January 4th
Hey Family,
Holy snow! We got around 13 inches of snow this week so that was a party. We had to shovel out 4 of our neighbors Tuesday morning, and then had to drive 45 minutes to district meeting. #missionaryperks Everyone tried to warn me about Wisconsin winters but I'm not sure I was quite anticipating this. Unfortunately, I'm not that smart so I didn't get a picture of it, but I'll make sure to send one next week. :) Happy new year!! :D Haha because of the holidays this week has been super slow. Everyone is either gone, or they were too far away for us to go see...we ran out of miles so we had to walk everywhere for a couple of days. :( Bleh, but that's alright! We've actually had time to go and contact people! There was this record for a former investigator in our area book that had written on the top in bolded letters, "Waste of time." Sister Jenson and I were really TOed by that, so we decided to go prove it wrong, and we met April! :) It was actually quite a bit of a miracle because April is willing to have us come back and teach her again, and her son's friend was over at their house and wants us to meet with him too! :) He's sort of been on a search for spiritual enlightenment, and so we're gonna try to start helping him out by getting him involved with the church. It's kinda funny, his name is Josh and he's the exact same age as Josh and acts a ton like him so. This will be a fun teaching experience. :) I hope ya'll have had an awesome week, and that this next week is even better. :) Love ya! Hurrah for Israel! :)
-Sister Peterson
January 19th
Hey Family :)
Soooo..this week has been..crazy. Good crazy though. :) To be honest, for the past couple of weeks, I have been feeling really discouraged and down, but this week I just decided to stop pitying myself, and get my act back together. I'm here to serve people, I'm not here to get discouraged and withdraw myself. Ya know? All I want to do is help people. That's what I'm here for. So, when I finally stopped just going through the motions and started focusing on that goal of helping others as much as I can, things have seemed to go a lot better and we've seen a lot of miracles. :) And I mean..a LOT of miracles. So get ready. Monday, we were able to go play sports as a zone and say goodbye to all of the missionaries who are leaving. Including my trainer Sister Lyons :( I was so sad to say goodbye to her, she's become one of my closest friends and it was so nice to be in the same zone as her. So yeah admittedly after I said goodbye to her there were quite a few tears shed by me on the drive home. Sister Jenson can attest. It's alright though, I'm super excited for her and everything she's going to accomplish in her new area. :) After that we had dinner with the Feustels. :) The crazy thing..is that their less active daughter Bailey brought her 4 friends to dinner for us to teach because..in her words, "They need Jesus." haha so we ended up teaching the Restoration to 4 people at the same time! It was pretty cool. :) Later this week, Sister Feustel came up to me and told me that one of Bailey's friends who was there had told Bailey that she wants to hang out with me..which boosted my ego a little bit..;) After the discussion she told her she wanted to be a Mormon! :D Sooo cool. Hopefully we can help her out with that ;) Tuesday, we were able to spend the day with a member of our ward named Katherine. She's prepping to maybe serve a mission, so she wanted to see what we do during the day as missionaries. :) It was sooo freezing the day she came out with us though.. we went tracting and that was pretty rough. The cold was like..seeping through my coat and my boots and it took a bit to get feeling back into my fingers..and nose especially. The miracle was though, as we were walking down the street to knock on doors, we passed by this lady outside of her van with her kid in her arms. We realized quickly that he was choking and that she was trying to do the Heimlich on him! So Sister Jenson ran over and helped her do the kid version of it, and he was finally able to breathe. The poor lady was so traumatized, we felt so bad :( But he seemed like he was doing a lot better so that was definitely a miracle. We said a prayer with her before she took him to the hospital. Hopefully that helped a bit. :) We finally were able to meet the new Elder Wednesday! His name is Elder Dold. He's pretty nice, he was in the Green Bay Zone the entire time I was there, and I never actually have talked to him until now. haha whoops. Then Thursday we went to the Chicago temple!! :D That was soooo awesome. :) we received special permission from our mission president to go with two recent converts, Sister Burton and Sister Pepper who wanted to receive their endowments. :) It was such a tender mercy to be able to go to the temple, and something I definitely needed. I was definitely on a spiritual high for the rest of the day :) We even got to meet the temple president and his wife while we were there, so that was a definite privilege. :) We were so truly blessed to be able to attend the temple this week, the Chicago temple is beautiful. It's small..but it's beautiful :) Sunday it was a definite miracle that we made it over the hill and to the church building without turning into ice cubes. We live just a hill away from our church building, so we usually walk. This week, we stepped outside to climb the hill and it felt like the air in my lungs froze. Way too cold. It was -10 degrees but we made it to church!! :) We had ward conference this week, and President Kindt spoke to us. :) In the middle of his talk, he started talking about how blessed we are to have such strong missionaries who share messages about the Savior with people, and then he said, "I would like to invite Sister Peterson to come up and share her testimony about the Savior".... o_0 hahaha I was pretty nervous. Goodness I don't even know what I said. Hopefully it was intelligible, but it was really neat. He said a lot of things in his talk that really helped me especially as I've been trying to stop just going through the motions and give myself over to the work. One specific thing he said really stuck with me, and I wanted to share it with you. He said, "Don't just do things out of obligation (like go to church, read your scriptures, and pray) do it because you love the Savior. I thought that was so profound. Definitely something I needed to remember as I've endeavored to jump back into being entirely focused on serving people. :) Later that day, we had the awesome opportunity to teach 5 people the Restoration all at once at April's house. :) Our intention was to just teach Josh and April, but April's two daughters also joined us, and April's friend Angie sat in on the conversation. Josh is already in 3 Nephi chapter 18 and we gave him the Book of Mormon only 2 weeks ago..o_0 isn't that soo cool?! :D and he understands it! We started to teach the restoration, but Angie kind of started to bash a little bit. :( she has been taught by the Elders in the past, and she has a huge hangup with modern day prophets. So she started to kinda get angry after we talked about the first vision, and she turned to me and said, "How do you know that mormon prophets aren't just liars? How can you believe that they've even seen God and Jesus Christ if you weren't there?" Then I kind of came back with the thought that we shouldn't have to see to believe, but that we need to ask God if things are true, and that's what I had to do to know that prophets are the Lord's servants here upon the Earth.That kind of got her quiet for a bit. Josh wasn't paying too much attention to the exchange, but rather read through the entire Restoration pamphlet while we were talking. I asked him if he had any questions, and the only thing that he really struggled with was the "How can I know" page. he said everything makes sense, but he struggles with the idea that God actually cares about him. We both bore testimony that God truly does care about him, and I'm not exactly sure what we said, but it seemed to help him. :) He told us he'd text us when he finishes the Book of Mormon this week :D After we were done with our discussion, I apologized to Angie if I hurt her feelings at all, but let her know that what I had taught was true. She said she was sorry she kind of attacked us, but that she's had bad experiences with people claiming to be false prophets and that she's actually planning on moving here to Fond Du Lac in May, and that she wants to meet with us when she moves here! :D that was DEFINITELY a tender mercy. She even got up and gave me a hug afterwards. :) haha well. This email is really super long. But it's been a good long week fullll of miracles. :) I'm so grateful to be serving here in Wisconsin. I love these people. I love this gospel. I know the church is true :) Hurrah for Israel!
-Sister Peterson
