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