Loving Albuquerque 11/23/09

Hello!

It's transfer time again. Sister Lamb is getting transferred to Aztec, where she will train a new missionary! Crazy right? But she’ll do a wonderful job. She was born to train and Aztec is a fun little town. I loved having district meetings there. Sister Brown and I will be staying together.

So, Thanksgiving is this week. Apparently, we have permission to go to as many Thanksgiving dinners as we get invited to. I bet there are a lot of Elders excited about that! One of my favorite families here in Albuquerque invited us to spend Thanksgiving with them and some other families at the Church building. They will be playing games and just having a big get together. It should be fun and we’re excited to stay here for the holidays! The families here are so good.

So, highlights from this week? Yes.

We got to teach another investigator this week. We knew that they would be going out of town for the holidays and that we wouldn’t get to teach them again for a few weeks. I wanted so much for this lesson to be powerful…for it to be exactly what they needed to hear. Sometimes, you can teach doctrine, you know, the missionary lessons, the principles that people need to know about the church. Sometimes you can just go through the order of Preach my Gospel lessons, after all there is a lot to cover. But it wasn’t the case this time. But I felt impressed that this particular person needed something more, something else. It weighed on me all day, it consumed our thoughts. So we went home and prayed specifically for this lesson. We developed a lesson plan that didn’t follow the order of Preach My Gospel at all. Mom, we actually decided to use excerpts from that talk you sent me from Jeffrey R. Holland, and it was perfect. We knew without a doubt, that this was what our investigator needed to hear. I love when the Lord tells us that he has something else in mind for a lesson than what we would normally do. You KNOW that that particular lesson is exactly what that particular person needs to hear, and you can tell them about the experience of planning it. Heavenly Father is very mindful of this work, even on an individual level.

We’ve been teaching a sweet woman who lives in the nursing home here. She is so wonderful. She never went to the temple, and her home teacher was talking to her one day and felt the impression that she needed to go to the temple before she died. So we’ve been going through the lessons with her to help her prepare. Anyway, when we went to visit her on Friday, she was very upset because someone stole one of her DVDs and a few chocolate candies. It bothered her a lot. But she told us that she tries to find the humor in it. “What kind of person would steal from a woman in a wheelchair!” she exclaimed. “Who would steal in the first place, but I mean, especially from an old person in a wheelchair!” I loved that. We laughed and laughed with her.

I love you all very much family! Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Love,
Sister Waters