Hello hello!! Weekly weather report: kinda hot actually. Only like 25 degrees F. I'm sweating buckets;)
Happy New Years! We had a wonderful week this week! Our week started off really well on Monday when we had a meeting with Alina, our investigator. We were planning on discussing repentance and President Nelson's "We can do better and be better" talk from May 2018 conference, but as we were talking, we ended up talking a lot about prayer and answers to prayers. She was thinking about when she wants to be baptized and she doesn't know if she wants to wait anymore. She asked us to remind her to pray everyday this week, and she decided to rethink her decision about when to be baptized! She is such an amazing girl, and hopefully she'll get her answer this week!
The other really amazing thing that happened this week was this cute family we became friends with. We went to stop by some grandma's earlier this week and a man with two cute little kids came up to us and asked us if we needed someone to let us in the building. We ended up talking for a while and he invited us over for dinner with his family a few days later. So, Sunday night we went and had dinner with him, his wife, and their two kids. They are so precious! They are such a loving, accepting family. They were asking us quite a few questions about ourselves, our work here, America, everything. I think they have a lot of potential! They are a really close knit family. They have a 6 year old son and a almost 2 year old. They're way smart! The 6 year old was teaching me a whole bunch of animal names in Russian that I can't remember anymore, like "meerkat". He knew a lot of their names in English too! The mom speaks some English and she practiced with us. It was a really good night for us!
Saturday was a really fun day as well. We had a youth conference type thing here for youth and young single adults from all over our mission. It was a blast because all my Novosibirsk friends were there like Anton and Tanya and also all of my Ulan Ude friends were there as well! I didn't realize how much I missed them until I saw them and it was so fun to catch up and just be with them again! Ah I love my people!!! We (the volunteers) were in charge of doing a presentation at the conference and it was so much fun! We decided to have them go through the life of a missionary kinda. We had different teams represented by different missions around the world. I was the "mission president" of the South Korea mission. It started off with a contest who could tie a tie the fastest, then who could eat hot instant noodles the fastest without spilling it all over themselves, and even a contest about who could learn their language the fastest (my team learned a few lines in Korean and ROCKED IT!). It ended with a food eating contest of really gross canned turkey and baked beans - cold. Sometimes, you have to eat really gross things people make for you and pretend you like it, so we had a contest about it. Then, Sister Richardson gave a presentation about her leg and why she wanted to come back on her mission, and we did a Q&A as well with some current missionaries and already returned missionaries. Pretty much, it was really fun and I hope that they all want to serve missions now!
This week was the first week of Come, Follow Me for the Book of Mormon, which is pretty much a study guide to help you study scriptures better individually and as a family. I started it this week, and it is wonderful!! The Book of Mormon, for those of you that don't know, is a record from the prophets in ancient America and records a visit from Jesus Christ after His resurrection. It was preserved through the ages by the power of God, revealed to a boy named Joseph Smith by an angel of God, and translated through the power of God. I was thinking about how amazing it is to be able to see God's hand in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. It is truly a scripture written for our day, and when we look at how God preserved it and brought it forth in our time, we can see how important it is to Him that we have these scriptures and study them daily. They truly help you come closer to God.
I love you all! I hope you all had a wonderful New Year's:))
Sister Jones
photos:
Some from the Nutcracker last week
Me in a winter wonderland!
