7 Months!

This week was pretty great! We went on exchanges with the Lakeside sisters, which would've been awesome either way it worked out. Sister Hingano and Sister Anderson are the sisters serving there so I would either have been with an old companion or an old roommate for the day. I ended up being with Sister Anderson and it was so much fun! We pretty much just talked about MTC memories the entire time...we also got ice cream, so that's always a win.

I loved the missionary broadcast that we had this week! I learned so much that I can do to be a better missionary. One of the main things I took away is to treat all of our less actives as investigators. A lot of times when we go to teach less actives, we'll read Ensign talks with them, which are really good, but are a little bit deeper than they are ready for. Just a couple weeks ago we had a lesson where we read "Stay by the Tree" with a less active and as we got a few paragraphs in we realized that she didn't even fully believe that there was a God. We then redirected our focus and focused on the basics of the restoration instead of finishing the talk. We realized it would've gone so much better if we would have gone into the situation treating her as an investigator. We always forget how little we actually know about them and the fact that they could know less than our investigators do about the gospel. Now Sister Gali and I are focusing more on teaching the restoration to all those that we teach, regardless of whether they are a member or not.
It was also amazing because the elders serving in a different ward told us that one of their families that they've been teaching is moving into our ward! So we're super excited to have a family to prepare for baptism.

On Thursday we had our monthly relief society activity! It was so much fun! Mainly because we got pulled pork sandwiches and I was starving. But it was also great to see everyone come out and have a good time together! The primary kids even played us some primary songs on bells! One of our investigators came and this ward really stepped up to make her feel welcome! This ward is so great at fellowshipping and I love it :)

On Friday we had a lesson with one of our investigators, Justin. He's come to mutual for the last 2 weeks and he came to church yesterday! We set him on Friday to be baptized on February 27th! He is so excited to be baptized! His stepmom is a less-active member and his stepmom's parents are very active in the church. On Sunday he came to church and was so excited as he sat with us. He told us that he had already done everything we had committed him to do 2 days earlier and all about how he told his grandparents that he was getting baptized. As we talked to him after church, he showed us his brand new copy of Preach My Gospel that he had gotten during Young Men. He even pointed out to us the section of the book they went over and the personal study activity that he was going to do as soon as he went home. We love his enthusiasm for the gospel and all of the things he does to help his own faith grow. Golden investigators are the best...

Welp it happened. We all knew it would with me having a Samoan companion and all but I hoped it never would. I ate fish. Never. Again.

Welp not much else that I can think about. Hope that you all have a fantastic week :)

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

P.S. The middle school here is getting ready to go back to school this week. Their pipes burst a few weeks ago and the whole basement flooded so they've been doing remodeling and everything. That's what happens when your mascot's the Patriots. They had to see hard times coming their way when they picked such a terrible mascot...

Hello!

Hello! This week was a little bit slower than last week. It was still a great week though!

On Monday we had an intervention. To all of your surprise, it was not for me, it was for our investigator's son's girlfriend...anyway she's drunk every time we go over so we took the Addiction Recovery Program missionaries with us. That was interesting.

We stopped by and invited one of the boys that we're teaching to mutual on Tuesday night and he came! We were so excited! He had so much fun! And it was awesome because while we were there in the gym with all the youth, we found out that this other kid that we teach, Reece, was there as well. We found out when we looked over and saw his mom, who is a member that hasn't been in quite a while. It turns out that the family that has been their main fellowshippers invited them to scouts that night. We were so excited because Reece hasn't even been to church in our ward before! And then the same family brought him to church on Sunday as well. We were so excited! Oh and he's going to be baptized in a little less than a month :) :) we're so excited for him!

On Wednesday we had dinner with Brother Sanchez. He's the guy that takes us out at least once a month to nice restaurants. This time we went to Ramono's Maccaroni Grill. I, of course, ordered a ton of pasta! Any of you that know me know that I actually ordered pizza. Also, update on food. In the last 2 weeks I've had Thai food twice, pasta, rice, curry, pasta, sliders, rice, this Mexican lasagna type thing, rice, pulled pork, and burgers. Update: still allergic to soy sauce :( yay...I just wanted to say how delicious burgers are. And that you all should be proud of me because a majority of the things in that list I just made I never ate before my mission.

Anyway, since all I talk about in my emails is food, I'll actually talk about missionary work now (I know, surprising right?). Something that we've noticed is that when we're doing all that we can to talk with everyone and are working hard all the time, Heavenly Father blesses us. Even when it seems like talking with everyone we see is completely ineffective and no one wants to talk with us, the weeks that we are better at that we see more miracles come our way. This week we really focused on talking with everyone we saw. This Sunday when we went to church, we got a new investigator. Seriously, she came up to us and asked if we could teach her. So that was pretty awesome. It's crazy because that seems to happen quite a bit in this ward. When we're working hard, we don't see a ton of success in a while and then Heavenly Father just hands us someone to teach. No complaints here.

Anyways not a ton going on here. Have a great week! Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Yay for baptisms!

This week was great!

Ok so we'll start with the best news first! Sister Torres sent me my planners and they're so cute! I'm so excited to use them!

Anyway, one of our investigators, Reece, is 9. A few weeks ago his mom (a less active member) had surgery and it didn't go well so they had to go to Carson City for a few weeks to stay with her parents. This weekend Reece came home! He is awesome! He's been excited for baptism since the missionaries started teaching him in June or so. The only hold up was that he didn't ever come to church. While they stayed with Reece's active grandparents, he went to church pretty much every week. He loves primary! Now we just need to teach him a couple more things and he needs to get in the habit of coming to church here and he'll be baptized.

We also had a mission tour this week! Elder Robbins of the presidency of the 70 came and visited us. From 1 to 5 on Friday we had trainings from President and Sister Chesnut and Elder and Sister Robbins. It was great! It was very spiritually draining because there was so much good stuff! And it was pretty amazing because there was a lot of math and stats and such involved so I was pretty much geeking out over that the entire time. He also encouraged us to find out a good method for studying our scriptures and keeping a study journal. He told us his method for highlighting his scriptures, which I learned was very similar to mine so that was pretty cool! For those of you who don't know how OCD I am, my scriptures are color coded with 7 different colors according to what the scripture is talking about.
Oh ya I guess we had a baptism this week...? Almost forgot ;) It was amazing! I'm not sure if I've told you about Mateo so here we go...
On December 9th we got a text from Christin​a (a member of our ward) asking us to come over and see them that night and she told us that she had big news. So we went over and she was there with her boyfriend that she had been living with for some time. They then announced that they had gotten married and that he wanted to be baptized and that they wanted to go to the temple! (For those of you at home, that doesn't happen often in missionary work.) We were super excited and we began teaching him. At this point he had already been coming to all 3 hours of church for 2 weeks. He also had been having gospel discussions with Christina and was praying a lot. He had already gotten into the habit of reading the Book of Mormon and some days he would read for 2 hours. He only missed 1 Sunday out of the 7 before his baptism and in that time we taught him multiple times a week. He continued to be excited for his baptism! In preparation for his baptism, I called every active member of the ward while Sister Gali did language study. It only took around 3 hours for me to call all of them. Many people were surprised that he was getting baptized because they thought that he was already a member just visiting from another ward because of the way that he behaves and interacts with his wife and daughter. Most people in the ward knew Mateo and he had a few friends by the time he was baptized! I was a little worried as his baptism was about to start because only about 10 or so people were there. By the end of the opening hymn, there were over 50 people at his baptism. We ran out of chairs in the primary room where we were meeting and Sister Gali and I had to stand in the doorway with a few other people. It was such a great turnout! Sister Gali and I got up and bore our testimonies at the end and I invited Mateo to come up and bear his testimony. He got up and his testimony was so powerful! Afterwards he talked to the investigators that other missionaries had brought with them and talked to them about baptism. Mateo was essentially the most golden investigator ever. We're sad that the ward will now be doing his new member lessons and we won't be seeing him much anymore.

Welp I guess you could consider it a slow week in the Mt Rose ward. I'll try to come up with something more exciting for next week.

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

2016!!

Hello everyone! Happy new year!

This week was pretty great! I'm trying to remember what happened because I left my planner at home I guess  -_- ugh oh well.

Let's see what I actually remember from this week. On Tuesday I learned to start the car when you're parked with the light on. Our car kinda sorta died. And it was super stressful because we were parked at an apartment complex that we're not overly familiar with and there were cars on either side of us so it would've been really hard to jump start the car. The miracle that happened was that we just happened to be parked right in front of an active family's apartment. They quickly came out to help us figure out how to fix our car! The next miracle was that they were parked right next to us. So they turned their car around, they hooked up the cables (cuz y'all know I have no idea how to do that) and they helped us jump start our car. We didn't even end up missing any of our appointments and we got home relatively on time.

We've been working with the bishop here a lot and trying to figure out who actually lives at the addresses in the ward directory. We're finding that the ward is smaller than we thought. Printed out our ward directory is 30 pages, so around 600 members, with 150 tops being active. This week we got a new copy of the directory and even after moving in 20 people or so in the last week we cut an entire page off the directory because of move-outs. (This is why we do our visiting and home teaching, guys. Just kidding, that's not the only reason. The real reason is that we all covenanted to do that...but anyway...tangent aside...) Definitely a bit of a transitional ward. Also a very "newly wed-nearly dead" ward. We did have 4 young men there this week to bless and pass the sacrament! That was pretty cool.

On Wednesday morning we had a lesson with our Mandarin speaking investigator and the South Meadows elders. We decided to give him to the elders as one of the elders is a Visa waiter and is waiting to go to Taiwan. I definitely understood pretty much nothing during that lesson, which is why I'm pretty glad someone who speaks Mandarin will be teaching him now.

That day we also all had interviews with President Chesnut. Turns out that I didn't learn anything new about my release date but I'll keep y'all posted on when I find out. It was great though because I love getting to talk to the Chesnuts!

The other day we had a super crazy street contact...about half the people in the main area that we do a lot of street contacting only speak Spanish. So I started talking to this lady the other day in Spanish and it turns out she's crazy. I actually zoned out through most of it. The spirit was so far gone that I think the gift of tongues was working against me so that I wouldn't have to endure that. She was singing to us some song from her hymn book and called me a sinner for wearing earrings and necklaces and for saying prayers with people in the street. I think her exact words were "Jesucristo no likee." She also told me that she was Jesus Christ so I think it's just her that doesn't like that stuff...Anyway after she sang the hymn I said something about how I liked how the hymn said that God loves all of us and she just responded with 'no'. Some people, no matter how many times you try, are incredibly hard to get away from. And the crazy thing was that she was waiting for the bus. You would think eventually the bus would end our conversation but we stood there for at least 5 minutes and no buses came by. People here are crazy.

Anyway thinking about more sane people...we went by to see one of the people that we are teaching and she said it wasn't a good time because she was having contractions. She hasn't had the baby yet but we're just waiting for the baby to come :)

This week we had our companionship inventory and it got pretty deep. One of my goals I made was to budget my money so that I wouldn't keep running out of money by the end of the month. Sister Gali then told me that the reason I don't budget is that I like curly fries. That's probably about 10000% true....

This next week is pretty slow. Well kinda. I mean we have a baptism this weekend so that's pretty cool. We've got this super solid guy that we've been teaching for probably about a month now. We're pretty excited for Saturday!

Well I guess I remembered more than I thought I would. But there's not much else that I can really think of this week. I hope you all have a great week!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee