You Cry For Me, I've Come From Alabama With My Banjo On My Knee

I love how my allergies turn on and off.  Yesterday I ate peanut butter and had no reaction, but on Tuesday, after I FINALLY got to hold a kitten, I spent the rest of the day sick and sneezing.  I hope one of these days Heavenly Father will realize I'm not going to stop holding animals and he'll take my allergies away...Until then, I just have to limit the number of strays I cuddle in one day. 

Something I'm grateful for this week: so many people gave us food during the week (soup, pasta, pupusas) that it didn't matter that our dinner appointment fell through yesterday. We broke our fast with a feast of leftovers :)

We've had a lot of miracles this week. Our investigator Katy has been coming to church finally!  She doesn't like driving (I can totally relate) but she's been driving herself anyway. I'm just so proud of her for coming this week and last week, because when I think about it I know that feeling of getting into the car and thinking "Wow, I REALLY don't want to do this," But she's been doing it anyway!  And the members are SO great at fellowshipping her, I'm super proud of them, too. 

Yesterday after church we had to go out to the far reaches of our area to check out a referral, and in leaving church we realized we only had about 50 miles of gas left. We prayed that we would have enough at least to get there (because we had to go out of our area to get there and it would be really bad to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere outside our area). When we did get there we saw that we had a little less than 30 miles of gas left, and it would take about that much to get home, so we decided we'd have to work that area (a trailer park) for the rest of the night. Turns out everyone who lives there is from Mexico, so not only did we find some awesome news and potentials, but we also found like 6 pregnant dogs, 3 racing horses, and a PYGMY GOAT (you bet I took a picture). 

We ended up leaving later than we thought we would and the GPS said it would take 45 minutes to get home so we were afraid we would be late and/or stranded.  BUT the power of prayer is REAL. We made it home exactly on time and somehow still had 16 miles of gas left!

Favorite investigator find of the week: This lady Susana who's from Guatemala. We met her and her husband taking care of their trees outside their house and she was super nice and funny. She really likes her trees, though. When we asked how long she and her husband had been married she said "Oh we're not married, we're just together.  I don't like marriage because I'd really just rather marry one of my trees.  My only problem is that I can't decide which one to marry, because I'm in love with all of them!"  She'll be an interesting one to go back and visit.  Honestly, I get the plant obsession though.  My sunflowers are finally growing again!  They're so cute so I decided to name all of them.  Pictures included, but I know my handwriting is hard to read, especially in chalk. Their names are Faro, Abish, Russel, and Menta 😊 thanks go to my mom for brightening up my life and our apartment.

A really REALLY great video that we watched this week with a less active family is "The Hope of a Mother" (I hope that's what it's actually called in English. It's "La Esperanza De Un Madre" in Spanish) on the Mormon Channel.  It's amazing, and you should all take a minute to watch it this week. 

Sometimes it feels like everything is spinning out of my control out here, or like I'm completely lost and I don't really know what I'm doing, but I know that I can always pray to my Heavenly Father and that He will and WANTS to give me direction.

Just a few of my miracles this week. 

Thanks to everyone!

-Hermana Thunell ❤

The Week of Dogs

Hi everyone! 

As always, this week was a mix of ups and downs. We had some miracles, some grumpy people, and some days that we just wanted to sleep (I have never enjoyed taking naps so much in my life). But you know, welcome to mission life. Hermana Jensen and I had great success as far as finding people to teach this week. We found 8 new investigators: Elizabeth, Jennifer, Jonathan, Juan, Juana, Julian, Rob, and Tania. I think I've finally learned the secret to finding: talk to everyone whose name starts with a J! 

This week was also the week of dogs. I swear all the animals in Houston know I'm allergic to them and so all the dogs flock to me. But of course when I want to pet the cats they run away 🐱😒

Speaking of dogs, we met this guy Juan the other week who's a German Shepherd breeder, so he has EIGHT German Shepherds. We met him at his mom's house, so we didn't get to see them the first time we met him, but for our return appointment we went to his actual house and walked up to the gate to meet 8 German Shepherds barking in our faces. 

As we waited for Juan to come out (because there's no doorbell or anything), we heard some very loud, very Hispanic music blasting from a fenced-in field behind us. We turned around to check it out and saw a horse DANCING TO THE MUSIC. The man that was training it saw us staring and yelled to us "Come! Come touch my horse!" (but in Spanish). So naturally we hopped the fence and ran on over. He wasn't very interested in our message, but he did tell us we could come over and ride his horse whenever we wanted to 😂

We went back to Juan's house later and his daughter came out and threatened to let all 8 of the dogs out on us if we came back, so I guess that's that. But meeting Huracan the dancing horse was definitely worth getting yelled at.

I love having the protection of the Lord on our side. He always protects us from people who try to let their dogs out on us and turns them into cuddly puppies instead 😊

Well, I've run out of focus to write anything else in this weekly. 

Thanks everyone for dealing with my crazy stories!

-Hermana Thunell

Houston, We Have a Problem...

(I've been waiting 4 months to use that as a subject title...)

Well, I hope everyone loved General Conference as much as I did. From the emails I've gotten this week it seems like the answer is ye!  But let me just say that this has definitely been the best General Conference experience I've ever had. Maybe that's because I'm a missionary and Conference is a chance to just sit and relax for a minute and soak in the Spirit. Regardless, it was amazing! The whole time I was watching it I was just thinking of how proud I am to be part of this Church. I love the push to LOVE everyone and to be unified as members in loving others and serving them. I'm so excited to work on loving people even more than I do now!! 

I know that Russell M. Nelson is a true prophet of God!

In others news...I still hate driving, especially because I popped our tire this week. We were running way late to one of our appointments and as we pulled up I accidentally rammed into a corner of the curb. I parked and when we got out we could hear the tire letting out all its air. But because we were so late to the appointment we decided to go in and deal with the tire after. Well the appointment ended up lasting until 9 and by the time we came out the tire was completely flat, of course. We called the vehicle coordinator who was on his way to the airport to pick up his wife, so we then had to call the elders who live close by. They came and changed our tire for us so we could get home and then to Firestone the next day. It took about an hour and it had just rained so the elders were pretty much rolling around in mud and puddles trying to change the tire. Their white shirts were so dirty afterward and I felt so bad. But, I'm so grateful that the Church is organized and that we didn't have to worry about all of that ourselves and there are always missionaries nearby that can rescue us.

My new companion, Hermana Jensen, is a super hero! Thanks to her we found 8 new investigators this week, and really connected better with some others that Hermana Bent and I haven't seen in a while. She's got this crazy ability to make total strangers completely open up about the deepest parts of their lives, and then she'll just weave gospel principles into the conversation and suddenly we're being invited inside their house and giving them a Book of Mormon and being invited back.

My absolute favorite investigator is Katy. She's the sister-in-law of a recent convert and she and her family are so cute and she's so funny and sweet. I love them so much. Yesterday we went to visit her because we haven't been able to see her in a while, and as Hermana Jensen started talking Katy started crying and telling us about all the trials in her life and how she wants to go to church so bad but her husband doesn't want to drive her and she doesn't drive (I can relate). She, and people like her, is one of the biggest reasons I'm out here. Because every time we go over I can see how much she wants to be happy and I can see clearly that the gospel can bring her that happiness and that peace that she's looking for. 

I'm so grateful for the knowledge of the gospel that I have and that I can be out here sharing it. I loved the invitation that Brian K. Taylor mentioned in Conference yesterday: "Every time you feel hopeless, lost, or sad open the Book of Mormon." I've definitely seen that the Book of Mormon is the quickest way to make myself happier or more grateful or better directed. I'm so grateful that I have such easy access to revelation from God, and I know that I'm out here because I want people like Katy to realize that they have that same access.

I love you all and invite you to accept that invitation as well: When you feel sad, hopeless, or lost READ THE BOOK OF MORMON. That's what it's there for.

Thanks for all the great emails this week!

Hermana Thunell

Two Heart Attacks in One Night

Hi everyone! 

The weekly's coming a little late today because of transfers! My training is officially over and now I get to take over the area because Hermana Bent got transferred! 😭 It's super sad, I already miss her so much. I don't know if I'm ready to take over the area and it's super hard to think about getting used to the habits of a new companion all over again, but so far that companion, Hermana Jensen, is super nice and seems to be a really hard worker. She's a native Spanish speaker so I'm either one step closer to fluency, or I'm about to be left behind in the dust. Wish me luck!

My last week with Hermana Bent was pretty great, mostly bittersweet. We saw our highway horse friend again yesterday with a second horse, but I wasn't able to get a picture 😑

This week was also the week of heart attacks! 

We've been asked to make 10 member connections a day, because honestly "out of sight out of mind", and we want the members to always be thinking of how they can do missionary work. But I also like being creative and texting members every day is great, but it gets boring. So we've starting heart attacking people!! It's super fun because usually by the time we get to the end of the night all of our plans have fallen through, so whenever we have time, we look up what members are in the area and heart attack a few of them! It makes people super happy and it's something fun we can end our night with.

I'm super pumped for General Conference, and I hope you all are too. The reason we have prophets is for them to receive revelation from God, and General Conference is the opportunity to listen to those revelations and apply them to our own lives.

We're challenging all of our members to start thinking of the questions they want to bring to General Conference, and I challenge all of you to do the same!  Heavenly Father wants to give us direction, we just have to bring Him the questions and challenges we need help with. I know that when we do that and prepare to act on the answer, He will give it to us.

-Hermana Thunell

Happy Pi/Cheesecake Day!

I can't believe it's P-Day again! This week has been a real rollercoaster, but I've really seen God sending me tender mercies right when I need them most.

Pretty much this has been the most stressful week of my mission so far. Transfers are coming up on the 26th and we all have a feeling Hermana Bent is getting transferred. So I'll be out of training and taking over the area with a new companion. With that I know I'll have to start driving again, because it's a hassle to have someone driving when they have no idea where they're going. That sort of hit me last Monday as we prepared to have exchanges with the sister training leaders and I got ready to practice taking over the area. In addition, we had a mission-wide call with President Hall that night where he pretty much shwacked all of us and said we needed to be talking to more people and working harder. From then on we've been counting the number of people we talk to and invite to do something every day. We're supposed to invite 20 people to act every day (140 a week that we report at the end of the week), which is reasonable for our area, but still stressful because we have to keep track of it. 

Tuesday morning was rough. I didn't feel like a good missionary and I was super stressed out about taking over the area for the day and also the thought of driving. We got to our meet-up place and Hermana Bent went with Hermana Montoya while Hermana Tucker came with me. Hermana Bent handed me the keys and I just looked at them, realized how much I DID NOT want to drive, and started crying.  Hermana Tucker decided to drive instead.

Taking over the area turned out a lot better than I thought it would be and Hermana Tucker and I got along super well. She assured me at the end of the day that I was a good missionary and that I'll be able to do this without Hermana Bent, but I was still REALLY happy to be back with her by the end of the night.  

Wednesday was rough. I was nauseous and dizzy and super tired because I didn't sleep well- all from stress- and I pretty much just wanted to lay on the floor all day and throw up and cry. We went out anyway and worked super hard on this one street for 2 hours, trying to get all of our contacts, but just as I was starting to feel better because of our effort, our district leader called us and told us that the way we were counting our contacts didn't count. So we went from having 10 contacts from the morning to having only 3. 

Thursday morning was a floor morning, until Hermana Bent told me to get up or she would pour water on me (in a loving way). We had an appointment with a member from one of the English wards (the reason why we had the appointment is a long story), and that turned out to be super weird but super fun. Somehow we ended up at McDonald's where Hermana Bent and I sang and played the ukulele. I think the member was hoping we'd become famous or something, but no one really paid attention to us 😂 but it was fun anyway and she bought us lunch. 

Friday was our service day. Since the mission office is in our area Hermana Bent and I clean it every Friday, which is so fun. This past week President Hall needed our help erasing all the phones from missionaries who have gone home, so we did that as our service instead of cleaning. It was only supposed to last two hours but it ended up taking 4 and a half hours and we missed an appointment with one of our investigators. So that was kind of a bummer, but we did find some really really awesome music on one of the phones and Bluetooth-ed them over to ourselves so now we have 5 songs that we've been listening to on repeat every waking hour for the past 4 days 😊 

President pulled me out for a quick interview during the service project to talk about how stressed out I am and he told me 1. That I should see the counselor and 2. That I should start driving.  So after leaving the mission office I drove to our next appointment! It was awful and I really didn't like it but I'm one step closer to taking over the area. 👍

Saturday and Sunday we had baptisms in the zone, but none of our investigators showed up to either so we couldn't go. It's been really hard this week because I feel like we're giving our best effort and I come home exhausted every night, but we're not seeing the numbers as evidence of it. But this week we're going to keep working even harder because we want people at church! And we want people on date! And we want to baptize someone!

We also have Savior of the World coming up! I've never heard of it before so I don't know if they do it in other places, but it's a musical all about the life of Jesus Christ put on by the stake. They're doing shows in English and in Spanish and all the members are a part of it so they're all really excited to perform it. There's a lot of hype building up for it and I'm super excited to go, but we can't watch it unless we have an investigator with us, so we're handing out invitations like crazy.

We're not really teaching anyone consistently right now, but we're excited to change that this week, and hopefully get someone we can bring to Savior of the World. I hope I get to see at least one showing of it. And hopefully in Spanish because our ward is basically completely in charge of the Spanish showings. 

That's really all I've got this week. Thanks for all the emails, I'm sorry I can't respond to all of them.

-Hermana Thunell

P.S. It was Pi Day on Wednesday but all we could find was cheesecake 😂😂

1/2 a Baptism, Full Tray of Cookies

Speaking of cookies, I'm pretty sure I cured myself of my peanut allergy, because I've been eating Reese's Pieces and peanut butter cookies all week (much to the dismay of my companion. Don't worry she knows where my Epi-pen is at all times). So pretty much I'm living the life I've always wished I could live 😂 now if I could just cure myself of my animal allergies...unfortunately no matter how many stray cats I cuddle I keep coming home sneezing ☹ 

Other than pushing the boundaries of my allergies, I've discovered this week that I also love biking as a missionary! We biked about 12 miles on Tuesday and I've decided that the trick to it is to be prepared to be embarrassed. Not only is it a process to figure out how to ride in a skirt (mine got stuck in my tire and ripped), but it's also super fun to be riding, see a person on the street, yell good morning to them, and then hit the brakes and do a nice little awkward backup to ask if you can share something with them. 👌 Biking is seriously so fun. As President Hall says: the happiest missionaries bike. And it's so true. We didn't bike all day, but we biked all morning and found that we were pumped for the rest of the day. I honestly couldn't stop smiling.

Sundays are miracle days! We seriously have at least one miracle every Sunday. This past week we've been trying to set up an FHE with one of Hermana Bent's recent converts and her daughter who we're teaching but we haven't been able to get in contact with them. We wanted to have it with another family in the ward but Saturday night our plans for that fell apart, so we went to church on Sunday knowing that if we wanted to have the noche de hogar (FHE) we had to find a family that day at church who could do it last minute and is also friends with Sandra, the recent convert/has kids the same age as Annie, her daughter. We went to church with one family in mind and planned to talk to them, but they didn't end up coming to church. And Sandra didn't come to church either so we forgot about the whole thing. Until the end of church when one of the members came up to us as everyone was leaving and said "Hey my family is having a noche de hogar with some of our friends tomorrow and we were wondering if you had any families you're teaching that you want to invite." I LOVE IT WHEN PEOPLE FOLLOW SPIRITUAL PROMPTINGS. He has no idea how much he blessed our lives.

We also had a baptism yesterday. We've been teaching a little boy named Eugenio whose parents are members but they asked us to teach him the missionary lessons because they wanted him to understand the importance of his decision to be baptized. So it only counts as a half baptism, but it's still way rewarding to see someone you've taught get baptized! It was actually SUPER stressful because I had to give the talk on the Gift of the Holy Ghost in Spanish and I was freaking out, but when it was all over the family gave us all their leftover cookies so we have even more cookies to eat, besides the peanut butter ones we made, and most of them won't kill me 👍

We get a surprising amount of food, and not even just from members. There's a lady that lives in the apartment across from us and one day we asked her if we could borrow a cup of milk. She came back out with a GIANT glass of milk. So naturally we had to repay her, so we made her some cookies and left them on her doorstep a few days later. Well, last week she knocked on our door at about 9:45 at night (side note: it's actually super creepy when people knock on our door at night) and gave us a bowl of this delicious ice cream creation on the plate that we gave her the cookies on. And then the next night she knocked on our door at about the same time and gave us a GIANT plate of rice and meat and homemade cucumber ranch stuff. She told us that she just recently quit her job so she just cooks all the time and she thought we might want some lunch for the next day because she knows we're out all day. She's like our mom, it's so sweet. We now have three of her dishes so if anyone has any ideas of what we can make her to step it up, please let me know (I'm thinking empanadas and quiche). I love nice people.

Still trying to figure out how to send videos, because we've got some really funny ones. But for now here are some pictures of fun things we find on people's doorsteps, the stickers one of the kids we're teaching put all over my arm during the lesson, and Hermana Bent's favorite daily planning outfit 😂

- Hermana Thunell

Holding Birds and Accepting Challenges

Well, I finished reading the Book of Mormon. 

I love the chance I've had to take on Moroni's challenge again:

4 Y cuando recibáis estas cosas, quisiera exhortaros a que preguntéis a Dios el Eterno Padre, en el nombre de Cristo, si no son verdaderas estas cosas; y si pedís con un corazón sincero, con verdadera intención, teniendo fe en Cristo, él os manifestará la verdad de ellas por el poder del Espíritu Santo;  

5 Y por el poder del Espíritu Santo podréis conocer la verdad de todas las cosas. 

Next go round of reading will be in Spanish!


Speaking of Spanish, here are some things that have been fun to explain to one of our sister training leaders who is from Venezuela:
-The meaning of the word "edgy"
-Bop-It
-Scavenger Hunts
-What roadkill is

I'm sure there will be more to come. In return here are a few of the words that I've learned this week:
Merendar- to have an afternoon snack (I'll be using this a lot)
Ardilla- squirrel
Cazar- to hunt (not to be confused with casar, which is pronounced the same but means "to marry")


We were challenged to lead with an invitation to baptism this week in every contact, which I found wayyy intimidating at first. We can't even get our investigators to commit to baptism, how are we supposed to walk up to strangers and do it?? But, I know that if we take on the challenges we've been given, we will see results. We got 2 new investigators out of inviting everyone we saw to be baptized. Mauricio and Jennifer both said yes even though we had just met them! So that's super cool. This week has been a good one to see results. We aren't teaching a ton of people and our most recent progressing investigator literally disappeared this week, but on Sunday almost all of the less-actives we've been working with came to church! They told us that our visits with them really helped them remember that the Lord loves them and that church is the place they need to be on Sunday. We also got a call from the Vietnamese elders that a referral we had sent them had become a new investigator for them so that was awesome! Most of the time we send referrals and never hear about how it goes, and just hope that they actually contact and teach them, so it was really nice to hear from the elders and know that the short conversation we had with a man who didn't really speak much English, the seed we planted, was starting to sprout.  


I also supposedly drank cashew juice yesterday? But I didn't have an allergic reaction so it's highly likely that I misunderstood.
Thanks for the support as always!  Please enjoy this picture of me with a bird on my arm 😊 (on that same night I also held a bunny!)

Love, Hermana Thunell