A Week in Stateboro :)

To start the week off, we have a great YSA group (lots of inactive ysa...but we're getting there)! They all meet on Monday nights for Family Home Evening. Apparently they sometimes bring friends (members and less active members) with them. It's so great to reach out and just invite. When we went to dinner yesterday, the wife of the home told us that when she was 14 she would get dressed and ready to go to church..then wait for someone to invite her (she  wasn't a member). But then they never would. How sad! Eventually....someone did invite her to a youth activity, but imagine how much happier she could have been if a simple invitation had been made months earlier. That's this week's challenge...INVITE. They don't have to say yes, but we MUST invite. :)

Tuesday we service for a part member family in the ward. You learn lots of neat skills on a mission...a new one for me was when we painted and crackled doors. After that I did a bunch of cleaning. Cleaning can make you feel so good because by the end of it, you feel so accomplished. By spending quality time with this family through service, it has softened the husband's heart a little. Years down the road, I pray he will be ready to look into the messages we share with them. :)

Tuesday evening was when the real cool story comes. Since this is a college town, we have a few investigators who are going to school. One of them is a Sorority girl who invited us to come to this coffee shop Tuesday evening with a few of her friends. She said a bunch of girls just come together and talk about Jesus. Sounded good to us. She had been hard to get a hold of recently so we thought this would be great, and we could meet new people. So we go...and order our sodas :D While we did so, she saw us and headed over to tell us to come upstairs and find a seat wherever we could. hmm So we go upstairs..and there are about 30 Sorority girls gathered in a group! wow. we find a seat and listen to this senior tell every one about her 'journey' of finding God. It was super neat to see this side of these girls. After the big gathering, everyone split up into smaller groups. We were able to tell a good number of these girls about the Book of Mormon, how we can have faith, the power of prayer..basically it was amazing! We were mostly planting seeds of faith for later, but who knows when they will be ready? We're hoping to meet with 2 of the girls this week. 

Thursday I was able to have a signing lesson! We have a less active member in the ward. She really doesn't have many people to sign with (even her sister, whom she lives with, doesn't sign much). So it was an amazing experience to use the little I knew to carry on a normal conversation with her. Signs came back that I thought I had forgotten. It was wonderful! I hope to sign with her more and be able to learn more "church/religious" signs. 

Friday night we had an interesting experience...while at a less active YSA's apartment, we got caught in the middle of some pretty nasty roommate drama. The one roommate started asking us a whole bunch of questions to get at the girl we were visiting. It was incredibly uncomfortable, and there was the potential for it to turn really sour really fast. Through prayer, and listening to the Holy Ghost...our mouths were filled with what needed to be said to calm the spirit of contention. I was especially grateful for sister Stout's powerful testimony of the Atonement. The spirit entered back into the room, and we left with things placed in the Lord's hands. 

Saturday night we had a lesson with a young family. The grandmother and husband are not members. It was full of the spirit. Neither were originally open to the idea of our religion very much...but since the spirit was there, we could see a change happen within their hearts. The next day, the grandmother came up to me and thanked me for the simple, yet profound way I had connected with the children. That most definitely wasn't me...but she had felt the spirit! That made me so happy! When we feel like what we are doing isn't adequate, the Lord has a way of sending the encouragement we need. 

I love this Gospel and I KNOW that when we pray with all the energy of our heart, we CAN know the truth of all things. We can know our divine potential. We can know the plan our Father has for us. We can know that God does has not shut the pathway of communication to heaven! WE CAN KNOW. 

How I love this work!!! Take hold of it :)

-Sister Brown