February 24th, 2014

We had another crazy week. I can't even decide if it was the worst or the best- lots of growing that is for sure

This morning, though, we went to the Hoover Dam! Hence the pictures. We went with this family who I still can't figure out how we know them. The very first week I came to this area (forever and a day ago) Sister Remund had planned for us to go visit the Rickard family who just moved in. We stopped by the  house and the husband was home but told us his wife wasn't there so to come back later. Well to make a 7 month story short, we continued to visit them and would just chat for 15 minutes or so, sometimes read from the Book of Mormon, la ti da. Then we realized that there was no Rickard family in our ward directory, and no family lived at the address of this family we had been visiting. It was crazy and when Sister Nilson came into the area I had her casually ask them if they were members of the church. They aren't. I still have no idea what led us there besides the spirit, but now we are good friends and they took us to the dam! And it is the perfect weather outside.

Being a Sister Training leader  is a whole lot harder than anyone cared to warn me about. Mostly it is just inner feelings of having to have a "model area" with the highest finding teaching and baptizing numbers of all the sisters i'm over. And now I'll be giving a lot of trainings/ going on exchanges which can be stressful. But most of all I'm excited and very humbled to be in this position.

I am obsessed with teaching our golden investigator Valerie. She doesn't have a baptism date nor has she been to church because she is handling the situation very cautiously. I love her. She came to the Relief Society activity this week and met a lot of ladies in the ward, which was really good. She was turned away from the Catholic church because the members were hypocrites, and is having a hard time trusting organized religion again, but LOVES the Book of Mormon. "The Book of Mormon, combined with the spirit, is your most powerful tool in conversion" I'm pretty sure it says that in PMG. While we were there her dad was over and started bashing the Book of Mormon and she stuck up for it, telling him it was like Volume 2 of the Bible.

We found out last minute last week that we had to move apartments- we went from our super posh 3 bedroom, 2 story townhouse to a stinky old elder's apartment. It actually wasn't too bad though after we introduced it to our good friends clorox and windex. We are now closer to our area and can walk to church and district meetings so it is a blessing.

LOVE you!
Sister Stoker