Yo ho!

December 1, 2008

Hey y'all,
So this week was a good one. We finally got to sit down and teach this awesome golden/elect that a member found for us while doing door sales. His name is Kevin, he's from Trinidad and England and he's black. He was taught by Elders for a while I guess in Trinidad, but we're still not sure why he was never baptized. Oh well, we'll do it! :) But he is sooo golden and sooo elect, which is what we're in the business for. He said he knows the BOM is true and he kept going on and on about how it coincides so well with the Bible. It was amazing.
Our mission goal for Nov. was 70 baptisms, and with 2 fasts in the month, we baptized 64 and confirmed 58 I think (are the numbers so far). We set a new record for this mission though, which is pretty dang awesome! So now to meet the standard set by the first presidency to double baptisms, we are shooting for about 100 in dec. So pray hard for us for that... Thanks!
This week I was surprised to meet again with my old comp and trainer, Sis. Arnell. Long story short, she is now dating seriously the son of the people we lived with in Franklin. Oh, and the son is in my ward now, here in M'boro. Yeah, ironic. It was a little bit weird, to say the least, to see her at church, holding hands in sunday school, and then to eat dinner with them, on my bday. Ha! Yeah, little awkward. Anyway, it made for a really good funny story! And that's what life's all about, right?
The work is going good here, the church is true and the BOM is amazing!!
I love you all, love,
Sister Gurr
PS--Funny story, on Thanksgiving, my day started at 4:20 am when I rolled over in bed and fell out onto the floor. See, my top mattress is light-weight and kindof thin and it slides a little bit, and it had slid off some, so when I rolled over, I was off the bed and then immediately on the floor. But on the way down i knocked over my wooden bedside table with my neck and face, which sent it falling down, knocking the plastic drawers next to it over and everything crashed. Sis. buhler woke up to the crash with me on the floor with my neck and chin in pain. She was so kind though, and said sleepily, "are you okay?" "yeah", "do you need any help?" "no, i'll do it in the morning" (everything was all over the floor). I just tipped my wooden table back up, put my clock on it, pushed my mattress back to the wall, and got back in bed. It wasn't that funny then, but we cracked up about it the next morning. Ha! That was the first time i've ever actually fell out of bed! (the pic of me on the bed is the after math, in the morning, after I had been running, hence why I look frightening)
But it was our preparation day, so we cleaned and grocery shopped at Wal-Mart, and then we were fed and taken care of very well by members and hung out at their houses, cuz we had the whole day off. Then we watched the Work and the Glory with Alicia and Roland, which we had permission to do. It was a great day!

What can ya do when yer 22...and on a mission?

November 26, 2008

So due to the wonderful holiday of my birthday, I mean Thanksgiving, our preparation day (p-day) is on Thurs. this week, but libraries are not open, so we are emailing today. FYI.
This week was fabulous--Ariana's baptism went very well on Sat., nothing too terrible happened other than the morning of, the Smyrna elders (the church where the baptism was going to be is in Smyrna, about 20 minutes north of us, so the Smyrna elders were nice enough to turn on the font for us) called us and said none of their bishopric were home and their ward mission leader was out of town, so they didn't have keys to the font. So we ended up rushing to our Bishop's house, getting keys, then rushing up to Smyrna to give them the keys (so much for saving on miles that day:), then we came back down here to M'boro where we finished up some last minute baptism prep before getting a ride from a member up to the baptism that was at 12:30. But it was great, we had a great turnout. And while Ariana was getting dressed, Roland (Alicia's man, who we are sort of teaching too, we love him) was just beaming, and kept saying things like, "That's gonna be me soon." It was great. There are a lot of legal things he needs to take care of before he can be baptized (it could be a couple/few years before he can, not sure), but that he is saying things like that is a great sign. He's great.
On sunday, Ariana was confirmed, and we had THREE less-actives that we've been working with at church (Amy Smalley, Marisa Manning, Julie Wilcox)!! We were thrilled!! It was so great! And all three of them are part-member families, which is great. We are hoping to teach their family members soon or eventually. Things are starting to pick up in this area. We have been having good success with the new swimming-pool family mission plans, and with teaching the members so far.
Our mission is praying and working really hard right now to reach our goal of 70 baptisms in the month of Nov., which would be a record in the history of this mission. By the end of this week we should be at about 62 if all goes well. So please pray that we can make that goal.
Oh! Cool experience! On friday night there was about 10 minutes left in the night and we had set a goal that day to find 3 new investigators, which we hadn't found yet; we were driving home, and I felt we should go to Kroger. So I asked my comp if we needed anything at Kroger. She said milk. So we went and the first lady we came across while on our way to getting the milk we stopped and started talking to, and long story short, she ended up being in our area (first great surprise:), and she turned out to be the lady some nonmember referred the sisters to (his neighbor, she had been going through a hard time) months ago, before I got here, but who the sisters hadn't yet been able to contact still. She was so friendly and told us about her kids, and she has two 14-yr old twin girls who she said are getting into boys, etc., and need some direction in their lives, and she basically ended up asking if and when we could come over. It was amazing. So there were our 3 new investigators for the day, and we are going to go teach them today. So pray they will be prepared and will accept our message and will want to be baptized.
I love you all! thank you Mom and Dad and Kerrs for the birthday packages!!! I loved them and really appreciate what you all sent me!! Very useful things (Mom and Dad), thank you!! And I was so excited about the honey! :)
And thanks to those that sent cards! ;)
Love, Sister Gurr
ps--and thank you Peter for the email (and lindsay and boys)!! It's good to know you still remember your sister on a mission! :) I love you!
pics:
some explanationg: The football one-- we were not watching the byu/u game...it was just on in the background for a little while at the Bishop's house where we were eating...he wouldn't turn it off... :)

The Church is true!

November 10, 2008

So this week was an exciting one--we sisters got to go on exchanges!! It was exciting because the sisters rarely get to do exchanges because we're a lot farther apart than the elders, and there's no traveling assistant sister to come to us or anything. But for multiple reasons, we got permission this week to do an exchange from Pres. Hutchings; so from thurs. to sat. I was up in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee with Sister Smith (from CA) and her comp came down here to M'boro. I have wanted to be companions with Sister Smith for a while now, because when we have been around each other at like transfer meetings and zone conferences, etc., I could tell we clique (sp?). And I don't think we'll ever be companions, so I was excited to get to be her comp for a few days at least. It was such a blast! Sister Smith is so great and we had so much fun teaching together and contacting together, and it was very productive too.
The fall here is SO beautiful!! The leaves are starting to really fall off the trees, but the colors are amazing! we have been loving this season in this here Tennessee!
Bytheway, I'm glad you all got the pictures. I was a little nervous about that email, especially cuz there were so many pictures. But to explain the cotton field one: "the field is white, already to harvest" haha... in case you didn't think of it. :)
Yesterday we taught Relief Society on the 2nd Coming and Millenium (the teacher was sick, we were asked the night before--Mom, no, I've never had to speak in a sac. mtg. yet on my mission), and it went really well. It's so exciting to know that we really are in the last days, and that Christ really is coming. And we don't have to fear as long as we are doing the small things God has asked us to do, like daily scripture study (SO important), daily prayer, going to church every sunday, family home evening, etc. They are such small and simple things, yet we get to busy that sometimes we get out of the habit of doing those things. But I have such a testimony that if we just stick to the little things, everything else will fall into place and our lives will be filled with so much more joy and peace. Especially in our families. Satan is sure working hard right now to tear the family apart. We just need to stay close to the gospel; that's truly where safety lies.
Dad, yes!! You can send me pictures! Please do! :)
I love you all!
Love, Sister Gurr
pics:
my pumpkin (only mine, not sis. Buhler's, weird) grew a ridiculous amount of mold really quickly, and was leaking like it was in a pool. Weird.
sis. Smith (tall one) and I in Mt. Juliet in front of some beautiful colors!
Fall in TN
Our district walking to the library at MTSU to email just a little bit ago (that's me TODAY :)

Finally Some Pictures!

November 3, 2008

This email may be short, but I wanted to finally send some pictures with it.
For Halloween we were to stay inside and do our weekly planning that we normally do on friday mornings. So we did, amongst some of our investigators (Alicia, Ariana, and Amari--Alicia's 2 kids) that came trick-or-treating to our apartment, and then after we were done planning, we carved pumpkins quickly before going to bed. It was a lot of fun! Mine is on the left and Sis. Buhler's is on the right. Can you guess what mine is? (and the little thing at the bottom of mine is supposed to be grass, not a fire...I was in a hurry:)
Things are going well, we are doing well, we are ready for the work to explode here soon. We are really focusing our efforts on the members, hoping to see some great success from it, that our Mission President has said we will. But our mission made our goal of 50 baptisms in Oct! And now we're shooting for 70 in Nov, and 3 in our area specifically. So please pray for that.
I love you all!
Love, Sis. Gurr

(Joseph Smith's First Vision)

Hey hey

October 27, 2008

This one's going to be quick, but it's been a good week!
Highlights:
Erin is now back on board, it turns out that it was her husband that didn't want us to come over. But she called us tues. and wanted us to come over, so we were really happy, but when we got there that night, she was quite drunk. She really loves us, and we love her, but her love for us came out in a very uncomfortable way that night. She kissed my comp on the cheek, on the ear, and kissed both our hands (which she has done before, but it wasn't so weird, cuz she wasn't drunk. Anyway..). We realized we couldn't teach her anything, so after a few minutes of being inside and her wanting to talk about the JS pamphlet she read (which we were proud of her doing), and after not being having been in this sort of a situation ever before in my life, and not being able to think of a soft way to do this, I said, "Erin, we love you, but you're drunk. And we can't teach you anything when you're drunk." She realized what we were saying, and she was a little hurt, and we told her she should go to bed and sleep it off, and we'd see her tomorrow. Anyway, long story short, we eventually left after singing some hymns to her to try to calm her down and bring the spirit, and we both felt so gross and uncomfortable. It was not an experience I want to ever repeat. I never want to see anyone that I already know and am close to drunk ever again. It was actually really sad to see her not in control of herself.
Anyway, since then, she felt really bad about what happened, and she even mailed us a letter and apologized for it. We've seen her again, sober, and she just begs us not to give up on her in this trialsome time in her life. Her husband is not being a very kind or Christlike husband, so she puts up with that, her family is not very supportive of her meeting with us, and her mother-in-law (who sent her to jail for 13 months before) is moving in with them again this weekend. So her life is really hard right now, to say the least. But when we were with her, taking a walk to get her out of her house and calmed down the other day, we met her neighbors (an older couple) and the cute old woman, Louise, asked for some "literature". She's met with missionaries before, has a BOM, the works, so we're going to go teach her on thurs. Yay!
Sandy (the one with many mormon relatives, love geneology) is back from the hospital and from rehab, so we'll be able to teach her again now. We visited her once this week, and she can't get around too well yet, so it might be a while before she gets to church and can be baptized, but she'll get there.
We had an amazing experience yesterday! We were contacting this referral that a member gave us the other day, and after talking to the referral and their neighbor (neither interested, but both very friendly and very nice), we felt like we should keep walking down the street. So we did, and a few houses down, I felt like we should knock on the door. So we did, and this woman named Carol answered the door with her large and ferocious dog that had been going crazy since we walked up the sidewalk to her porch, opened the door about 5 inches, saw us, then closed it. We weren't sure if she was just putting the dog away, or if she wasn't interested. So we started walking away slowly, then she came and opened the door and came out. We ended up chatting with her for about 10 minutes, then she asked us what we were asking for or selling (something like that). We told her we weren't selling anything, that we teach the gospel for free! Anyway, we ended up teaching her all about the restoration and the BOM, and at the beginning of the JS story, she looked like she was trying not to laugh, and by the end of the 1st vision, she was crying. She told us we had no idea how much she needed this and appreciated it, etc, and it was amazing. We are going back to teach her on thurs, and we're really excited!
I love you all, thank you so much for your prayers and your emails and letters!!
Love, Sister Gurr

It's fixin' to be Winter it seems!

October 20, 2008

So I think I jinxed us here in Tennessee last week when I talked about the amazing weather, because since then it has gotten significantly cooler. But it's still really pretty, and it's pretty nice in the daytime. And as for allergies, they really only lasted that one weekend, when I wrote about them. Just in case any one wondered...
Anyway, missionary work is awesome in this here Tennessee. Our district leader, Elder Rothlisberger from New Mexico, is going home tomorrow, who we've become pretty close to; he's a fantastic missionary. So that's kindof sad; but the work goes on!
Speaking of the work, some updates:
Erin has turned weird on us. We're not sure what is going on with her. She and joe were going to come to the ward Halloween party on Sat. night (trunk-or-treat/"Fall into Missionary Work"--we were a central part, got to answer questions from the primary kids about being missionaries, it was really fun and very productive!), but Joe got really sick the day before and they took him to the hospital that day. But it's like she got antied or her marriage is better and so she's done with us after getting a good spiritual high, or Joe told her not to talk with us much anymore, or something. We're going to go over tonight to hopefully straighten things out. She needs the gospel so bad! Aaa!
We had an awesome experience sat. though--we had met this girl, Jaki (Ja-KEY), who is 17, on fri. She was outside her house, across the street from Erin, actually. We talked to her for a second and asked if we could come back the next day to teach her and any of her family. She said sure, so we went sat. at noon-ish, not expecting anything great to come of it, but the Lord sure showed us! She ended up not being there, but her mom was, and her grandma, Sylvia. And it turns out Sylvia (black woman, in her early 60's, probably) used to live in the other ward area and used to be taught with her son, by Elders. So she was very familiar with Joseph Smith and the BOM, etc. but she had just moved cuz her house had burned down or something. So we ended up teaching her (re-capping, really) a first, gave her another BOM, and she totally wants to come to church (in a couple weeks, when she has work off) and stop smoking and get back into the BOM. It was amazing. These descriptions of these experiences do no justice to how it really is, but she has the most amazing attitude and outlook. She is so golden! She was even like, I want to just spend an hour today, just reading the BOM. We were like, okay, you do that! (didn't really say that, of course) And she said, "I'm going to go humble myself and pray to the Lord to quit smoking." She is awesome, and we are so excited to teach her more tomorrow.
This week we also had a great correlation meeting (first one since i've been here) with our Ward Mission Leader, and he is now able to focus more on the work, and it was so great. And the members here are so amazing and so supportive and want to be really involved. We are so blessed to have great members here in the Blackman Ward.
The Church is true and the Book of Mormon is amazing, and it truly does bring us closer to Christ!!
I love you all, thank you for your prayers!
Love, Sister Gurr

It's Fall Y'all!

October 14, 2008

So if I wasn't sold to live in Tennessee someday already, Tennessee in the Fall has me sold. It is soo beautiful here and my favorite part is that while the leaves are changing and it's so pretty, it's still warm!! We are still wearing short sleeve shirts and loving the weather. Even at night it's still so nice! We slept with our window open last night and my comp even was hot a little. But word is that it's going to cool down quite a bit this week, but it's beautiful right now. I hear that UT has snow, that's weird to think about here. I'm definitely not looking forward to wearing a skirt every day in the freezing cold weather that Tennessee apparently gets in the winter. Oh, well, there are worse things in life right? And being a missionary is amazing, so it'll be worth it anyway.
Speaking of being a missionary, it just gets better and better. So this last week we found out (through District and then Zone Conference, which was yesterday, which is why we're emailing today, FYI) that the First Presidency has asked (or commanded, really) all US missions to double their baptisms. This is huge. Our mission (TNM!) has an average of about 40 baptisms/month, give or take a few, and we are shooting to have an average of 70 a month (that doesn't sound like it's doubling, but with the different months goals now, and different totals, etc., it is, just trust me:). So we are really focusing on working with the members and with certain little goals within each companionship to accomplish this. Because if it came from the Prophet, it came from God. And God never gives a commandment without making a way to accomplish that (1 Nephi 3:7), this I know. So things are going to start picking up real quick I hope, I'm really excited about this new goal. Things in our area are going really well. We were told to pray to find the elect in every single prayer we say, and since we've been doing that, we keep finding them, it's amazing. Every single day last week we found at least one person. Oh, and I forgot to include in my email last week that I discovered the week before (my comp was kindof still discovering this herself) that my comp has the Gift of Discernment. If there is any gift of the Spirit that you would want as a missionary, it's this one. She can tell with almost any one we talk to, if they are elect or not (ready for the gospel or not). It's amazing. So after we talk to someone I ask her something like, "what about them?" or "Are they?" and she either says no or yeah! And now we have a communication system to know while we are talking to someone, so if I'm talking to them, for example, and they are not elect, she lets me know by clearing her throat and then we can end the conversation and not push to teach them and we move on. It's so awesome. So now with potentials, we are weeding them out more effectively and don't worry about going back and going back to try to teach them if they aren't an elect. We just drop them and find someone else. However, being elect doesn't always mean they will accept the gospel, just that they are ready, we have concluded.
Well, i'm almost out of time, but to update on some of our investigators:
Erin is doing awesome!! We have taught her the Plan o' Sal and the first lesson (Restoration), and she hasn't successfully quit smoking yet but she quit drinking coffee through the stop-smoknig-workshop we did with her (that's one of the steps--no coffee, tea, or alcohol for those 7 days). She had been drinking 6 cups a day, and is not drinking any now!! But there are a lot of stressful things going on in her life right now, including her husband not being supportive at all of her quitting smoking. So please pray for her to be able to quit because she wants to so bad. But with her husband, we've been praying for him to have a softened heart toward us and the Church, because she feels like she is restricted on how involved with the church she can get because of him, and miracle last night!! We went over to take them brownies and thank you cards, mostly for him to thank him for copying this really neat picture of Christ for us, and then he ended up coming out and sitting with us and listening to us sing hymns to them, and chatted with us for a few minutes before going back to bed (yeah, he had been in bed). She said after that she never thought that was possible that he would do that. And when we got there, she was a wreck--had been smoking, drinking, sweating like crazy, crying; and she'd asked her husband (Joe) for a divorce earlier that evening; and by the time we left, she had apologized to him, told him she didn't mean it, that she loved him, and he had come out and joined us, and then by the time we left she was completely at peace, composed, didn't need to smoke, and said she was happier then than she had been in years. And I can testify to you that these miracles we saw last night in the life of Erin are because of the power of God. God is so real and is so aware of all of us. And He led us to her because He loves her so much and wants her to have this joy in her life, which we are so privelaged to be able to bring to her.
I know that God lives and that He loves us all so much. Please pray for her and for Joe to have a softened heart and to want to learn what she's been learning.
I love you all, thank you for your support and prayers, really, miracles come from the power of prayer.
Love, Sister Gurr