Courtney's favorite scripture:
I know that which the Lord hath commmanded me,and I glory in it. I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy.
Alma 29:9
I can't believe we are finally here. Next week will be her last letter from the mission field. When she is home she will write her final letter for her blog. Thank you all for your love and support you have given her. We are truley blessed.
sorry this is gonna be a little short today. This week was awesome!. We were able to teach Kyle (the kid who just got out of jail) and his cousin Jessica this week. They are AMAZING. Jessica got an answer that this is the path she needs to go on and in just a couple of days read through half of first Nephi and loves learning. She is so in tune and has such a depth of understanding in the Gospel, she amazes us when we ask a question, her answers are more than perfect. Kyle is doing well, but has not got an answer to his prayers yet...I have never seen someone be so disappointed for not receiving an answer...he cried! He is not a kid you imagine crying especially not over not receiving an answer to a prayer. But he is still working on it and is still willing to try to do more. They both came to church on Sunday and it went pretty well. Jessica got all signed up for Girls Camp and they are signing her up for Youth Conference as well! She is just jumping right in. I am so excited for them. We met with another lady this week, her daughter just got baptized at the end of May and has been talking to her more about the Gospel. The daughter lives in Southern Illinois so she got ahold of us to ask us to go visit her mom. We had a great first lesson with her, she assured us that if this isn't what she wanted then we wouldn't be there. She seems very promising and is very open. She wants changes in her life and thinks now is the perfect time to do it, she is 52 and wants the second half of her life to be better, and wants to be closer to her daughter and believes this will help. So those are the exciting things we had going on this week. i love you all! have an awesome week!! next week is transfers so i will email onn wednesday!!
Hello family!!! sounds like it was an exciting weekend. I cant believe haley and zach are in high school now. Thats weird. i hear the weathers been starting to get alittle better out there now. its pouring right now out here and the allergies have been horrible! but thats alright.
Well as for us here in the great state of IOWA it wasnt a very eventful week actually. Sister freitag and I were both super sick most of the week so we spent a lot of time inside. But towards the end of the week we started feelin a little better. We actually got to go out to a member in the branch, sister leonards ranch and help her with her horses and chores around the ranch that day. We met with one of our investigators, kim this week and her twin daughters mattea and mariah this week and did some service with them at their house. We're just trying to get them to come to church but kim is really paranoid to be around people in public. Other than that we had a couple other lessons that our investigators didnt show up for. Aban skipped out on our appointment with him but he called us and wanted to set something up for this week. On saturday we got to go to des moines for the multi-stake relief society conference that sister allred from the general relief society presidency spoke at. Oh my gosh, I got to see grandma mathusek and sister fagersten from cedar falls and leslie lee, sister gelder, sister jeppsen and a couple other people from iowa city. I was so excited! I love them! It was a really good conference. Sunday was an awesome day at church. One of our members, renae gave a talk and she brought her son kyle and a couple of his frends to church with her. Kyle just got out of jail this last week and told his mom he wanted to go to church with her and when we were talking to him after church he told he wanted us to come and teach him and he wants to get baptized! Sweet!!!!! he's a really good guy, just wrong places at the wrong times but maybe it was just the wrong place at the right time for him to realize whats important and the changes he needs to make in his life. We're gonna be meeting with him on wednesday!!its gonna be awesome!! it's gonna be a good week!!!!
I love you all!! have an awesome week!!! thank you for everything!!! happy fathers day to all the daddies!!!! you're awesome!! till next time, Sister C
Hello hello family!! I hope you guys had a fabulous weekend! I cant believe haley and zac are both gonna be goin to high school...wierd! Is the weather getting any better at home? Its getting pretty hot and humid here. I definitely wont miss the humidity when I leave.
We had a pretty good week here in lenox! We worked with a lot of our members this week and had some really good lessons with them. Earleir last week we had this guy call us that said that he wanted to meet with us. So we were super excited about that. His name's Aban and he's from honduras but he's lived here since he was about 15 or 16 and turns out that he's really good friends with one of the less active members in our branch, freddie. Aban said that freddie had been talking to him about the church alittle bit and aban said that he has really been wanting to change things in his life and wanting to come closer to god. So we went over and met with him on thursday and took brother and sister wangberg with us (ps. Brother wangberg reminds me so much of dad). So we were teaching him about the restoration and the spirit was super strong and you could just tell how much aban wants to follow Christ and we were gonna ask him if he would be baptized once he knew that the things we were sharing with him were true and then he started talkin about how when he was 10 he went to our church over in honduras all the time by himself and he got baptized. Well alright then..deed already done. And he came to church yesterday which was awesome to have someone there for the members to work with. Other than that we had the rest of appointments with investigators fall through this last week but this we'll hopefully be able to have some appointments that actually happen.
Update on Crazy nancy: she stole our front porch light and some more rocks from our yard. Haha. Shes getting a nice little collection there and apparently she went out in the middle of the night and painted the back of our neighbors car and she likes to spray paint her face. Haha.
Well thats about it for now, the lbrary's closing for lunch along with the rest of the town. Gotta go. I love you all!!!!! have an awesome week!!!!
Happy Tuesday everyone!!! How was your guys’ memorial day weekend? Do anything fun? Summer times here and schools gettin out…whoo hoo!! I cant believe amys gonna be starting drivers ed..weird! I think she should just be cool like me and wait till shes 18. lol. I totally spaced it when I was emailing last week but happy day of birth last week brit! And uncle pauls getttin hitched this week!! One word….awesome!!! im so excited for him! Tell him I love him and give him a big hug for me and tennyson too!! Tell him im so excited for him to go to brazil!! My goodness everyones goin there, im feelin kinda left out. Not really actually, iowa’s so much better. We’ve got cows, corn, pigs and soybeans..what more could you want. Lol. I cant believe its still snowin up in the mountains. That’s crazy.
We had a pretty good week. We had most our appointments with investigators fall through but we found stuff to keep us busy. We spent almost an entire day helping one of the less active ladies in our branch, sister cheney around her house. She’s older and lives by herself and she needed help re-gluing all of her wall paper in her family room so sister Freitag and I were up on ladders all day. It was really nice though, we got to know sister cheney and help her and she came to church on Sunday which was really nice to see her there. She’s such a funny cooky old lady that likes to sneak things into you car when your not looking, like a cactus. We spent some time at a less active members house, the zimmermans. Oh my gosh, I love them!! They’re soo awesome! They’re in their late 60’s and sister Zimmerman (first name’s Ginny) says she was baptized a long time ago but no one has her records and no one knows where they are so we’re not sure if she really was baptized or not. But she and her husband are amazing. Saturday was awesome. One of the towns that we cover is called Bedford and on Saturday they had their annual “Bedford in Bloom” festival. One of the members of our branch was the head chairman of it and had sister Freitag and I really involved in it. There are a lot of towns in our area that don’t accept “outsiders” very well especially when you knock on their door so we’ve been trying to do service in those towns so that we can be seen and get to know the people that live there that way and Bedford is one of those towns. So on Saturday we got to help out at the festival with the talent show which is a big thing here, some of the kids games and then with their “blazin bbq bash” contest. Let me tell you Iowans take their grill outs VERY seriously. They had different categories like: chicken, ribs, briskets, pork butt you name it they grill it. So they had like 6 different judges for each category but the jusdges couldn’t know who made what and the grillers couldn’t know who the judges were so it was double blind. so sister Freitag and I were the runners who went around and collected the meat and couldn’t let the grillers see the judges and took the meat for them. It was really fun and we got to talk to a lot of people and gave a couple book of mormons away. The elders that are in our district also came out for the day and helped out with the karaoke so the town was kinda stuck with us, they couldn’t get away even if they wanted to we were everywhere. Haha. It was a really good day. We had a really good day at church on Sunday. We had a couple less active members come which was awesome. Yesterday for memorial day Ginny (sis. Zimmerman) and her sister myrtle (we like to call her old myrty) took us to a memorial day service at the cemetery in their home town called diagonal that hasa whopin 250 people and most of the towns that we cover are about that size. The service at the cemetery was really good and everyone that was there went and had lunch at the community center afterwards and Ginny was introducing us to all her old friends that shes known her entire life. It was really good to meet pretty much the entire town at the same time and having someone that they all love be the one to introduce us to them all.
Well we’ve got some appointment set up this week that should be really good and hopefully we’ll be finding some new people to teach and get this place up and goin.
I think that’s about it for us here in good ole lenox iowa!! I love you all so much! Have an awesome week!!!!
