Weekly letter home

Hello Hello My Friends & Family!!!

Monday:
Well this day was pretty much the calm before the storm… we are so blessed we have seen an insane amount of miracles. We have found so many people to teach it is very exciting but intimidating and overwhelming as well. When you teach people the most important thing is to keep them progressing in order. To do that we like to set a baptismal date for them to work towards; so my companion and I have decided to help each of our investigators to do this, have faith it could happen!! I know that the Lord would prepare their hearts but I wanted to do everything in my power to be able to help them be ready. I prayed for a long time trying to discover what I could do more, I felt an answer to my prayers in my mind "Be Obedient" and so I was determined to do everything with even more exactness. You know me and rules but that is especially on the mission how the Lord blesses us, so I determined to do so.
Tuesday:
Tuesday we met with Cindy Tatchell and her family her grandson is 9 and we have been teaching him. We taught him a lesson and asked him if he wanted to be baptized he was so excited as well as the whole family. We set a date for June 11th, this will be such a blessing to his whole family. Cindy is doing great and they have all been coming back to church together!! Then directly after that we met our new investigator Camille Dragness she just came to church on Sunday and asked to meet with us she has two little girls and is married to an inactive member. We met with her and her husband, it was a great lesson. The spirit was there she wants very much to be baptized!!! She set a date for June 18th. This day was so amazing. I feel so humbled as I see the Lord’s hand in everything we do!!
Wednesday:
We had received a referral for a couple on Sunday and so we called and set up an appointment to give them a church tour on Wednesday. They were so sweet and have a strong desire to learn. The wife is from Thailand and she is very nice. We taught them the message of the restoration as we showed them around the church. It was so amazing the spirit was there and we committed them to be baptized as well. They are working towards July 25th!!! They were so nice unfortunately we found out they live in another wards boundaries... so the Elders there will be teaching them. I still was very happy to meet with them even if only briefly. The Elders were of course very excited when we called and let them know they had new investigators who were ready to be baptized.
Thursday:
We met with Clifton Ewell he is on date for July 18th and his family. My heart goes out to her as she does what she can to keep her family together. It is nice to teach in their home because it brings in the spirit and everyone can benefit from the lessons.
We also met with Patti Black we have been meeting with her all week actually. She is so amazing her testimony is so strong. I really love her we talked about how she can go through the temple in a year. She asked if I would come back and go with her!!! I was so happy. I can’t imagine a happier day than that; to be able to see her all in white at the temple. This gospel is so amazing... baptism is just the gate and so much more lies in store for all those we teach!
Friday
Today we meet with Wendy and her four children. The lesson was so amazing and when we asked the family to be baptized they said yes!!! I can’t explain the joy that I feel. I have seen miracles everyday this week it is the best experience in the world!!!
Saturday
Well today was interesting, the highlight was our visit to Brother Messenger, he is very old and very strange. The Bishop asked us to visit and share a message with him. Our lesson was very interesting, there was a parrot making some awful bird noise constantly the whole lesson. It was crazy and we brought a 16 year old girl from the ward with us.
Sunday
What a beautiful day, we had such a great turn out for church. We have so many investigators we have to get a lot of help from the ward to get everyone to class and to have someone to sit with!! What a great problem to have! Patti’s baptism was amazing. I wish you could all meet her to understand why I love her so much. You can’t help but love her; she has such a sweet spirit! The baptism was well attended by ward members and many of her family who are not members. I know that she will be a great example to them and I am so happy to have been able to see the change the gospel brought to her life. Wendy and her family also attended the baptism which was wonderful. They are a great family and I am so excited for them. My heart is so so so so so so full!!!
On the way home on Sunday I began to look ahead to the things we need to teach to these wonderful investigators that the Lord has put in our path and I began to feel inadequate. How can I teach them? I am so new and although I am giving everything I have sometimes I feel like I am not up to the task. I was talking to Elder Jenkins my District Leader about all this and he said I just need to trust God. I do trust God and I will work hard and do all that he asks me to do. I know I can't do this but He can. I felt peace last night as I prayed about the coming weeks of teaching. I know that the spirit is what teaches, not me so it is all right if I am new because the spirit has ample experience!!

I love you all,
Sister Graf

Yeah for missionary letters!!!

This has been the most wonderful week, I know this is a running theme for me but it is true this was a really great week!!
June 15th – June 21st
Monday & Most of Tuesday you got last week…
Tuesday: We had a great lesson with Paul and Bronwynn they both have a long way to come but that is what the gospel is all about change and the joy it brings to our lives. Paul is willing to go on a church tour this week which is a big step in the right direction. We did find out he has a huge problem he struggles with, which is a huge barrier, but the Lord can overcome anything!!
Wednesday: Things are so busy it stresses me out… Sister Jones doesn’t know what is going on here yet which means I have to remember everything and it can be a lot but luckily the Lord is with me. So somehow it all gets done!! We went over to the Ewell’s, we have been doing service for them, and tonight it all paid off we were able to teach there 9 year old son who has not been baptized. Clifton has been waiting for his Dad to be worthy to do the baptism. Unfortunately this may never be the case. We talked to the mom and then taught Clifton. We set a date and he is excited his Grandpa will probably end up baptizing him. He is a great kid and the whole family is really enjoying the lessons. Which is good!!
Thursday: Busy again we visited 2 less actives and one of our Recent Converts and then had two lessons with investigators. I love the people here and teaching them and that is so important. I just keep reminding myself of that! Wendy and her 4 kids, and also Tyler the grandson of Cindy, I told you about them last week... the 6 new investigators we found in one hour. Anyway they are doing so well. They love learning and being involved with the church it is so amazing to teach them. I love to see people get excited about the gospel. We have a wonderful ward that is so helpful and welcomes everyone in!! It helps so much. It is such a blessing to be here. Patti Black is also doing great... every time we teach her, her testimony grows. She is wonderful, I wish you could meet her she is the sweetest lady!! Friday: We had a great day. We had the church tour with Paul. It went well he is still hesitant but he felt the spirit and committed to pray definitely a step in the right direction. That is great!! We taught Wendy and the kids, they are so amazing. I am so excited for their family!!!
Saturday: We had an appointment with Patti and it was great she was nervous about her baptism being so soon. The lesson was awesome, spirit awesome, and at the close she prayed and it was the sweetest prayer there is nothing in the world like the prayer of an investigator. It is so simple and from the heart. She thanked God for us which was nice but then she said she was so excited to be baptized. It was so so so cool!!! I love this gospel and she is so ready now!!
Sunday: I don’t know if I have room for all the blessings I have been receiving from the Lord. Sunday another amazing day!! We had 7 investigators at church, wonderful!! I can’t express to you how much of a miracle this is.

Letter

June 1st – June 7th
Monday: We had so much fun today. The Elders in Lake Tapps had us all come over to a members home which is right on the lake we bbq and had tons of fun!! Also we had some good lessons and for our dinner went to the Birches and ate the most delicious Indian tacos YUMMY fry bread! Good day!
Tuesday: Today was good we had a great lesson with Dave Turley taught him about prophets. We showed this clip from this video Special Witness’s of Christ. You showed President Monson at the time it was Gordon B Hinkley was prophet but anyway we showed this part by Pres Monson he spoke about the Book of Mormon which was really good. Then we watched a clip with President Hinkley the spirit was so strong he testified of Christ and it was amazing!! We are still trying to get him to commit to baptism he says he will be baptized but he is not sure when. It is frustrating but we are making progress. He asked how many lessons we have I told him at least one a week until you get baptized. He said I hope you are creative… does he know me at all I am VERY creative.
Wednesday: Today was so busy we had a million lessons not really but it felt super busy… we taught Jamie we found her tracting last week and it was cool we taught the restoration and she really felt the spirit we are going back next week. The only challenge with her is that well she is living with her boyfriend who is her baby’s daddy and we can fix that but she doesn’t know about coming to church on Sunday. She goes to church with the boyfriends Grandma and she feels really obligated because they gave her a lot of help with the baby. Anyway we will see. SO we taught this really cool object lesson where you try to fit an egg into a plastic bottle, which is heaven, but you have to do all these steps take off the shell, baptize it, etc it still doesn’t fit until baptism of fire you light the rubbing alcohol in the bottle on fire and then you put the egg on top and it gets sucked down… it is pretty cool but very dangerous. My companion is terrified of fire so I am always in charge of the demonstration so in front of all these kids I totally burnt my hand, the rubbing alcohol was a little too much anyway I spent the rest of the lesson with my hand in the bowl of water we had used as the eggs baptismal font. Pretty funny oh know wait till I tell you what happened at our next lesson. That night when we showed the object lesson to Bronwyn her roommate/ baby’s daddy came in for the lesson. We taught him which is cool we are trying to get him to church you never know… anyway same object lesson except I forgot to tell you in one step we color black on the egg then peel away the shell to represent repentance. SO one of our eggs sins was stealing a candy bar… anyway when we lit the fire it sucked the egg in but sliced off about half of it. We all laughed so hard!!! Paul said “There goes that candy bar she stole” anyway it was hilarious. Who knew getting into heaven would be so violent!! But amidst all that, somehow we felt the spirit.
Thursday: We helped the Ewell’s move. We had a great lesson with Brandon his baptism is Saturday we are so excited for him and we showed the egg demo which exploded. We might have to retire this trick it is pretty dangerous. Went and taught a recent convert who is taking temple prep it was going great and she is super excited. Friday: Had some great member lessons they have referrals for us this is great!!! It is nice to see some results from working with the members. It was a good day not much else…
Saturday: We helped the Ewell’s move all morning it was really crazy and a lot of work. But it is always nice to see the ward unite behind someone. We had a lesson with the older man it was super funny he is the father of a member of the ward. The other day we set up an appointment. We asked if we could come and share a message but when we came today we asked to pray and he said no I don’t ever talk about religion… we are missionaries that is what we do! Anyway it was weird we tried to get around it unsuccessfully and he ended up just talking about his motor home. The weird thing is the member his daughter didn’t warn us at all and she knew… how weird. Saturday night was Brandon’s baptism it was so awesome the spirit was so strong and he was just beaming there was a good amount of support there which is always good. Dave Turley came to the baptism which was cool he really felt the spirit and we are hoping this will be the key to helping him progress!!!
Sunday: Today was crazy we had a long ward meeting and then tried to get a less active family with a 9 year old son to church. I don’t think they liked us coming over but the 9 year old came to church so that is good. To bad we need his Dad there too since he is the one holding up the baptism. We had a lot of people at church which is great but stressful there is only two of us, it is hard to be everywhere at once and make everyone feel welcome. Brandon bore his testimony it was amazing I am so happy for him. His family was supposed to come but didn’t, I worry about him. I hope the ward takes good care of him he has no support otherwise. We have a good ward so it should be good.
Monday: Well I woke up and came here. Write more next week.
Love,Sister Graf

Yeah PICTURES!!! :0)

Yummy coconut cupcakes...


Cute missionary!

Beautiful Temple grounds...

Linz with her last companion (2nd in the field)!

At the beautiful Temple!

Lindsay and her new companion!

Tracting in the rain!

Another Update from the Pavement Pounder

May 5th 2009 – May 11th 2009

Ok so here is the update… some of this will not be news to my family because I just spoke with you yesterday for Mothers Day. Which was awesome!! It was weird though because it didn’t even seem like it had been very long since I talked to you. Anyway maybe Christmas will be a longer stretch… So here is what I have been up to:

Tuesday:
We met with our Ward Mission Leader and he is really great. He has lots of spread sheets and information for us. He holds weekly meetings and they are serious well they actually just meet the normal protocol but this is the first time I have seen the plan followed  Each week someone from the RS presidency and Elder Quorum is there. Which is really helpful. Anyway he has every member of the ward taking a 3 Sunday missionary training class. And I mean every ward member he has the Stake helping cover classes so everyone will be able to attend. Pretty cool. So we have a lot of people in the teaching pool here which is awesome. I think we will be busy, I love busy

Wednesday:
We had Zone Meeting today seems like we have a great Zone everyone is super friendly and nice which is different then my last Zone. We have so much to do here but it is very frustrating because we don’t know anyone or know where anyone lives. Luckily I have Trent’s GPS which has been saving my life. But even with it things are challenging we are trying to get maps and figure out where everyone lives so we can use time and miles more effectively. Although there is a lot to do it is very frustrating and slow to get starting because we just don’t know where to start and how to get a hold of people

Thursday:
Well my new area is very interesting…. There are a lot of trailers and it is pretty scary. There are some nice homes but most of the neighborhoods are trailer parks. The Elders left a big note explaining where we should not go after dark. It is about half our area anyway we were tracting today and met this guy it was so interesting he believes almost everything we do preexistence, modern day prophet, heirs with Christ. All of that but he belongs to another church. It was complete news to me that anyone believed that… other then our church. But they have a sketchy story as far as how the authority was given to them. Anyway he came to the church, we do church tours as a tracting approach and teach the first lesson, so anyway he had this map of the biblical history of the world that stretched across the whole gym floor. It was really intense!!! He showed it to us and then told me how Ham descendant of Noah, was the one to construct the first pyramid and that it is actually a altar to God. Then he explained that before scripture prophets used to read the stars and that the Sphinx is Virgo, which represents Christ birth thru Mary and the Lion tail is Leo, which represents second coming. Now all of this new information was really interesting to me who would have thought??? Not me so needless to say he is not getting baptized but I did think the whole thing was pretty entertaining

Friday:
Well we have met a few investigators now… Brandon is 17 and is on date for baptism May 16th. We met him briefly Wednesday at the church and he had a huge hickey on his neck. As we prepared for our first lesson with him we read his teaching record turns out the Elders generously left the Law of Chastity and Word of wisdom for us to teach. I know it was really nice of them. So my companion is really worried about this because she doesn’t like to teach the Law of Chastity it is pretty awkward. So we decide to read from the youth pamphlet and I tell her I will talk about the awkward parts…. Anyway in the lesson we are all reading along and it comes to her turn I hadn’t looked ahead but the next paragraph had all of the details of the dos and don’ts needless to say she turned a little red. But she pushed thru. I felt so bad but it was kind of funny later. Turned out he was good in both of these and has committed to live these laws including abstaining from passionate kissing from now on!! He is really a great guy!


Saturday:
So today we decided because it was bright and sunny it would be safe to venture into the trailer parks what an adventure. Although one might think people who are a little less fortunate might be compelled to be humble and in turn would be more receptive you would be wrong. We ventured out with bright hopes but they were quickly dispelled. Almost everyone has a huge dog and a KEEP OUT sign. Somehow they thought we would read the sign and realize they meant us. We ventured past the fence at one house where we saw only a little dog and a woman out front. As soon as we entered 3 huge dogs came bounding around the corner and jumped on us. The largest a german shepard kept trying to bight me but don’t worry the Lord protected me the most interesting thing was this lady made no attempt to stop the attack. I was the only victim as my companion abandon me at the first sight of danger. Needless to say she also did not decide to be baptized. We also on the way back to the car came across a dead squirrel it had been dead for quite sometime and was in the later stages of decay. The strange thing was someone had spray painted it blue. Maybe it was some form of art…. My favorite thing about the people we came across was this, at the end of every door approach once they reject us we ask if we can do anything for them meaning service, but they always ask us to pray for people or for things like their bad knee. This is really funny to me… you don’t want to hear a message about Jesus Christ but you want us to pray for you????

Saturday:
I am feeling pretty exhausted. We are tracting a ton and trying to find people that we are suppose to be teaching. We got really lost because there was a new development not on our GPS or the map. On the map it was a huge forest but that was not true. It was pretty frustrating then after we found the people we had an appointment with they were not even home One cool thing did happen we went to a members house to call them on a mission we didn’t even get to there lesson. A friend of theirs Rusty was there fixing the computer. He seemed to be listening to what we were talking about and I felt prompted to engage him more in the conversation. Turned out he had lots of questions we ended up teaching the first lesson and he said he would come to church. It was so neat!!! He is a really smart guy and I am excited to teach him.

Sunday:
Rusty came to church and so did another investigator Dave Turley. Dave has been to church about 3 times and the first time he came he had already purchased a scripture quad. We are teaching him on Tuesday!! It is a little complicated because he lives outside of our mission. We are on the furthest edge south so it can be complicated sometimes. We are in the process of getting Stake approval because the fellowship is in our ward. Anyway we gave Rusty a manual for Gospel Principles he had read the lesson for Sunday as well as 3 other chapters he is really on fire and we are so excited to teach him more. It is nice to see the work finally starting to progress. There is always downs as well, Brandon didn’t come to church when we talked to him later he said he was not ready to be baptized but still wants to meet. It is kind of the dance of the mission two steps forward two steps back. But the work does move forward. I love love being a missionary and am excited for this new area.

Love always,
Sister Graf

Transfered
To Puywalup