June 23, 2014

Hey family!

Sounds like everyone has been so busy lately with a lot of exciting things going on, that's nice to hear that you all are staying busy. 

Well this week was a busy one, Sister Petersen and I are really being tried I think haha 

We had some really good lessons set up this week with Shequita and her family and every single one fell through.  Needless to say we were bummed out.  She kept canceling on us and we just think that she is not interested right now, but that she is too nice to say so.  So on Saturday when we went over with the Silva family to have a lesson, Shequita didn't answer. So we left her a note and just told her that we were sorry that we missed her and that we could see that she was really busy at the moment, and that if she was still interested in learning about the gospel that we would be happy to come back by. She hasn't called us since then and so that is a bummer. This last Tuesday we also had a lesson with Richard that fell through, we went to his house with the Vega's and he was sitting outside. He looked very stressed and told us that it was not a good day for him. Apparently his sister and brother-in-law were having some marital problems and that they had been fighting all day about splitting up and that everyone was going to have to move out of the house. So way drama, Richard was very stressed because he didn't know where he was going to go, and of course that made us stressed because we didn't want to lose him because he is so prepared! Well so we left and he told us to call him in a few days to see how things are so we did that and it was still seemed to be a mess at his house.  We told him that we were keeping him in our prayers and that we knew that Heavenly Father would help out his family at this time and that things would work out because he was supposed to learn the gospel.  After we had gotten off the phone we realized what we had promised and we were a little nervous. We decided that we needed to say a prayer right then and there for Richard so that things would work out in a way that he could stay and continue to learn the gospel. Later that evening we were out with a member, Sister Rodriguez and we had decided to go over to Richards to see how he was and share a message with him. Richard was happy to see us and we could tell things were still not going well. We shared our message and then invited Richard to church and promised him that if he would make the effort to come that Heavenly Father would bless his family and he said I hope you are right. We said a prayer with him and then we were on our way.  Yesterday at church when the Vega's walked in Richard was with them. He looked a lot happier that day and we were so excited that he had made arrangements to come to church. After it was all over Richard was smiling and seemed to be so much calmer than he had been all week.  Sister Lyons the young womens president came up to introduce herself and asked Richard how he liked church and he responded " I loved it, I want to come back tomorrow!" It was pretty cute.  After she left I was asking Richard how things were going at home and he smiled and said, things are getting better, I asked him if he still had to move, and he say no they are letting me stay. MIRACLE! I was so happy to hear that, I told Richard that Heavenly Father really is looking out for him and he said I know he is. It was so good! We have another lesson with him tomorrow night with Brother and Sister Rodriquez, we are teaching the POS and so it should go really well.  We also have been working with a less active lady in our ward Sister Stratton, we were able to start teaching her the lessons and we invited her to church and she said she would come, so this is good.  She wasn't able to come yesterday because she had a procedure done on Friday and so she has been resting and trying to recover from that. But hopefully we can get her there this Sunday! This week is the last week of the transfer, which is crazy. It has felt pretty slow for me, but I know that it is going to get faster. Once I start the new transfer next week I will only have 2 more to go. That is so weird to think.  I need to start getting ready for school. I really hope to be able to go back to the U and start the spring semester. We will see how that goes. Well have a good week! Talk to you later! 

Sister Jamison

June 16, 2014

Hello Family! 

How are you all doing this week! Happy Father's Day and Happy Birthday Matt! Hope those all went well for everyone!  Well this week was pretty good. We had been having some really bad thunderstorms and we had a small tornado pass through.  It didn't do too much damage, although sadly some people’s homes got some damage.  There is a less active lady in our ward that we have been visiting-Sister Stratton- and we went over to see how she was doing and her house got hit pretty badly, there was a big hole in the back of her house and half of the furniture in her house was on the lawn. She was pretty distraught about it, as anyone would be.  But she now has it all back together; she just needs to get the hole fixed and all the trees around her house that have fallen.  We are pretty lucky that it didn't come by where we live, which is only about 2 and a half miles away. There are a lot of trees in the area though that have been snapped like twigs. That is going to be a big clean up just because these tress are massive.  We are starting into hurricane season though, so things like this will start happening a lot more often. But that's ok; they aren't as bad as they sound. Well anyways on to happier news!!! So this week we were able to go back to Shequitas and teach her and her husband and the lesson went very well. They are so into the gospel and learning together it is great! They were also really excited to come to church yesterday, but ended up not being able to come because the night before their 10 year old son Reggie was riding his bike down a hill and wearing flip flops and his foot caught the ground and it just flipped him right off.  He landed on his head and got an abrasion poor kid, so they were in the emergency room Saturday night and stayed home with him on Sunday so that he could rest. I don't blame them. We also were able to have a really good lesson with Richard this week.  We had the Vega family come with us and that was so good. Sister Vega grew up Jehovah Witness and then converted, and brother Vega is from Puerto Rico, so he was able to explain things that didn't make sense to Richard in Spanish, and it really, really helped.  It gets really frustrating for me in a situation like that because I understand most everything that is being said I just can't respond! Haha so I am grateful for the members that come and help! We didn't really have anything else too exciting this week haha; it's been a tad slow. But we are still working hard even in all this crazy weather!  I wish I could write more today but I really have no time:/ But I love you all and I will write next week!

Sister Jamison!

June 2014 - Lecanto, Florida

June 9, 2014

Hey how's everybody this week? I hope really well. And happy birthday

to you Matthew! You old man! This week has been pretty crazy in a good

way for sister Petersen and I, we found two families to teach. The

first one is a little family we met last Wednesday. The mother's name

is Shequita and the dad is Reggie. They were on our potential sheet

from a few years ago and so we decided to stop by and see them. We ended up meeting Shequita first and talking a little bit with her. We then

asked if we could come back later so that we could share a message with

her and she said that would be fine. We took the Reid family with us when

we went back to meet with Shequita and we taught her the message of

the restoration. It went very well and the spirit was very strong. By

the end of the lesson she was in tears and telling us how she wanted

her whole family to hear this message. She also expressed that she and

her family were experiencing difficulties, and she knew that coming

closer to God would help them. We agreed and told her that we would

love to meet and teach her about families and she loved that idea. She

asked us if we could come back the very next day to meet her husband

and we said we could do that, except for when we came back they were

having some drama in their house and we weren’t able to stay. But she 

was glad that we stopped by and told us that she would call us later and

tell us when we could come back. Well we were a little bummed, we thought she was never going to call us back – these types of things happen all the time.  Later that evening she called us and told us

that she was sorry and about earlier in the day.  She said I didn’t want

you to think that I was just leading you all on; I really do want my family

to hear the message that you shared. She said I've talk to my husband

and shared with him he things I've learned about the Book of Mormon

that you gave me, and we agreed together that we need to learn this as

a family. She again apologize for earlier and asked when it was that

we could come back. We told her not to worry about it, and that we

understand that these types of things happen sometimes. We set up a

time that we could come back and teach her family again, and it

will be later this week! The next few days were a bit hard as we tracted

a lot and weren’t having much success. We knocked on a few peoples’

doors and had some interesting interactions with them. I gave one lady

a card and told her to check out the website on it, once she realized

that we were "Mormons" she threw it back in my face and slammed the

door. Some people are so rude. By Sunday night 7:45 PM we still weren’t

seeing much success, as we drove all I could think in my mind was

Heavenly Father please I just need a miracle. Then a name came into my

mind, Richard, a Catholic man Sister Petersen and I had met tracting

in the rain two weeks ago. We decided that we would go over and visit

him and see if he was still interested in hearing a message.  His

brother-in-law Antonio answered the door when we got there and invited

us into his home. He welcomed us to sit on the couch as he gathered

the rest of the family. A little bit odd too - Sister Petersen and I sat

a little nervous as we weren’t prepared that they would welcome us into

their home. Antonio, his wife Gail, their daughter Asia and Richard all

sat around. Antonio then apologized for not welcoming us into their

home two weeks ago, because they were having dinner as a family. We

told them we understood and that everything was fine. Then a moment of

silence came as they all stared at us waiting to hear a message. The first

thing that came to my mind was to share a Mormon message, Earthly

Father, Heavenly Father, and then to talk about families and how the

Book of Mormon can help our families be together forever. We testified

of eternal families and the love our Father in Heaven has for us, we

also talked about how there is a living prophet here today and how we

can come to know that by reading the Book of Mormon. They seemed very

intrigued by it and when we asked them if they would read the it they said yes. The spirit was very strong and they agreed with the things that

we were saying, Antonio told us that we are welcome to come into his

home anytime we wanted. We asked if we could come back the next week

and share more about the restored Gospel and how it can bless their

family. They said yes, so we are looking  forward to seeing the family in a

week. That is pretty much all that's been going on around here. I will

let you know how everything goes! But I have to go now, love you all!

Sister Jamison

June 2, 2014 - Lecanto, Fl

Well this week was a pretty dang good one! It truly is amazing how the Lord is able to bless us in the little efforts we put forth as missionaries. We had a great Zone Conference last Tuesday and it really applied to what I have been studying in the Book of Mormon oddly enough. They talked about our purpose as missionaries and of course the usual lessons on key indicators from Preach My Gospel, but they also talked a lot about how to move past when you hit a wall as a missionary and are just tried of doing the same old routine everyday. Well this obviously really caught my attention because I feel like I am just wearing thinner and thinner each day, I am always so tired I want to die, my body always feels in a funk, my patience for tracting in the sun and getting yelled at are at about 2% and sometimes I feel like the days will never end. Being a missionary is so hard, I remember going into the MTC with all the changes that happen, the total consumption of all energy gets taken from you in the first week and you really have to decide in that moment if you can handle this type of schedule, and out of body discomfort for the next couple of years. And that is why I feel as a missionary you hit so many walls on your mission. The adversary works on you like none other and when you are going a hundred miles an hour and Satan puts a wall right in front of you that completely stops you dead in your tracts and you have to figure out how to get around it, you get tired and you wonder what am I doing here.  Sometimes you become lazy, or careless, and you forget just how important your work is and why you are here.  At this last zone conference I hadn't really realized that I had hit one of these walls.  In Ether 2 the Lord has prepared a promised land for the Jaredite people, a place where they can live in peace, and harmony and worship God. A land that is promised to be protected so long as the people obeyed the word of God and worship Him with everything that they had. In other words, ultimate real estate from the Lord.  The Jaredites prepared everything that they had to to go to this "promised land" where they could be free; they traveled far from home through the wilderness. I imagine that would be very hard to travel through the wilderness with so many people consisting of fathers mothers and young children, but none the less, they went forth to receive and inherit this chosen land, once they made it to the sea they built barges so that they could cross the waters to make it to the promised land.  Once they arrived at the beaches, still not to their promised destination, I imagine fatigue, hunger and yet relief had finally crossed them.  They made camp on the beaches, ( a nice place, who wouldn't want to live on a beach?) and settled. And for four years they sat, camped out on the beach, enjoying the sunshine. They were so tired and so done with traveling that once they finally made it to a resting spot, they stopped their journey.  They lost sight of the Promised Land and settled for something less because they did not have the faith nor concern to move on. As a missionary this tends to happen, you work so hard, and you are so tired, that in the same moment things seem to coast at a smooth pace you just stop, you camp on the beach and "chill out" settling for less when the Lord has better things in store for you. After the four years the Lord in Ether speaks to the Brother of Jared, and chastened him for not pressing onward to the Promised Land and receiving the blessing that the Lord had in store for him and his people. ----Wait, stop, the Lord chastened him because the Lord couldn't give him and his people wonderful blessing because they didn't obey------- How dumb would it feel to get in trouble for not getting blessings that will make you happy and prosperous? After this the Brother of Jared re-committed himself to the Lord, he went back and gathered up his people and made the preparations to press forward, and that is exactly what they did.  There are many things that I like about this story, but what I love is that the Lord was still willing to bless them, as long as they repented and went forth. As a missionary or not this applies to everyone.  The Lord wants to bless us but can't if we don't obey Him. And if he has to get mad at us it’s because he wants to give us good things and we are just too stubborn to take them - wow why are we all sooo stubborn. This week our district had made the goal that we were going to set a baptismal date for the month of June, well at the beginning of the week Sister Petersen and I really had no one solid that we could have extended the date too, but we knew that as we made it a goal and really prayed for the Lord to put someone in our path that would accept a date, then it would happen. All week as we would plan in the evenings and during our online proselyting time we would make lists of former investigators and potential investigators that missionaries had met with in the past and work them into our schedule as we would go throughout our day. Well for the first couple of days we weren't seeing any success, just longs days of contacting and tracting. Wednesday night when we returned home from our too long of a day we collapsed to the floor in prayer as we set off to plan for the coming day.  Every single day we had been praying for someone to invite to be baptized and it just hadn't happened yet. Thursday as we went out we ended up going to contact a man named Rudolf Douglas, according to our records, missionaries had given him a Book of Mormon four years ago, but was never able to teach him anything because he worked in New York and New Jersey and was never home. We decided to go and check it out and when we got there Rudolf was very friendly, he is from Guyana, and he is now retired and invited us in to share a message. So we shared the Message of the Restoration and talked about why there are so many churches now days and how we can know which one is the true church.  The spirit was very strong in the lesson and everything we shared, Rudolf agreed with and how it made more sense about the church and Jesus Christ in former times.  At the end of the lesson we invited Rudolf to be baptized in June and he said, " I accept that challenge! But only if I pray and read the Book of Mormon and know that it is true." We said " Of course thats what we want you to do! That is what you must do or you will not know." We also contacted another potential investigator who met missionaries a while back named Shonese, we were able to share a quick overview of the Restoration with her and we asked if we could come back and share it with her family and she said yes! It is amazing the miracles we have seen as we have made goals and worked toward them.  The Lord truly does bless righteous desires of the heart, as we keep moving on and don't camp out on the beach, He is able to bless us with what we need. He is always ready to bless us we just have to allow it. Sister Petersen and I also got to do service for our neighbor this week, Sister Williams (who is related to Elder Andersen---cool) we helped her plant flowers in her front yard. It was nice to do some physical work.  It always feels good to work. I encourage you all to read in the Book of Mormon Ether 2-3 and that's pages 489-494.  It is always good to know and to grow in our testimony, especially when it is better helping us understand our relationship towards Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father.

Love you all, Sister Jamison