.: Week 28 Hostesses All Week Round 2 :)

Week 28

Dear Lahat ng Tao,

Hello everybody! :) Hope everyone is having an awesome week so far! this week was so FULL. Sister Guiuo and I are pretty exhausted with all the people coming and staying at our house and everything but it has been a fun, memorable weekend. We have decided we would make an AWESOME married couple because we had a pretty fun time having everyone over....it included buying 4 boxes of pancakes haha :) BUT we had fun because our family was completed with Sister Holzworth's visit on Tuesday!!!! She slept over at our house because of the STL training and IT WAS SO GOOD TO SEE HER :) So Sister Guiuo has now met her Lola in the mission. It was great. Anyway on to the week!

So good to see my trainer Sister Holzworth again!

Our complete family--Nanay (mom, me), Anak (Sister Guiuo, daughter)
Lola (Sister Holzworth, grandma) :)

Like I said we had a lot of people come over to the house from Palawan because we had our Mission Tour/Zone Conference this week. It was so fun! All of the missionaries in our Zone were there. It was so fun to meet everyone. I loved it. :) Elder Haynie was the special visitor and I went up to shake his hand and he just patted me on the head and was like I see you every week so just pretend this is extra special for you ;) It was kinda funny. Elder Haynie is such a funny guy. I loved this mission tour, it was all central to finding and to really getting involved in the lives of our investigators and finding. It was super nice, uplifting experience. Much needed :) There is just something special about being surrounded my a bunch of missionaries--I really feel such a special spirit. But that was super awesome this week!

Sisters at the Mission Tour! Including Sister Singer!

More Sisters from the Mission Tour!

The only three U.S. Sisters in the entire mission :)
Me, Sister Barton, Sister Singer--we're all from Utah, too!

A little update on all our investigators. Kelly is doing great--she came to church, loves our messages and continues to tell us how much peace she feels in reading the Book of Mormon. My favorite thing to hear :) Beth is doing awesome--she really is opening up with her desire to be baptized. We taught her after the mission tour so we were spiritually edified so it was an awesome lesson with her about the purpose of baptism and everything. Cezar came to church this week and made a lot of friends at the Christmas party on Saturday.

Which brings me to my next point. We have 2 wards so we had double Christmas parties on Saturday, it was great. We had a lot of our investigators come. And Filipinos have crazy parties haha. If they know how to do one thing, its throw a great party. We had fun hanging with all the members and introducing our investigators to all the members too. Great experience. Love the people in this area! Its going to be a bitter sweet moment when I leave this area. But I think I learned this week that missionary work is a lot of just caring for and loving people. A lot of people just need some friends that will help and listen to them--and I think our investigators felt that at the parties hopefully.

Our investigator Angelie and her new baby!
She came to the ward Christmas Party!!

We actually had a way cool thing happen this week with the Antonio Family. We were walking in our area about 2 weeks ago heading to one of our appointments when this guy with a cigarette in one hand and a beer bottle in the other came up to us. And I just thought Ohhh boy, this can't end good. But he approached us, dropped his cigarette and started to talk to us. And he said that the missionaries used to teach him in his province and he had been waiting for us....we were like ummm...is this guy serious? So he took us to his little bahay down this tiny street and there were his 4 kids. And we have been teaching them--and they had a couple of Book of Mormons in their apartment they brought from their province. We taught them and he has read about 50 pages in the Book of Mormon because he was "waiting for us to show up." Lesson learned? Don't judge people, and God sends us to prepared people.

So this week was a good one all around :) I am just grateful to be surrounded, led to people that need the gospel. We had a way awesome lesson in Relief Society the other day and I've had this poem on my mind that was read. The message for me is that God gives us our little places to tend to, whether it be a mother in her home, a missionary in their respective area...no matter what stage of life you are in God gives us opportunities to serve others :) and it never goes unnoticed.

Father, where shall I work today?And my love flowed warm and free.Then He pointed out a tiny spotAnd said, “Tend that for me.”I answered quickly, “Oh no; not that!Why, no one would ever see,No matter how well my work was done;Not that little place for me.”And the word He spoke, it was not stern;He answered me tenderly:“Ah, little one, search that heart of thine.Art thou working for them or for me?Nazareth was a little place,And so was Galilee.”