11/3/2013: (no subject)

Hey family!

Woah, different color! Unintentional surprise!

This week has been good!

Iris, our walk-in from last weekend, came to church yesterday, and even though she was confused during a lot of it, due to some pretty deep tangents on moral agency in sunday school and it being fast and testimony meeting, she seemed to like it a lot, and made lots of new friends! She loved the Relief Society lesson, and when the Bishop came in at the end of relief society to ask the sisters who hadn't been home taught by their home teachers, she asked Sister Aliaga "who am I supposed to visit?" And S. Aliaga told her "that's only for people who are already members of the church, we visit each other, don't worry about it," and she says "How can I join this church?" NICE!! Then after church we taught her again about the importance of the Book of Mormon, to re-emphasize that it was how she was going to be able to gain her testimony. We invited her to be baptized on December 22, and she accepted! Yes! This girl seriously has so much faith. In her school bible study group, she said they've studied a lot of the Apostolic epistles, so doesn't even really know much about Jesus Christ himself, but she has such a strong desire to follow him just from what she does know about Him. She said the most spiritual moment she's had was when the choir in the Relief Society broadcast sang "I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go." Talk about awesome! She's the one in the 2nd picture.

Hayley is still doing well, though hitting a trial of her faith this week. In researching more about Joseph Smith, she found out about polygamy, thankfully from a pretty reliable, accurate resource I think, from what she understood about it, (ie that it was revelation, short-lived, etc) but naturally is struggling with it. She's kind of pulled away from us a little bit, but she's still willing to read the Book of Mormon and continue to pray about it. She's meeting with one of our awesome RM ward members, Annie, tonight for dinner. Hayley invited us to go, but we feel like for some reason it'll be better if we don't go. We're hoping Annie can help ease her mind on it a bit. We've been praying a lot for her, and I think she's honest enough in heart that I have faith she will continue to investigate and overcome this and make her baptismal goal! Especially with the powerhouse fellowshippers she has.

Also, we had some really cool pull-backs this week!! None of them were for our area, but that's ok! 

1) The first one, and honestly the coolest one, was this Nepalese pastor who walked up to me and told us that "Most churches don't understand the Bible-- it says Christ's church should be founded with Christ as the chief cornerstone, with a foundation of prophets and apostles!" And we were like "Oh my goodness this man is AMAZING," then he said "so I wanted to hear more about your church, but I've heard you don't believe in the resurrection." And we said "Oh, we believe. We DEFINITELY believe in the resurrection!" And he said, "wait, do you know what I mean when I say the resurrection? How when we die the spirits of the righteous will go to a state of paradise where they await their resurrection to celestial bodies?" And both of us just got insanely huge grins on our faces and were thinking "Are you sure you haven't read our Plan of Salvation pamphlet before??" and we were like "That's EXACTLY what we believe!" And we all just get really excited smiles on our faces and get kind of jumpy, but he had to go, and was like "We'll have to talk about this later!" SO COOL!!!! It's going to be a Sidney Rigdon thing where he can bring his entire congregation to us!! YES!!

2) This Chinese guy who grew up in Australia who had a good friend who was a member and gave him a Book of Mormon, so we explained a lot more about the Book of Mormon to him, gave him a Chinese copy, he said he'd come to church, and then we gave his number to the elders, who started teaching him 2 days after!

3) This Nigerian man who was staring at me from across the street, and comes up to me and says "What church is this?" and I tell him, and he said "Why didn't I know this church was here before?" almost in frustration to himself, i.e. sounding like he'd been looking for a church for a long time. Then we gave him a tour of the church, and S. Aliaga grabbed an English Book of Mormon, and he was like "Do you want to give me a bible?" And he pulls a bible out of his bag and says "I carry one with me everywhere!" So cool! He kept saying "Yeah, there's nothing more rewarding than doing the work of the Lord." This guy means serious business! He said he'd come to church Sunday too

So yeah, pretty much the English branch Elders loved us after this week. Haha. Pull-backs rock!

 

Love you all! Ga yau!

Sister Heaton

 

 

Us and Taiwan Sister Chou, one of the Mandarin sisters who we live with.

Sister Aliaga and I dressed up as twins for Halloween, since we couldn't think of anything that would actually be appropriate to dress up as and still be missionaries.

Us and Iris!

Our enormous district.