Baptism and Hospital Dolls

Hello everyone!

This week was awesome because I got to go to a baptism!! :) One of the guys I taught in Mt Rose, Jon, got baptized on Saturday and President gave me permission to go! There was such a great turnout at the baptism and all 4 of us sisters that taught him got to be there :) We met Jon about 2 months ago after we got a call from one of his friends. Jon's friend is a member in Sparks and after talking to Jon one day asked him if he'd be interested in meeting with missionaries. A couple days after this call we started meeting with Jon and found out he is so prepared! We committed him to be baptized in our second lesson and he accepted, even after the confusion with his baptismal date. He thought we said June instead of July when we committed him to a baptismal date, so he thought we were inviting him to be baptized in a week instead of in 5 or 6 weeks. Good thing is he's super solid and we still laugh about it :) haha. It was also great to go back to Mt Rose and get to drive down Neil Rd and see a bunch of the members from my old ward :)

This week we went back to the Kiwanis place and helped make dolls again. It's not the most exciting job but partway through we met this girl named Emily. Emily is working on her girl scouts project of making dolls for children in foster care. She told us about how she's been to the hospital many different times and each time the hospital gave her a doll that was able to comfort her through her treatments. When things got hard she would hug her doll and it made her feel better knowing that someone was there for her. That definitely made me want to keep working on dolls :)

Anyways, sorry for the short email again! I will send some pictures though to make up for it :)

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

P.S. This week Sister Balbuena and I found some coupons on the mail room floor and used them. Haha things that happen when you're a poor missionary haha

New Companion :)

Hello everyone!
This week was a great week mostly because my companion is awesome!

Last week we had one of the laurels in the ward ask us if she could come out with us since she wants to go on a mission. We set up a few appointments so that she'd be able to have a great experience but most of them cancelled on us. We spent most of the day out in the 104 degree heat knocking on doors with no one answering. I was afraid that she wouldn't want to go on a mission after learning that that is what a lot of days are like but at the end of the day she told her family how much fun she had and how much she loved getting to spend the day being a missionary! She is so awesome! :)

This week we got a call from this guy that served his mission in the Philippines. Turns out he was the elder that taught most of the lessons to Sister Balbuena and her family before they got baptized a few years ago! So we got everything set up and he ended up coming to our ward yesterday for sacrament meeting. The really cool thing is that we gave talks in sacrament meeting and Sister Balbuena shared her conversion story!!

Love and miss you all!
Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Another Transfer

Hi everyone! :)

First off, I'll tell y'all the transfer news. So many things are changing! So we've been serving in the Sierra Highlands, Peavine, and Mogul wards for the last couple weeks. Now I'll be in the Sierra Highlands ward with a new companion, Sister Balbuena. Sister Muhlestein will be staying in the Peavine and Mogul wards with a new companion, Sister Wakefield. They served together in Elko so they're super excited to serve together again! Sister Monsivais is going to Sparks.

This week we had some awesome lessons! So last transfer Sister Muhlestein and Sister Paul were tracting and prayed to know of where to go. They decided to knock on this door because they had cool patio furniture and they ended up talking to this family's teenage son and he told them to come back and teach them. The next time they came by they ended up talking to only the dad and the next time only the mom, Kasey. A week or so ago we ran into this family and set up a time to teach them. We went by for our lesson and they were super open! Each of the times that the sisters had talked to them in the past, they had been given a pamphlet and they had read all 3 of the pamphlets! So we were super excited about that and we spent the lesson answering their questions and briefly teaching the restoration. At the end we were talking about the Book of Mormon and Kasey told us that a few weeks ago a guy had come by and was selling Books of Mormon. We were super confused and then they remembered that he was selling church magazines but left a Book of Mormon on their porch. So here's what happened!!! My first day in this area, we were walking to this investigator's house to give him a copy of the Book of Mormon with Sister Muhlestein and Sister Paul's testimonies in it. As we were walking up, this guy came up and tried to sell us church magazines. We told him we didn't have money but we had a book that he could have if he wanted it and he accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon. Unfortunately, the only copy of the Book of Mormon we had on us to give away was the copy with their testimonies in the back. So we gave it to him, hoping that one day he would read it. Then he went back to knocking on doors and the first door he knocked on was Kasey's door! As he was leaving a note, he set the Book of Mormon down on their patio and forgot it as he left. To make a long story short, Kasey still had the copy of the Book of Mormon with the testimonies in it! It's crazy to see how God works!! :)

Saturday morning we texted a bunch of the people we've been teaching to see if they needed a ride for church the next day. As we headed out to some lessons, our 10:00 cancelled so we were trying to figure out which of the people we had written down to try first. Then, this less-active sister that recently moved in texted us and said she wouldn't be able to come and wasn't doing well. We asked if she needed a blessing and she said yes but wanted us there. We had a lesson at 11 so we had to find someone fast to come give the blessing! We ended up having 2 men in the ward respond and say they could give her a blessing in the next half hour or so. When we went by she was so grateful! The Spirit was so strong and she began feeling a little better almost immediately. It's great to have worthy priesthood holders ready to serve with such short notice on a Saturday morning! :)

Last night we had Why I Believe! I'm trying to set a record for the number of transfers in a row that you can go to Why I Believe at the Golconda stake center haha. Anyways, I got to see Sister Anderson and our amazing investigator Jon! He's getting baptized a week from Saturday! Another one of our investigators, Beverly, is getting baptized on the 20th! Jessica, one of our recent converts, is planning on getting her temple recommend soon and going to the temple! :) I love the Mt Rose ward!! :)

Anyways, sorry for this novel of a letter! Oh wait! Can't leave out my recent life accomplishment: We were at the Kiwanis bike shop fixing bikes and this spider crawled out of the chain of the bike I was working on. So I killed it with a screw driver. I was pretty proud of myself.

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Hi Everyone :)

Hi everyone! Hope y'all are having an amazing week! :)

This week was awesome! We are having so much fun being in a trio! There definitely is never a dull moment and there is always TONS of work to be done.

This week I met this awesome lady named Sister Tillotson from the Skyline ward. She was talking to us about her mission and told us she served in the Virginia Richmond mission. Turns out that her vehicle coordinator was Elder Gootee, so grandma and grandpa served in her mission at the same time that she did! :)

For those of you that were asking, we are still teaching Ashton and his family! :) They are great! Ashton and his brother still want to be baptized and the parents still want to start coming back to church. We had a lesson with them last week and we were excited because we felt like they were finally going to come to church this Sunday! Then on Saturday night his dad ran into all of these medical problems and they couldn't come to church on Sunday :( One of these days they will be able to come!

We had this amazing lesson at IHOP this week! Haha best place to have lessons! We taught this guy named Barry. Years ago he went to a Catholic seminary to become a priest. As he was studying there he felt like that wasn't what God wanted him to be doing and that the church didn't have the truth. He spent years working to build his relationship with God on his own and searching for truth. Then, he started coming to IHOP every Wednesday at 4:30 to eat dinner and read his books on religion. A couple weeks ago his waitress told him about a great book that he should look into and asked if he'd like to meet with the missionaries! This week we got to teach him and gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon. He wants to meet again this week but as we got to talking to him we found out he lives in Sparks :( So now the APs will be teaching him! :) We're excited he has good missionaries to teach him at least!

In other news Sister Monsivais and Muhlestein saw a raccoon for the first time in their lives. We ended up pulling over to the side of the road as they took pictures of it peaking in and out of the sewer. After all the times I've seen them when we're camping, I didn't take any pictures. Sorry! haha

This week the Chesnuts texted us and asked us if we wanted to go get ice cream! So they took us to Dairy Queen and we got to talk to them for a little while! :) They told us all about how they met and their crazy wedding day and told us stories about each other. It was so fun!

It's crazy to think that another transfer is almost over. Every transfer seems to go by faster and faster and I still feel like I just left the MTC a couple weeks ago! Being a missionary is the best! I love all of the great people I've been able to meet and to see the changes in other people as well as myself :)

I'll try to send some pictures from this week! :)

Love and miss you all :)

Sister Ashley Gootee

Trios for life!! :) haha

This week was crazy but awesome!

P-day was super fun! With is being the 4th of July, we didn't do any proselyting that day. After we emailed we went and hung out with members for a little while and then we went to the ward barbecue for most of the night. We pretty much just hung out with members and got to know them a little better and pigged out on a ton of food! Since I emailed last I have had at least 8 burgers. I'm kinda disgusted with myself. Anyways, we got permission to stay out past 9 for fireworks so we ended up going and hanging out on this hill with a bunch of the missionaries in our zone. Sadly we missed some of the fireworks but it was fun to hang out with everyone!

On Tuesday we had zone training so Sister Muhlestein and I had to give a training 😓 I'm still not a huge fan of doing trainings but it wasn't too bad. Our topic was on working with ward members and gaining their trust.

Tuesday night into Wednesday we had exchanges with the Peavine sisters! Unfortunately, Wednesday  morning we got a text from President and one of the Peavine sisters ended up going home. We are now in a trio with Sister Monsivais! She is awesome! She is from Provo, Utah and Sister Johnson trained her. We'll be companions for the next couple weeks til transfers! It's been pretty crazy lately though! She covers 2 wards and we cover 1. We ended up being at church yesterday for 7 hours (which was awesome!!), taking the sacrament 3 times, balancing 3 different wards' investigators, and trying to figure out our dinner calendar. The blessing is that we now have more people that want to feed us than we have time for! Maybe we'll start passing around a lunch calendar haha.

Anyways, going to church for 7 hours was super fun! It's probably as close to general conference as you can get without a general authority being involved. It was great to really spend the day thinking about the covenants that I've made. I also went into each of the meetings with a question in mind and all of my questions were answered through different speakers! The Church is true, guys.

Also! I learned something super awesome! So I serve in the Sierra Highlands ward and now we cover Peavine and Mogul wards as well. The ward mission leader for the Mogul ward has a son serving a mission right now and he's serving in the Indiana Indianapolis mission!!!! :) So his name is Elder Carroll and he's serving in Zionsville so y'all need to somehow find him and take him out to lunch or something :) What's super cool is that he also served in Lafayette for a while but I think it was after I left on my mission, so I never met him. I definitely had missionaries tell me about an elder serving from Nevada though so I'm pretty sure I've heard of him!!

Anyways, I'll send some pictures!

Love y'all!

Sister Ashley Gootee

P.S. Cool miracle: Mom sent me a package last week and it had a bunch of random stuff in it and one of the things was a water bottle. I looked at it and was like "what the heck?! What am I supposed to do with this water bottle" cuz I already had one that I used all the time. Then, later that day, my water bottle broke. Sometimes God gives us blessings that we don't even notice we need until down the road! :)

Happy 4th of July!

Hi everyone! Happy 4th of July :) this week was pretty great!

This week we got to go on exchanges with the YSA sisters. That meant that I got to be companions with Sister Johnson again for the day! She was my first companion in the Mt Rose ward! :) It was so much fun to be back together and to catch up on each other's lives. It was also fun because we got to go do some contacting on campus! I felt like I was back at Purdue again only this time I was the missionary :)

Then after exchanges we had to go to the eye doctor for Sister Muhlestein. She's getting glasses! So we spent a lot of the day at the eye doctor and then trying on glasses at Walmart. I was quite entertained. I even went to the little McDonalds at Walmart and bought fries and a Coke, so I just felt like this little kid following around their mom as their mom struggles to finish errands haha.

Friday we had MLC! I didn't have to give a training this time which was super exciting :) I got to see Sister Anderson and catch up on a lot of the people that we'd been teaching there! Sadly our 2 solid investigators aren't so solid anymore :( one of them is MIA and the other wants to move a lot slower. Other than that though it was fun to catch up with her! At the end of MLC we always have the missionaries that are going home bear their testimonies. 6 of the missionaries that were there had to go up! :( it's crazy to see all these missionaries that have been here since the beginning going home. This transfer there are supposed to be 20 missionaries going home, many of which I've served around :(

This morning we had a ward breakfast (for a different ward haha) and got some good food! We have 2 barbecues to go to today and then we get to watch fireworks! We basically have the entire day off so that should be fun :)

Love you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee

1 Year!

Hi everyone! This week was a great week :) it's so weird to tell people now that I've been out for over a year! 

We had exchanges again this week! I went with Sister MacNeil to the Stead area. SIster MacNeil is in the last transfer of her mission and I spent the night with her and her companion my first night in the mission field! It's so crazy to think how long ago that was. We had so much fun and I got to meet so many great people in that area :) and then, a miracle happened...I had Steak n Shake! Ok, maybe that's not really a miracle but I was pretty pumped about it. As far as I know there is only one Steak n Shake in Nevada and it's not super far from where I am. I was so excited! :) haha

This week I learned how to fix bikes! We do service at this Kiwanis place once or twice a week and usually we help make dolls for children in the hospital. This week they didn't have that much for us to do so they asked if we wanted to help with bikes. So we went out and changed the tire tubes on this bike and fixed the chain. I was pretty proud of myself considering I did all that in a skirt :) haha it was a great learning experience! Hopefully next time we go we can do the same thing so that I can learn how to fix my bike all on my own!

This week we taught this amazing family a few times! We have been teaching their 12 year old son, Ashton, and preparing him to be baptized. We teach him with his 6 or so brothers and sisters and his parents. We've been struggling to get them to church but other than that they have been accepting everything we've been teaching pretty well!

We also taught this family this week that has been working on returning to church. The mom hadn't come to church in forever and recently prayed that a stressful situation in her life would be resolved. She ended up receiving her answer and recognizing that God was answering her prayers. In gratitude she committed herself and her family to come to church every week from then on! It's been great to see them there and to have them feel of the Spirit that is there.

Another family that we've been teaching came to church yesterday as well! They are all members except for the daughter, Jess, who is 15. We have been teaching her and she recenlty has been praying more and more to know that God is there. Though she doesn't feel that she has received her answer yet, I know that as she continues to show God she's working for her answer by praying and going to church that she will receive answers.

Yesterday Sister Muhlestein and I had a pretty crazy experience with the Spirit. We have been struggling so much to find new investigators. Yesterday we were praying to be able to know who to go and visit and as Sister Muhlestein was praying I thought of this girl that we had tried a few days earlier. This girl was very nice but had told us she was atheist and not super interested in changing that. I thought it was weird that I had thought of her so I didn't say anything but then after we finished praying Sister Muhlestein said that she thought we should go see her. We both thought it was crazy that we both thought of her but knew that meant that it was the Spirit! Then as we were driving towards her house I realized we didn't really have a reason to explain to her why we were coming by again so soon. As I sat and thought I looked at my water bottle and thought to myself that we should dump out our water bottles and go and ask her to fill them up for us. I didn't say anything and then as we pulled up to the house Sister Muhlestein mentioned that we needed to think of a reason to come by and see her. Suddenly she looked down at her water bottle and voiced the same idea that I had thought a few moments earlier. As we parked along the side of the road we dumped our water bottles outside of the car (I should add that this was right after dinner and they had just filled our water bottles with mostly ice so our water was perfect for this boiling hot day. We weren't even sure that this girl was home but here we were pouring out our water, depending completely on faith that God would bless us.). When she opened the door she agreed to letting us in to fill up our water bottles and we ended up staying for half an hour and getting to know her and her boyfriend. She still isn't super interested but seems to be opening up to us more. Though no new investigators came out of it, God at least knows that we're willing to act on the promptings He gives us whether it be big or whether it be to dump out our water bottles :)

Here's a list of my recent life accomplishments:

-I ate a whole plate of spaghetti, green beans, and garlic bread.

-I fixed a bike

-I held a snake...and it was terrifying

-We went to a pizza buffet and I not only got pizza, but salad as well 😮

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)