Baptized Like the Early Days...

Hello lovely family and friends!

How are you all on this fine Monday afternoon! I hope it is fine where ever you are, as for me in Indiana it is hot and muggy out there so we try to stay in the AC! :) So this week was just wonderful for a lot of reasons! The first being that on Saturday at 1:00 it was baptism time!!!!!!!! Woot woot! Yep, Cameron, Bree, and Emma were all baptized on Saturday in the creek by their house! It was such a cool experience! It was really hot and humid out there and there were big bugs flying around, but it was such a great day! They were all super excited and after the baptism Emma and Bree, who are 11 and 10, went back in the creek to go swim! It was really funny! i love being able to see people make this step along the path! It is such a wonderful thing to witness and the spirit is just so strong there. As they were being baptized it made me think back to the early days of the church when everyone was baptized in creeks and rivers and lakes. I had a nice time reflecting back on how much things have changed since then and how much the church has grown since then! This really is such a great work and I am so lucky to be able to be a part of it now and for the rest of my life. Being on my mission has helped me see the importance of always sharing the gospel even without wearing a name tag in Indiana! We all have so much we can do to help those we love come and see the truthfulness of the gospel!

We had some crazy rain this week! There were many storms throughout the week and then on Saturday evening, the biggest one hit! It was crazy! We were really happy that it hit after the baptism seeing as it flooded most of the streets in Greencastle! We were in a members house talking and eating cake and were about to share a message when we noticed how dark it had gotten outside. Then the thunder started and we saw the lightning begin to light up the sky! It was pretty cool but the member told us we needed to leave before it got worse....so we didn't even get to teach her! Haha it was raining pretty hard when we opened the door and our umbrella's were in the car, so she ran back in and came out with a cowboy hat for me to wear and a cloth hat for Sis McCombs! We drove home to drop something off and were going to teach more people before dinner but as we drove we noticed how much water was in the road so we went home and ran inside! We were almost soaked by the time we got in the apartment so we decided to go play in it for a quick minute! It was so much fun! It was very relaxing and fun to be able to run around in the rain and jump in a couple of puddles...we went inside when we heard the loud cracks of thunder again though and enjoyed the rest of the storm inside! It was a fun adventure!

This weekend was a week of teaching for me! I was asked to give a training in district meetingon Friday, had to teach Relief Society yesterday, and will be teaching the adult FHE group tonight. It was pretty fun to be able to learn so much about the different topics I was assigned!On Friday my training was on finding and I focused on finding through faith, with confidence. It was a really good meeting because all 3 of the trainings seemed to flow together very nicely and it was a very inspired meeting! One of my favorite district meetings yet! The lesson in Relief Society yesterday was "The Cost-and Blessings- of Discipleship" by Elder Holland. I really enjoyed being able to teach that lesson as I have had many experiences within the last couple months that have helped me better understand what it means to be a disciple of Christ. I think it went well. It was strange though since the Relief Society in the branch consisted of 9 women yesterday...it was very small. I liked it though! Definitely lots of experiences to teach as a missionary! I feel like I have learned so much just in the past 3 days! :)

Other than that, my week was pretty routine. Met lots of people who didn't want to listen. Talked to some strong Catholics and Baptists...semi friendly but not interested in listening other than trying to compare. We did some service and ate some food with people. We got a couple new potential investigators that we will be meeting with this week. I think the most exciting thing is that classes at DePauw University start up this week so the students are all headed back into town! I am excited to personal contact on campus and find some new people there! College life in this town is definitely very different than it is in Utah, we will just leave it at that. haha!

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week! I would LOVE to hear from you though out the week! My address is
501 Elm St. Apt 1

Greencastle, IN 46135

love, 

Sister Abbie London

1. Baptism time!

2. swimming after

3. Playing in the rain

4. Playing cowgirl

Many Mighty Miracles

Hi everyone!

This week has been so great! We saw so many wonderful miracles happen and were able to do a lot of good work here! It was fun and we worked hard, what could be better?!?!

On Tuesday we had a lesson with 3 of our investigators. We only had one more lesson to teach them before they had been taught everything. They are 12,11, &10 and all have been wanting to get baptized for a while. It was hard last transfer I guess to get a hold of the parents to set stuff up but we were finally able to go over for dinner and a lesson. While we were waiting for dinner, they mom of 2 of the kids asked us if the branch was having any activities on the 23rd, we said none that we knew of and she then told us that she would like to have the baptism that day! The kids were super excited to be able to finally get on a date and were interviewed yesterday! All three are set to be baptized this Saturday at 1:00 in their POND!!!!! Yep, that is right! They have gotten permission to be baptized in their pond since it is a family tradition or something like that! I am so excited for the baptism and am glad that they are finally able to make this commitment with their Heavenly Father! It was such a wonderful miracle! Oh, and the best part is that a couple weeks ago when we were doing our weekly planning, we had felt that the 23rd was the date that we needed to extend them! Coincidence....I don't think so!
 

We also had exchanges this week and saw lots of cool miracles then too! I was with Sister Mumford, she is 20 and has been out one transfer longer than I have. We had some good teaching experiences and got a new gator! His name is Mike and he was watching Heaven is For Real a couple months ago and just knew that God really is there. He grew up going to lots of churches and doesn't really like how there are so many churches that don't teach the same things. Every church has different things claiming to be true. So we taught him the restoration on his porch and had a really good lesson with him. He said that if he found out that what we are teaching him is true, that he would be baptized! We have another appointment with him tonight, we are hoping that we will be able to teach his whole family tonight too! We had a good fun day, even though Sis Mumford hit her head on a tree branch really hard....yeah...that wasn't good! But she is fine and we were still able to get stuff done!

Yesterday we had Branch Conference and a member of the Stake Presidency taught our 3rd hour lesson. It was a really good lesson. He talked about 2 different things. First he started out by sharing a cool experience he had during a study of his recently. He was reading in the Book of Mormon, Mosiah 5:7-9, and it talked about being a child of Christ. He talked about where we got our names from. Like I am a London and got my last name from my dad. He talked about how he was adopted and when he was adopted, he took on the last name of his new parents. When we follow Christ and make covenants with him, we become sons and daughters of Christ. We are adopted into his family and can better take his name upon us. It was a really cool lesson and something I had been thinking about lately. He also talked about how we can all be a part of the Hastening of the Work. There are so many ways to help in the Hastening and we all need to figure out how we can best do our part. It is Heavenly Father's work and we need to get behind him in accomplishing it. It will be so much easier if we do.

I love you all and invite you to figure out your part in the Hastening this week!

love, 

Sister London

1. I realized yesterday how long my hair is getting! I love it! 

2. Thanks for the new headband mom! I love it! 

Catching Lightening Bugs

Howdy!

Hi y'all! I hope you have all had a wonderful week and are enjoying life and what not! This week was my first full week i
n Greencastle! It was a good one too! Lets see...where to begin!

So on Tuesday night we were coming in for the night when Sister McCombs looks at me and says, "Look, I caught a lightning bug!" Sure enough there in her hands was a lightning bug! Since I am from Utah and have never had the opportunity to catch these little suckers, we decided to go out and catch some more! So, a little while later, we had 6 lightning bugs in our jar. Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph...missionaries are weird okay... It was a fun experience! Another fun thing that happened this week is that we kind of learned to play Monopoly by the real rules, you know with the houses and hotels and stuff...last Monday for p-day we played some games at the church with the Elders. Both of the elders knew how to play Monopoly and one say that Sister McCombs and I had way too much money not to have houses/hotels...so we bought some! It was cool! I am still not super sure how it works...but I was making money faster, so thats cool! :)

We taught some gators this week and got dropped by an eternigator (eternal investigator). That was sad. This week we mostly spent our time trying to track down some of the less-actives. There are A LOT on our branch list and half are names of people that no one has even met before. So we are trying to track some down and are hoping to start teaching more part member families. It will take some work but there are so many LA here and if we can get them to start coming back, this little branch could be a ward! So as we travel around the county roads and such, we came to some pretty fun dirt roads! It made me want to go jeeping! Good thing Sid still owes us a jeep trip when we get back! ;) There are a lot of back country roads here and some pretty cool red covered bridges. They are cool except when driving over them and being able to hear them creaking underneath the car....I'm not the biggest fan of crossing bridges...

So some other random cool stuff from this week is that we have started giving out church tours officially to anyone! Before we were just giving them to people that we were already teaching, but now we are giving them to the members and we can now take anyone! So if we just meet someone and they want a tour we can take them or we can do the members friends. It is pretty exciting! I really like these church tours that we give. We show them 4 different paintings placed around the church and also the chapel and talk about the sacrament. It is a simple tour but so powerful! The elders took us on one the other night to practice and I was playing the nonmember. It was so spiritual especially when we were looking at the painting of Jesus Christ coming to America. It was such a powerful moment!

One final thought to end with. Next time Satan is trying to tempt you to do something stupid, remember this scripture from Ether 11:14, "...and Moron did that which was wicked before the Lord." Don't be a Moron! :)

love,

Sister London

1. our lightning bug friends

2. Abbie Potter doing some service! 

Greencastle!

Hello!

Hi everyone! So I have been transferred to the Greencastle Branch! My new companion is Sister McCombs! She has been out for almost a year, meaning she came out the transfer after me! Greencastle is a tiny little town....like really tiny! It is the smallest town that I have ever lived in...I haven't lived many places but it is small! I like it though! It has a cute little small town feel that I imagine Stars Hollow would feel like! Depauw University is in Greencastle so I am pretty excited for school to start here in the next couple of weeks! The branch is pretty awesome, it is strange being in branch instead of a ward...I'm not used to such a small congregation. It is fun though! We have a set of Elders who are also in the branch so we aren't completely exiled...just a little bit! Greencastle is actually fairly close to my old ward in Terre Haute! We are in a different stake so I won't really get to go down there until some of the people we were working with get baptized.

I haven't really gotten to meet too many of the investigators that we have here yet but most of them are out of town. There is a lot of work to do here, none of the gators are showing much potential or willingness to progress. So we will need to do a lot of finding! Yay! I am excited! Let's see....nothing super exciting or funny has happened since I have gotten here...

It was very bittersweet leaving Terre Haute! It was such a great area and ward and I was very sad to leave. My last 2 days there were mostly spent visiting members and teaching some gators one last time. I miss Terre Haute but know that I did all that I was supposed to do there. A new adventure awaits with new laughter and new trials. Come what may and love it!

So the bugs here in Indiana just love me! For some reason I am just too sweet and they keep coming back for more...it happened last summer too but it is annoying! I had gotten a lot of bites last month in Terre Haute but they all healed and stopped itching and the bugs seemed to be sick of me. Then I got transferred and the new bugs were excited to find some fresh blood....I have probably at least 20 bites on my legs. The itch so bad!!!!!!!!!!! I have some bug spray now and am going to make it hard for these pesky little suckers to eat me! I'm not gonna let them win that easy!

Well...sorry it is a really lame email...I wish I had more exciting things to write about this week...but sometimes, mission life is pretty uneventful! I love you all and would love to hear from you!

love,

Sister Abbie London

1. Me and Sis McCombs

2. might be hard to see...but it is all my bites. :(

Last Week in Terre-dise

Hello Everyone!

Well, as you can see from my email title...I am being transferred!  I am very sad to be leaving Terre Haute and Sister Faleono! I have enjoyed this wonderful ward and area so much! I feel so blessed to have been able to serve here for so long with 2 wonderful companions! Last night when we got the call, we were at our former bishops house talking after dinner to his wife and the Elders. All of a sudden, I heard the phone ringing and my heart jumped as I answered the call from the assistant. He told me I was leaving and my companion was staying. At that moment, our hearts broke a little. 2 seconds later the Elders phone rang, one of them is leaving too. The Honey Creek ward will be getting 3 missionaries transferred in this week. We are all very sad...but I know it is the Lord's will, so I will go and do what He needs me to do! I have worked hard here and have been blessed to see many miracles, so I feel like I have done my job here in the Haute!

So besides transfer news, we had a very good week! The highlight was being able to go to the St. Louis Temple with some members! It was so great to finally be able to go back to the temple after not being able to go for over a year! The spirit was so strong and I felt to so good being there! It was the best way to end my stay in Terre Haute! I also realized how much better Indiana is than Illinois...the drive through the part of Illinois was very boring...driving through Indiana is very boring too, but it is greener here and the corn is taller, which makes for a more interesting drive! It was exciting though when we got to the south part of Illinois and I saw some hills! It was great!

We taught a lot of people this week! We found and taught some pretty solid people! One person we taught is a young women who is friends with a member. This girl's family doesn't approve of the church so since she isn't 18 yet, she can't get baptized. That hasn't stopped her from gaining a testimony of the gospel however! She knows it is true and wants to be able to have the spirit with her always! She also even talked about maybe going on a mission one day! It is super exciting and I will definitely be returning to Indiana when she gets baptized! Her testimony and faith is so strong!

We also found some cool potentials this past week and were able to teach a couple lessons to them. It was a good week and we used our time effectively! I love being a missionary and being able to see the changes that people are willing to make for the gospel!

Yesterday, I spoke in Sacrament Meeting! I spoke on an article out of the June 2014 Ensign called "That We May Rejoice Together." I think it went pretty well! About a month ago, I felt a prompting to write a talk based off the article and to volunteer for a talk. I  skeptically obeyed the prompting and am glad I did. I don't know why Heavenly Father wanted me to speak on it but I do know that the spirit was in that room! There was a time in the middle of my talk where the room was spooky silent! It freaked me out a bit actually...but it was good. Sister Faleono told me that you could feel when the spirit came into the room and a couple people mentioned to me after that they were more inspired to do missionary work. So even though I felt a little off, I guess others were able to receive some guidance! We also taught the YW yesterday! We had 4 girls at church yesterday and no leaders. So it was us and them and we were able to have a nice talk about what it means to take Christ's name upon us and how we can better stand up, even if we are standing alone. I think it also went pretty well!

That is about all I can remember from the week....but I have a good couple days ahead of me! Tomorrow is basically already planned out with saying goodbyes to members and teaching some gators one last time. I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you next week from somewhere else!

love,

Sister Abbie London

1. at the temple! 

2. the craziest district on the planet...half of the group will be transferred... :(

Keep on Keepin' on

Hi Everyone!

I hope you are all having a wonderful s
ummer and that they weather isn't too bad for you all! I have got to say that this summer is so much nicer than last summer was! Maybe that horrible winter was worth it if it means a cooler, less humid summer! It has been beautiful here! :) Hopefully it stays that way...the Indiana weather is more bipolar than Utah weather!

So this week was a little rough with our numbers. Last week we taught 17 total lessons and this week we taught 8 total lessons. It was a struggle but we kept working hard and tried to teach as many people as we could. There is always more to do however! This week we have set some goals to make ourselves stretch more and are looking forward to diligently moving forward! It will be a better week!

We went up to the mission home last Monday to drop off Sister Hansen so she could go home. So for the following 24 hours we were in a trio with Sister Wilkinson until she got her new companion! It was a pretty fun day! On Monday night, we stopped in Fishers and had dinner with Sister Ingram and her daughter, Lexi! It was so fun to see them again! It was crazy because it was almost exactly a year since I had first arrived there as a very green missionary! Time flies! Then on Tuesday we had interviews with president. That went well and we were able to get some trainings from the zone leaders and the assistants on how we can be better, more powerful missionaries! It was a pretty good morning. Since Sister Wilkinson covers the ISU campus, we went and PCed for a little bit...at least we tried too. There weren't many people out and those who were did not talk to us. It was fine though, we still had fun and it was cool to see campus!

Something that the mission is trying to be better at is inviting investigators to baptism in the first lesson, so the assistants committed us all to invite the next 5 people we taught to be baptized. So on Tuesday when we had a lesson with a new gator, we invited her to be baptized and she said yes. Then on Wednesday, we had a lesson with another gator, Amanda, and recommitted her to be baptized and she also said yes! So we are super excited to extend them both dates in the next couple of days!

We had some fun on Thursday with a member making cupcakes for Elder Litster's birthday on Friday. We had them all nice and they looked really good. The only problem was that we had district meeting in Linton, about an hour away...so needless to say, they did not end up still looking there by the time we got there. :( good thing the look didn't really effect the taste!

That pretty much sums up my week...other than helping little kids find some frogs/toads, getting called short by a 9 year old who is shorter than me, and having 2 different people make fun of my parking, it was a pretty normal week! 

I love you all!

-Sister Abbie Paige!

1. the awesome shirts we got last week! They say "I'm so Haute"!

2. hunting baby frogs/toads with the newest member of the HC Ward! 

Defending Your Faith

Hello Everyone!

It's been a good week here in the Haute! We had some cooler weather and a nice little break before it started getting really humid! So I was happy about that! This week we had some really interesting and fun things happen, I'll start with the interesting! 

So on Saturday night we met with an inactive that we have been meeting with since I first got to Terre Haute. She doesn't come to our church anymore because she has had many bad experiences with some ward members and she decided to go back to the church she grew up in. But she is still on our records. We have been doing service for her and spending time with her for about 6 months now. for some reason she decided to let the sisters in back in January. So on Saturday we were over there and had just finished eating our dinner and somehow she got on the topic of the church, she then proceeded to tell us all of the bad experiences. We were put in a situation where someone we loved was attacking our faith and was therefore attacking us. We sat there, both wanting to get up and leave but something kept me held down on that couch. I could not get up and I did not know what to say...so there we sat. Listening to her say how much she hated Mormons and Mormonism. Then right after she said that, she burst into tears. She kept apologizing over and over again. For a while we sat there watching her and then I was up and walking towards her. We sat by her for a while and tried to comfort her and then Sister Faleono opened her mouth and allowed the spirit to work through her. We were bold and told her that we are representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as such we will talk about the church. For the first time in 6 months, we were able to have a real talk about the church and how it will help her. We talked about forgiving like the Savior did and all realized that she needed to tell us all those negative things because she has been holding onto them for years and hasn't moved passed them. I am not gonna lie, when we left her house....I was ticked! I was so mad and upset and felt like I did not do all that I could have to defend my faith. My face got all red and stayed all red and hot for about an hour after. As we (Sis Faleono and I) talked later that night, she helped me realize that I was did defend my faith. In that moment, we acted like Christ would have. We loved those who were trying to tare us down. We listened with love and comforted even though it was hard to do. In that moment, we did more for her than we would have done if we would have vocally stood up for what we believe. Instead of using words, we used our actions and were able to have positive results. I learned a lot that night and am grateful that this experience only strengthened my belief and my testimony that this is the true church of Jesus Christ. 

This week we also helped a member's sister move. That was a fun experience and we were able to spend time with so many great ward members and help a non member feel the love. I have mentioned before how great service is a missionary and I am so glad when we have opportunities to serve others. There is something so great about helping someone and doing a good deed. It brings joy and happiness to someone else as well as to our Heavenly Father. 

I hope you all have a great week! Keep being awesome and know that there is a missionary in Indiana who loves you all very much! 

love, 

Sister Abbie London

1. My angry face on Saturday night...

2. All of us after packing up the moving truck! 

3. definitely not in Sandy anymore...