Hey everybody!
I don't have crazy updates this week, but things are so good! Yes there is a story behind the subject and yes I am too lazy to tell it. Yall will just have to use your imagination.
We moved to our new apartment Tuesday and get this we moved all by ourselves! Picture two 20 year old girls at 7am lugging massive dressers and desks to our new apartment on our wheely office chairs. It was a sight for sure. We have spent the rest of this week moving in.
As a branch we are currently focusing on cleaning up our member records and figuring out who does or doesn't live in our branch currently. Turns out I'm pretty good at it and it is super fun! I've been like a detective trying to get ahold of people and we have had some pretty great experiences come from it as we have been able to find some of our members we didn't even know we had in the area.
A lot of our friend have been sick, so yall could pray for them. As we have been going around finding more people to start teaching we have loved capitalizing on the season of Christ's birth. We are sharing little Christmas messages with families, talking about the giving machine, and we even got to take a little Christmas tree to a family in need. Oh man it is so fun!
One beautiful contact we had this week was with our new friend Monique. We were at her house looking for her dad, and she right away opened up about some struggles she had been experiencing. I immediately thought of a member in our branch going through some similar things. We shared some words of encouragement and set up a time to come back, hopefully with our member!
A huge miracle this week was that our friend Melissa (is the wife of a member). She comes to church sometimes with him and knows us pretty well. She feeds us on occasion too. In the past she hasn't show a whole lot of interest in learning more about the church even though she has lots of questions, she isn't familiar with church at all. On Saturday we went over for dinner and had the best homemade chilli. We were having a great time and laughing and talking. Then out of the blue she started asking questions about the second hour of church and said she might start coming and that she would need us to help her understand better! This may not seem big to anyone else, but trust me this is huge. The spirit is for sure working on both of them and it is so fun to be apart of. We were able to valid her fears of not knowing much and we promised we would be with her as she started getting used to second hour!
My thought this week is actually about the chapters where Jacob quotes Isaiah in the book of mormon. Piggybacking off of my thought from last week, I think I have looking at it too complex-ly. Nephi says that his soul delights in the words of Isaiah and to be honest I have not been able to relate to that at all. In the past they have been confusing to read and when I feel like I understand it seems to always be about destruction. Pshhhh I was so wrong! This is what I wrote in my scriptures. "I am learning to rejoice in the words of Isaiah
I was getting so lost in the prophesies of destruction that I skipped right past the 'but his hand is stretched out still and the promises that he will send a second time to recover his people. Isaiah is rejoicing in a God who brings Deliverance. He is prophesying of the gathering of ALL of God's children. His message is the same as the rest of the scriptures, that after all the destruction and hardship from our own 'prone to wander' natural man, his hand is stretched out still and he will recover us, just like when he left the 99 to recover the one."
Sister Jackman and I laugh consistently and we are just so happy to be together! Please continue to pray for our friends:)
This week, out cute new apartment made me happy!
Sister Johnson
