Jenn on a Mission

Hi Mom,   So they should be contacting you this week to give you the travel arrangements, they are behind with them because they are moving the mission office and the office lady get's confused pretty easy and I think me switching stake presidents really through her off. Anyhow you should hear from her this week, I really could not even tell you as they do not send them to me until two weeks before as they do not want us to be distracted at all. I said whatevs as long as I go home when I am supposed to, if it was up to me I just would not come:) No I know I need to but I just really want to stay here and do missionary work.  Anyhow with Bishop Swenson you can tell him the 24th is fine, I had no idea he would want me to talk as well. That will be fun to talk in your ward and then talking in the AZ ward the very next week. I just got done talking in the ward I am serving in right now and even though I do it all the time I still get a little nervous so I am sure I will ...

Hi Friends and Family,     What another great week in the mission field! This week has just flown by and I am just wanting to slow down the time and spend as much time as possible here, my bishop has asked me several times if they would extend my mission another 6 months and I told him no problem you just have to get the permission. I know that it would not happen as all good things do end, but I love it so much and have enjoyed serving each and everyday in the lords service. Friday we had zone conference which was my last one, it was really bitter sweet as it was also my mission president's last one. President and Sister Dance end their mission this next week on the 28th and we will have a new mission president the very same day. It feels so weird to be under a new mission president for the last couple weeks of my mission but I know that it will be good to help my companion adjust and to be able to meet him.  There will be allot of commotion going on with saying goo...

Dear Friends and Family,   What a wonderful week! There could not be any better way to end a week then to witness two people get baptized.  The baptism were so wonderful and to feel the spirit of both of them was great. I just love seeing both of their faces as they came out of the water and to see the light and joy in their eyes! We also had the opportunity to start teaching two new people this week. One of them is a special circumstance given from out ward. His name is Justin Tabbilos and the ward found out that he did not have a baptismal record at all even though we all thought he had been baptized. Well come to find out he was baptized in the Philippians and they never recorded it with the church and they could not track down the witnesses for the baptism either. It was pretty sad as I am sure he does not want to go through the process again. The ward talked to him and he decided as he is ready for the priesthood to go through the process so he can have his record i...

 It is finally looking like summer! Hi Friends and Family!  This past week has been pretty awesome! I just love doing the lord work as always and it feels like it just gets better and better. Maybe I just love it more and more and I hope to always be a part of it in my life.  We are really excited for Erica's and Kayla's baptism's this weekend. They were both going to be baptized together on Saturday but we had a slight hiccup as Mikayla as not had the opportunity to come to church more than once. So it is going to work out that her baptism will be on Sunday, we are really excited for both and them and for them to make this commitment with their heavenly father. Erica is amazing as she waited to tell her mom as she was not sure how she would react, the one thing I loved is her mom was like there is still time to change her mind as she has not made her decision. I loved that she told her that I have already made up my mind mom and ...

Miracles are happening everyday!! Hi Friends and Family!  This past week has been such a great week! As I was sitting at church on Sunday and I watched a member walk in with 3 of our investigators I thought to myself "Wow, I am so thankful for amazing members who support this work and help in the efforts of the lord!" We have been teaching so much this week and I could not be more than grateful for the opportunities we have been blessed with.  Eloy is excited for his baptism this Saturday as are we, he is pretty funny in the way he wants to know each thing and what to expect. I love how he says he is excited to be "Part of the team" one thing I loved is he said at the end I want to be part of the right team who is doing the right things. I loved it knowing that he was brought up strongly in another religion but yet can see the truth and has the strength to move forward with being baptized even though his family does not support him in it 100%. I know he will be bl...

Always reach out to others! Hi Friends and Family,   This past week has been a good week! I would say the highlight of the week was Wednesday, of course the training we had that day was great but more than that is was the lesson we experienced that evening. We had Sister Dance with us and we were able to teach Erica and to have Ciara with us as well. As you know we have been wanting Erica to choose a date to be baptized for quite sometime now as she wants to be baptized it is just choosing a day to be baptized. Well it was great as before we even started the lesson Erica tells us that she has been thinking and that she wants to get baptized around her birthday. So we pulled out the calender and she decided on June 11th. It was pretty exciting and I am so happy for her and pray I can be there when she enters in the water of baptism. On Friday we had our second lesson with Kristi that week and right before we were getting started her friend Mary Beth stopped by and ...

Love this work! Hi Family!   Wow this past week was such an amazing week!! We have been so blessed and I could not be more thankful, the work in our area is going AMAZING. I just hope we can continue to live up to and do the things the lord is asking us and directing us to do. I love how the spirit works and being able to recognize the small promptings of the spirit each and everyday. The lord is literally directing this work and I am thankful to be an instrument in his hands. We were able to experience a great baptism of Cara Goodman on Saturday. It went so well and the support of the ward was awesome. She was super excited to be baptized and her family was there to support her in her decision. I love seeing someone be able to make that covenant with their heavenly father and be able to realize the importance of it. Erica also came to the baptism and after I talked to her about the importance of her not delaying her own baptism and how Satan does not want her to be baptize...

Hi Friends and Family! What an amazing week! I cannot tell you how much I love to do the lords work and to be here on my mission. Life as a missionary is AWESOME! The work in the turn again area is so busy and the lord is blessing us so much with teaching opportunities. I do not think there is a night were I do not hit my knees in full exhaustion to express my gratitude to the day that we were able to have. I love to see how the gospel can truly change peoples lives. This upcoming Saturday we are looking forward to the baptism of Ciara Goodman. She is doing so great and is looking forward to the day when she can make that covenant with her heavenly father. Each commandment we teach her she looks forward to committing to it and is excited as it gives her the opportunity to better her life. It has also been great to see her dad and sister change their lives for the better and see them both come back to church. I love that no matter what stage of life you are in you can always decide to ...

Hi Friends and Family,   This past week has been such a great week and I am so thankful to be here!!  The work in our area is going so great, and we have had the opportunity to do allot of teaching this week. I always think the first day of your mission is very meaningful and is forever imprinted in your mind. I wanted to be able to have sister Sadlier to have a great day and be able to see how great doing the work is. We had an appointment with the Snow family that night who is a L/A part member family. When we got there her non member husband met us outside to let us know she was going to be cancelling which is the end turned out to be a blessing as he stood outside and talked to us about his feeling and the church. He does all the commitments that we leave with his wife and he talked to us about some of the hang ups that he has with the LDS religion. It was great to be able to talk and testify about our beliefs and why we do some of the things we do. I know that Ryan w...

Another crazy week with transfers! I found out that I will be training again for a 3rd time which I could not be more than excited for. My companions name is Sister Sadlier and she is from St. George so that is fun. I am excited to stay in Anchorage and continue to serve there.   The work in the turn again area is great and I am excited for the people we are teaching. Erica and Kiara are still on date to be baptized and I am looking forward to see them enter the waters of baptism. Each of them have concerns in regards to what is going on because with Kiara her dad and her are not getting along so she left with her mom. I will have to explain more of this later. With Erica we are encouraging to keep her date as she has thought about waiting until after her baptism. We are continually encouraging her to move forward with her date. Sorry to make this short but we have to go, I am so grateful to be here and so grateful to be in the lord's service. Thanks for all your continued lo...

Hi Family,   This past week was such a great week! I am so exhausted from how busy we were but I am thankful to my heavenly father for giving me the energy each day to teach and stay awake. We were able to do exchanges with both the Wasilla sisters and the Hmong sisters this week which went great. I have loved and appreciated doing exchanges these past week and I am grateful for the opportunity we had to do them. This week I was able to travel to their areas and spend time with sister Lee and sister Cranney who are awesome. I loved being able to serve in the Hmong area and be able to appreciate the ability to speak and learn more than one language. Sister Lee was very patient with me and helpful so that I could be included even though I did not understand allot of time what the people were saying. My exchange with sister Cranney was much different in the way that it was more of going back in helping with insights of an old area. I love sister Cranney and how devoted she ...

Hi Family and Friends,   This past week has been such a great week! Sister Nay and I had the opportunity on Monday to get a call from our mission president and he asked us if we would be willing to do exchanges with all the sisters in the surrounding areas. We were both very excited for this opportunity as it has never really been done before in the time that we have been serving and we of course always hear about exchanges with the elders. So that evening we planned out our 4 exchanges for the next couple weeks. Thursday was our first exchange which sister squire from eagle river came and worked with me and sister Nay went and worked with sister Young and Hollingstead. It was really fun to be able to work with another sister and to have her angle on things for the day.   The work in this area has been so great, on Monday we went and visited a less active we visit every Monday and we did not have allot of time due to the fact that we needed to be at a baptism we were ...

Hi Family and Friends!   Sorry did not write last week, when there is a holiday it makes it hard to find a public place to email. Things this past week have been really great, the best news was to find out that I am not getting transferred and am going to be serving again with sister Nay. We have allot of people that we have been working with so I was really thankful to find this out as I am excited to see them progress.   On Friday we had Erika come to a dinner with a member to help her get to know more people in the ward, it is great to see how willing the ward is in helping her feel welcomed. We talked about getting baptized with her and for her to ponder and pray about it. I love being able to teach people that have never had religion or the gospel in their lives as everything is new to them. When we were talking about the resurrection with Erika her reaction was so great as she simply said "Well I have never thought about that before!" I just thought how many ou...

Hi Friends and Family, This past week has been such a great week, it has been so warm here in Anchorage. Well I guess for us it is warm as it got up to 40 the past week or so and we have been wearing our jackets. It is crazy as during the day it warms up and the snow melts and then at night it freezes up again, so basically it is just one continual wet mess.  Just looking forward to spring and summer that is for sure!  It is also crazy with the time change how it does not get dark until nine and that we gain 5 minutes of light a day. Of course i remember it from last year but I am not sure I could get used to it being light all the time.  I prefer having it get dark at night and so when the sun never goes down it is weird but it is fun at the same time.   We had some great lessons this week with our investigators, Erica returned from her trip and we were able to teach her on Saturday . With her baptism being planned th...

Hi Family,   This past week has been a good week, it has been sunny almost every day which is so nice!  The work in our area this past week has been a bit slower than most as it was spring break. Allot of our investigators were out of town or had to reschedule. It gave us a good opportunity to focus on contacting and to find other people that we usually do not take the time to do.   On Tuesday we were contacting people in the ward we have never met and we met Candice Snow who has not been to church in years. We chatted with her for a good time at the door and found that she had lost her testimony as a teenager because of the pressure of marriage and had not gone back to church since. She since then had married a non member and they had talked about going back to church but have never acted upon it. While talking I felt strongly about asking her if she would be willing to learn about the gospel just as we teach anyone who has not learned about it before and to mak...

Hi Family and Friends, This past week was a great week! I still amazes me each week how so much can happen in such a short amount of time. We had transfers at the beginning of the week and we had to take sister Dalton to the transfer meeting from the airport. It was allot of emotions watching the first sister I served with go home from her mission, she was really nervous and all I could think is I do not really want that day to come. I love being a missionary and being able to share the gospel, this week was so amazing with the opportunities we had to be able to teach. On Thursday Sister Nay got sick and ended up staying home all day on Friday. We had a lesson with Erika that day that we really wanted to attend, thankfully the members that were feeding us dinner that night came and picked me and Erika up for dinner so we could have the lesson. Teaching with a member and not your companion is always a different dynamic, I prayed so much that evening that the spirit would guide...

Hi Family and Friends,     Another week has come and gone, this week I am writing you on Wednesday because we were blessed to go to the temple. It was the first time I have been able to go on my mission and I was so thankful to have the chance to go. The past week and a half has been really busy with work and with sickness, on Sunday we found that half of our ward was sick with this bug that keeps you down for weeks. Well unfortunately they passed it around and I ended up with it part way through the week as well as our investigator Erika. Guess it works out for us all to get sick at the same time as we could not teach and they could not be taught! Anyhow we were both able to get passed it and are feeling much better now.   We also were able to teach Willie last week and to have an amazing experience in extending the invitation to be baptized. During the lesson we were talking about Christ and the role he plays and the example he set for us. With this Willie bo...

 Hi Family and Friends!! This week has been such a great and busy week! We have had so many  opportunities to teach and to share the gospel I am just loving it. We  Started off the week with stopping by and trying to visit with Trevor  again. He would not commit to us last week for a return appt so we  just told him we would stop by sometime at the beginning of the week.  Well on Tuesday we took Lizzie with us and decided to try. When we  first stopped no one was home so we decided about an hour later that  we should try again (yes sometimes as missionary's you feel like you  are stalking people:) anyhow it ended up working out great as he had  just gotten home a bit ago and had the feeling we were going to be  coming that day so was reading the book of Mormon just as we knocked  on the door. I was thinking wow caught in the act that does not happen  very often. Because his knowledge of Christ...

Hi Friends and Family, This past week has been such an amazing week! We have have been so  blessed in this area to be able to find and teach. This week we taught  3 new investigators who are all really great. Trevor was the first  person we taught on Tuesday, he was found by the elders when we did a  district tract in our area. We at first were thinking he was not ours  because he is young, but he lives with his girlfriend which is a  pretty big hurdle. He grew up around a couple Mormon friends but has  no knowledge of the church or of basic christian beliefs for that  matter. It was so great when we were talking to him about the story of  Joseph Smith we asked him if he thought it could be true and he says  "Well I do not see why not" I sat there and thought here is a young  man who has no knowledge of anything in the gospel so if you look at  it with hearing it for the first time with believing eyes it would...