🕊 The Spirit Cares 🕊

This week was great!! We had an amazing lesson with Sebastian! The member we brought, Kaeli just got home from her mission and in our lesson this week she promised Sebastian that when he prayed he would get his answer about being baptized THIS WEEK. Well, yesterday at church she asked him about it and GUESS WHAT he got his answer!!! He is so excited to get baptized! His mom is totally on board with it but he still has to talk to his dad. He also has a friend in his theater class at school that recently got baptized who he said will give him scriptures to read to help him! He is such an awesome kid and it's so cool to watch him gain confidence in the gospel and see him realize that he has a testimony! 😄 it's just so great!!

My companions and I had an interesting/funny experience with the Spirit this week. I say interesting because one of the things that I have been amazed to learn on my mission is how the Spirit works and how he tells us things simply by being present or not. So here's what happened. My companions and I were trying to plan a family home evening lesson for this family we had met the night before. We didn't know much about their spiritual background, just that they use to be active in their old Ward and we're not coming to the new ward. So we knelt and prayed together as a companionship and asked to be inspired as to what message we needed to teach this family. Well ... we sat there for several minutes and one of my companions looked at me and said "I'm gonna be honest I didn't feel anything." I didn't feel anything either, but we had to come up with something! So eventually, we came up with a rough plan, but I didn't feel good about it. We were all trying to figure out why this didn't feel right. Then one of my comps said "is there something wrong guys? Do we need to talk about something?" I love both of my comps so much and look up to both of them because they are amazing women and hard working Missionaries ... so I didn't have any issues. But as we started talking we realized that the problem was we all felt the same way about each other, and in turn were intimidated and a little self conscious! Haha as we talked and shared our feelings with one another those insecurities went away and when we prayed again we could feel the Spirit come back and we were able to revive the inspiration we needed and our family home evening that night went great! The Smith family felt the Spirit and they really started to open up to us.

I think this is so funny because this is totally a girl thing and I'm pretty sure elder's don't have this problem. Hahaha 😂 But the moral of the story is that God is involved with every aspect of our lives and really does care. At first I thought it was silly and bit ridiculous that the Holy Ghost cared about whether or not we talked about our feelings or insecurities to each other, after all we were still working. But in order for us to work more effectively as a team and be unified, and help each other come closer to Christ we needed to learn to genuinely love and not just respect each other a little more. Both of my comps aren't use to talking about their feelings, I usually wear mine on my sleeve. So I'm excited to make them my new best friends. These are my last two after all. 😏 haha

Overall we had an amazing week! We had a meeting with our stake presidency yesterday, our stake president just got back from a stake president council with Dallin H. Oaks where they talked about how we need to start focusing more on how to help the older youth and young adults do missionary work because when it comes to missionary work, that is the age group when most people join the church. This is so true, we are teaching Sebastian right now and the impact and potential that he has on his family and friends from his example is amazing. So that was really cool to get talk about! I'm super excited for this new focus in the stake!

I hope you all have a wonderful week and remember that I love you!!!

Love,

Sister Abby Martinez 

This is how my hair turned out from those corn rows last week: