Another Transfer

Lots of stuff happened this week! I'll start with the most important.

Sister Johnson is leaving :( she is going to be training though! She's going to do awesome. I am so pumped for her because she is going to do amazing! She's also going to Elko and is going to be in one of the wards that I was in for a couple weeks so she will love it! Sister Gali is going to be my new companion! It's crazy because we're already in the same zone and we went on exchanges together and such.

We went to a hobbit house this weekend. It was THE coolest thing EVER. There's a family in the Lakeside ward that is a huge fan of Lord of the Rings so they decided to build a hobbit house into the hill in their backyard. I'm definitely attaching pictures of that.

We also went to Chili's this week. This member in our ward takes us out to dinner about once a month or so and he took us there. I may have overdosed on chips and salsa.

I also heard the best explanation ever for prayer this week. A 7 year old was helping us teach this guy how to pray and she said that you start by saying Dear Heavenly Father. Then you go wee wee wee and then you say in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. We're going to have to start using that when we teach.

In other news we had mini missions this week! We got a mini missionary for Saturday and it was so much fun! We got to be with Athena, a 17 year old from Carson City, and she is awesome! She treked through the bad smells of Reno and weird things that happened that day that usually don't happen...We'll just leave it at I still hate dogs, and this week I kicked a dog.
Satan is working hard. We keep having this Satanic spiders come and disrupt our personal studies and ruin the whole Spirit. Satan really knows how to get to us. I'm also pretty sure he sends dogs to me and has them come gross me out while I'm trying to bear my testimony.
On Sunday we had stake conference and part of it was a broadcast from Salt Lake City. It was so good! We were all encouraged by Elder Lynn G Robins to simplify our lives. He talked about how Satan may not have a ton of success in making you too wicked but he is pretty successful at making you too busy. He asked us all to consider what we could do to simplify our lives and reminded us that the antidote to complexity is contentment. I also liked Elder Dallin H Oaks' talk. He encouraged us to commit ourselves to put the Lord first in our lives. He also posed the important question to ask ourselves: Are we active in the gospel or active in the Church? While we should at least be attending our meetings and being considered active in the Church, it is so much more important to be active in the gospel. We can do this when we are being a 7 day member and being a member when no one is looking. I thought of the importance of daily prayer and scripture study and taking the sacrament with a broken heart and a contrite spirit. Lots of interesting things to think about!

I can't really think of a ton of other stuff that happened this week. Just helping Sister Johnson get ready to move today :( pray for her, she's going to an all biking area in the winter! 😓

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)