Fall Surprises

Hello Everyone!

Your favorite Indiana missionary coming at you live from the Greencastle Public Library! I hope you all had such a wonderful week! Sorry about the lameo email last week! Hopefully I can make it up to you this week, even though nothing super new and exciting has happened! I will do my best to deliver though!

So last Monday we went golfing...I wasn't good but we had lots of fun! It was a beautiful day and I didn't even really need my sweatshirt on for too long! It was lots of fun! I started to lose my voice on Monday also which wasn't very fun. By Monday night it was pretty pathetic, but just kept getting worse as the week went on! I caught a little bit of a cold and am starting to get over it now. My voice is almost back to normal! Yay! But there were a couple of people that we tried to teach this week that told me how miserable I looked and that I needed to go sleep. It wasn't very fun! being sick as a missionary is so hard because you want to rest and get better but you know that resting all day is not productive and not what you are paying to do. So you try to keep working and being diligent and then people tell you how awful you look and it makes you feel worse...it is an endless cycle. Haha but I am glad to be getting better!

We have a new investigator, Natalie. She is 11 and super awesome! she is excited to learn more about the gospel and she came to church yesterday! She is kind of the step-sister of a recent convert and so we have been teaching her the last couple weeks! she wants to get baptized but hasn't been put on a date yet. We are still trying to figure everything out...it's an odd situation. She is super awesome though! We taught her on Saturday night and made a craft with her! We made these hair flower clip things and showed her the Restoration DVD. It was a cool lesson and it is fun teaching her!

We had the Branch Chili Cook-off on Saturday and it was a beautiful 70 degree day! The weather this week has been absolutely wonderful! It is so nice and warm with a hint of a fall breeze! I am loving it! This morning when we left to go do our laundry at8:00 I didn't even need a jacket or cardigan or anything! It was so wonderful! The leaves are bright beautiful colors and are everywhere! Fall in Indiana is probably my absolute favorite thing here! It is so great! i love looking at the beautiful trees and thinking about how blessed we are to have a Heavenly Father who loves us so much and has given us things like this to be grateful for!

I also had some random things happen this week...like on Tuesday I got a call from the mission office telling me that they were booking flights for the January departure and they needed to ask me a couple quick questions. Then she asked the questions and told me to forget this call ever happened! haha it was pretty funny and I have surprisingly been able to not dwell on the call too often! It is getting really strange though how quickly it is coming up and all the things that go along with that. I am just excited to be here and to be doing the Lord's work! It is a wonderful thing being a missionary and I am loving every second of it. It is hard sometimes and things get rough but I am so grateful for all the trials because of what I have been able to learn from them! :)

I love you all and hope you have a fantastic week! Happy Halloween!

love,

Sister Abbie Paige!

1. We made matching sweaters this week! :) 

2. After making our craft on Saturday

Golf

Hi Everyone!

Sorry this email is coming at you all so late in the day! We went golfing for p-day today...yep golfing. One of the ELders is pretty big into golf and they wanted us to tag along with them...since neither Sister Munoz or I had been golfing it took a lot longer than normal to golf 9 holes....like all day! It was fun though and I actually enjoyed it sometimes... I am not good like at all! But I was able to hit a couple good swings and get the ball farish! On one hole I actually made it in the hole in 5 shots! :) It was pretty thrilling!

So for transfer news, Sister Munoz and I will be staying together in Greencastle for another 6 weeks! :D I am super excited to be able to stay here and get to continue working in the great branch with such amazing members and a great companion! We had some cool experiences this week! A recent convert from another ward in the zone had to move in with her dad due to some stuff. Her dad and his girlfriend live in our area and we have been able to meet them and start teaching them! The girlfriend is super solid and we met her 11 year old daughter yesterday, who is also super solid! we left them with a Plan of Salvation pamphlet and the 11 year old texted us last night at almost midnight telling us that she read the pamphlet and hasn't felt closer to God in her life as much as she did after she finished reading it! It was so cool! She is excited to come to church and wants to be baptized!!!! It is awesome! I am super excited to be able to keep getting to know them and to teach them more about the peace of the gospel!

Library closes....see you later. Try to email another time.

love ya

Crazy Missionary Life

Hi Everyone!

Due to Columbus Day yesterday and our little library being closed, I finally get to email! We have come to the library 3 different times today in hopes of 2 computers being open...third times the charm and we were able to snatch a quick email sesh before dinner tonight! So forgive me for being scatter-brained in this email....I have not really thought about what will be going in it...so yeah. It has been a crazy couple of days for sure though! We had a fun P-Day yesterday and spent from about 12-5:30 playing board games! We played Risk and Monopoly. I was not good at Risk but was not the first person killed off....and I was doing pretty good at Monopoly! Thanks to the Elders and the member for telling me when I should invest in houses and even hotels! If we would have had time to finish the game, I probably would have won! It was a good game...some competitiveness crept in but for the most part it was fun!

Last week we did the usual and visited less-actives. That has been our focus lately and we have been able to contact some pretty awesome LA who are wanting to get back into church! It is great! We just came from a lesson with one and I am super excited to continue in our quest of becoming a ward! Hopefully Sister Muñoz and I will be able to stay together another transfer and continue to work on it together. We get transfer calls on Sunday and I really don't want to leave Greencastle yet!

We had a really cool opportunity on Wednesday to watch "Meet the Mormons" and it is just awesome! I loved it and will be excited to watch it again someday! I think it will be a great way to get people to know more about the church and we heard that it was #11 in box office hits this weekend~! That is awesome since it isn't even playing in all theaters! I would definitely recommend it to all you of! Go watch it! 

Also, last Monday for P-Day we went bowling! It was pretty fun and was the first time in a whole year that I had been bowling! I didn't pretty good and managed to finish in 2nd the first game with a 103! I got 3rd the second game with a typical score of like 90's....still it was a lot better than what I played last year in Fishers! It was fun to relax and go bowl! We had a member give us a giant watermelon last night at dinner....yep, the same one who gave me all the watermelon before! It is pretty good watermelon! I guess when you tell someone how much you love something, they are more likely to give it to you....anyway, we decided to seatbelt the melon in the car and last night/this morning proceeded to make a face on it. Her name is Teri and she is currently living in our fridge. It was pretty fun!

We met a really cool potential this week on campus so hopefully something will come of that soon! She is awesome and was pretty excited to take a Book of Mormon! We can tell that she will be a member some day! Sorry this is all so scattered...can't really think right now! I hope I made sense and I love you all! Have a wonderful week!

love,

Sister Abbie Paige

1. Our Risk game...by this point we were all doomed so as the one Elder was resting his head, i was making the picture #2. And this #3 was after I had been cleaned off the board. #4-Teri the watermelon

 

 

Hay, it's General Conference!

Hello Everybody!

Wasn't it such a wonderful weekend with General Conference?!?! It was so great to be able to hear so many inspired talks to help us all become better! I really enjoyed how so many of the talks went along with each other and it was fun to notice some of the themes of conference! One that I noticed was how we all need to follow the council in Helaman 5:12 and build our foundation on Jesus Christ. I really enjoyed all of the talks on how we can do that and on making the atonement a part of our lives, the most important part! I also enjoyed the talks on overcoming challenges that life throws at us. I thought it was pretty cool how many of them spoke about the principle of agency and how "decisions determine destiny." I also learned a lot from those who spoke on obedience. That is one of the hardest things in life and on a mission! The principle of exact obedience is hard to follow sometimes so it was nice to get some reminders and ideas on how I can be more obedient! Probably one of my favorite talks was by Elder Korg Klebingat of the Seventy. It was a quick, powerful talk and I loved when he said, "selective obedience brings selective blessings." That one really stuck out to me. Sometimes it seems easier to just obey some of the rules and not others, but really in the end is it going to be worth it? Will the limited blessings get you all the way to where you want to be? I also really liked the idea that Elder Carlos Godoy had with the question, "if you continue living the way you are living, will the blessings promised in your partriarchal blessing be fulfilled?" It was really neat actually because something that we have been working on as a mission is beginning with the end in mind, which is something that Elder Godoy mentioned in his talk....I could go on and on but I am sure you and I both don't have time for that! Conference is such a wonderful time to receive guidance in our lives, now the trick is to keep reviewing the things that we learned throughout the next 6 months. It is now time to apply what we learned and see some of those wonderful blessings that come from following the council given. As Sister McConkie said, "following the prophet is ALWAYS right!"

Now to my week as a missionary! It was a good week! We were able to get in contact with some of the less-actives on the list and have appointments with some this week! I am excited to go get to know them better and am hopeful that we will be able to start to see some progress with them soon!  We also gave one of our investigators a church tour. She is a junoir at DePauw and is from China. Her family doesn't really want her to be baptized so she is trying to figure out what she wants. I believe that she knows the church is true and has felt the Holy Ghost testify to her on many occasions but she is afraid of what might happen in her family is she is baptized. The church tour was good and the spirit was strong...she is still at a stand still right now. We are kind of unsure about how to help her right now. We had another investigator who lived downstairs but her and her boyfriend broke up and she moved out...so we haven't been able to get her new address to meet with her yet. Hopefully we can get things picked back up soon.

This week we also got to assist some members in hauling some hay! We got to be farm hands again and serve! It was really fun and a good work out! I got a nice bruise on my leg...not quite sure how it happened but it did and it looks cool! It was really fun to help with the hay and we got pretty good and tossing it....hay is a lot heavier than you might think so there is a little trick to tossing it! So basically I am now a pro and can help in any of your hay moving needs! :)

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week!

love,

Sister Abbie London

1. My cute new fall outfit from home! Thanks family! :) 

2. Indiana Fall!