Pumpkin Spice and Everything Nice...

First off, here is a video of Sister Tauala and I singing. We do it a lot at dinner lessons. One of our investigators made Sister Tauala a ukulele, so that's cool.

We have found a large Micronesian family who wants to be baptized and we have our second lesson with them today. We also have have three investigators on date for baptism this next month, it's exciting!

 This is one of the member's dogs.  It is so cute.

Newel from Bible study

 Brother Roniger catches possums.  I watched him drown this one.  It was sad.

  

Our ward mission leader made us delicious pumpkin shakes.

We are matching.

This was my outfit today. Another skirt from Nana and yellow jacket!

 I match our wall!

Me in one of the new skirts from Nana and a shirt that Sister Tauala gave me.

We had the opportunity to watch the Saturday Afternoon Session of General Conference with Bonnie (one of our investigators). (October 3, 2015) We challenged her to write down a few questions about anything, the church, God, ect and pray to have them answered in conference. She took that challenge. After we watched the session with her she proceeded to tell us how every single question she had was answered.  It was awesome! Afterwards we sang/played "How Can I Be" for her. The
spirit was so strong and the whole room was warm. Bonnie started tearing up as we bore testimony of our Latter-Day prophet and the Book of Mormon. It is so amazing to see her progress in the gospel.

Riya & I

Besides teaching and meetings, we have been doing lots of tracting in the letter streets of Vancouver. This week I found out we aren't even supposed to be down there after dark, oops. We have a ton of less actives we are trying to contact; most of them we are finding have moved. On Saturday (October 10th) we were finding less-actives. On S and T street which are the ghetto of the ghetto in Vancouver. I love finding addresses in the letter streets because the house # is based off of what number AVE the person lives off of (those streets run in numerical order from east to west) and then the letter street (in alphabetical order north to south). We couldn't find a specific house though and walked around a whole block to find the address. When we got to the house, it looked like children lived there and just a fun little house. We knocked looking for a less active. A lady opened the door sobbing. She had a fat lip, swollen eyes, it wasn't good. The first thing I asked her was was she alright. The response was she is fine. She didn't look fine at all. She asked what we wanted. We responded we were looking for the less active. The less active wasn't there. We then left her with our card and left because there was nothing else we could do. I felt useless. There was a heaviness in my heart because sister Tauala and I could tell exactly what had gone down.


Working in the letter streets I have realized a lot of things. The type of houses and the environments people work in like in the book:  "the Jungle" by Upton Sinclair still exist. How can I, as a girl who has lived in a "red neck" neighborhood, with mostly Mormons, with educated parents understand them and help them? I don't know what it is like to go hungry, to be dirty, to be cold, to be hated, to be abused, to go homeless, to be hopeless. I've been sad and scared, but I have never seen eyes so full of fear until I saw that woman answer the door. And that was the trigger. The rest of the evening I keep on thinking what could I do and so was pretty silent. Sister Tauala knew something was up. I broke down crying. Seeing something in real life I have only read in books shook me pretty badly. We called the mission president and talked about it.

I couldn't focus on the work the rest of the evening or Sunday. So Sunday evening, I received a blessing from my district leader and Ward mission leader. Within seconds the spirit was so strong and I felt this huge weight come off of my chest. It was an incredible amount of peace that filled the room. It wiped away any discouragement and sadness I felt, and I knew the girl would be okay. Our mission president forbade us from going back to that house, but I felt a sense of hope. 

See, I don't know what people go through. I probably will never understand it, but our Savior does.
I am so grateful for the priesthood power, because it is real. That power and authority from God makes things real and binding here on earth and in heaven. I found this picture of Christ passing the sacrament. The deacons who pass it on Sundays are doing it under the authority of God, just as Christ would. It puts it in a more real perspective.