Maxxlenny, FL

So this week has been interesting. I am in Macclenny and it looks just
like Bear River City. No joke. It is soooooo small town. I love it
though! The first night here we went to a part member's home and had a
"jam" session out in the back yard where we sang all sorts of church
songs. We live with a member who is amazing! And we sleep on bunk
beds.

There is pretty much nothing here. We have already visited the only
store here. It actually had modest skirts! I only bought one and I
finally got a wallet that I like. Right now we are sitting in
Starbucks right in front of Walmart and emailing you.

So I got a flat tire in my bike this week and we had an adventure
trying to get it fixed. Now I know pretty much everything you need to
know about a bike! I have become sort of a jack of all trades out
here. I can landscape, sew, fix a bike (and an air conditioner for
that matter), I can make cute cards and invitations in a matter of
minutes, build houses, paint houses, take care of alpacas, horses, and
fish, and do anything else that you can probably name. As a missionary
you acquire lots of skills.

My new companion is Sister Koenig she is from Fallon, Nevada. She is
super fun!  We are having a blast trying to figure out what we can do to

help this area grow.

I am doing okay. I am still adjusting. I am trying to do what The Lord
needs me to do. I am stressing out because of how fast this is going.
I don't think that I will be ready to come home. There is a song that
we listen to that talked about the progression of a mission and how
you leave you heart here and I cry every time. It will be the hardest
thing ever for me to come home.

Transfer

So this week has been interesting. I am in Macclenny and it looks just
like Bear River City. No joke. It is soooooo small town. I love it
though! The first night here we went to a part member's home and had a
"jam" session out in the back yard where we sang all sorts of church
songs. We live with a member who is amazing! And we sleep on bunk
beds.

There is pretty much nothing here. We have already visited the only
store here. It actually had modest skirts! I only bought one and I
finally got a wallet that I like. Right now we are sitting in
Starbucks right in front of Walmart and emailing you.

So I got a flat tire in my bike this week and we had an adventure
trying to get it fixed. Now I know pretty much everything you need to
know about a bike! I have become sort of a jack of all trades out
here. I can landscape, sew, fix a bike (and an air conditioner for
that matter), I can make cute cards and invitations in a matter of
minutes, build houses, paint houses, take care of alpacas, horses, and
fish, and do anything else that you can probably name. As a missionary
you acquire lots of skills.

My new companion is Sister Koenig she is from Fallon, Nevada. She is
super fun!  We are having a blast trying to figure out what we can do to

help this area grow.

I am doing okay. I am still adjusting. I am trying to do what The Lord
needs me to do. I am stressing out because of how fast this is going.
I don't think that I will be ready to come home. There is a song that
we listen to that talked about the progression of a mission and how
you leave you heart here and I cry every time. It will be the hardest
thing ever for me to come home.

Miracles

So we have been seeing so many miracles these past few weeks! This area has truly blossomed! Nick is getting baptized on the 16th of August and he is one of the most solid converts that I have ever seen! He is so converted it isn't even funny. He is defending the church to his anti family, and he has even gotten his mom, step-dad, and little brother to come to church 3 out of the last 4 weeks. It is awesome! I love baptisms so much! I have missed seeing one! The Lord has definitely prepared Nick and I know that his baptism is a direct answer

I also wanted to tell you how grateful I am for the Book of Mormon. There is so much power in that book. It has helped me so much throughout my mission. I know that is has given me hope, peace, and comfort. Please remember to read it everyday. Hayden and Katie are included with this challenge. Anyone who can read should be reading at least one verse in the Book of Mormon daily, it will change your life, and perhaps save it. It will bring you strength to fight the adversary. It will give you courage in those situations that might seem too hard to handle. It will be the light at the end of the tunnel. Please read it everyday. 

Overcoming challenges through hope and faith

Anyway, this week has been another great week of miracles. We have had so much success lately with having lessons. Hopefully this will carry over to many people being baptized in the coming months. We have a lot of success finding people, but they somehow drop off the face of the earth and we never hear from them again. 

This week we have been riding bikes more than ever. I like it well enough. I don't like doing it for long periods of time though.

So this week I spoke in sacrament. I spoke on overcoming challenges through hope and faith. It was pretty ironic since I just went through basically the hardest point of my life these last few transfers and faith and hope were what brought me through it. We have also been studying the Christlike attributes and the first two just so happen to be faith and hope, it was really nice to see how far I have come and to see how much I grew. I am so grateful for hope and faith and that they were able to help me get through that rough time. 

We had an amazing miracle last night thanks to the guidance of the spirit. We were just going to knock a street and we had a few doors to choose from. I felt like we needed to knock the door right in front of us instead of crossing the street. When someone answered it turned out to be the home of a member of our ward who is fairly active. We laughed about how we didn't realize it was her house and then we asked if there was anyone who she knew that we could visit. She directed us to go see her neighbor and said that she had actually brought her to church before. We went and knocked on her neighbor's door. The lady opened right up and let us in. We talked about church and she said that it was different than what she was used to, but that she loved it. We have a return appointment with her this week! It is amazing what happens when you follow the promptings of the spirit. 

Ft, Caroline Ward

This week was pretty dang good! We have been working our tails off
here in the Ft. Caroline ward. We are finally starting to see some
success here.

This week we set a solid baptismal date with Nick for August 16th! We
are so excited to see this for him! He has been coming to church for
more than a month straight and you can just see the change in his
eyes. He has so many questions, but he understands that sometimes we
don't always need all the answers. I am so excited to see him enter
the waters of baptism. He has a goal to get sealed in the temple to
his fiancé (who is an active member of our ward) when he is able to.

We also had an adventure this week while riding our bikes. We have
been asked by President Craig to fast from our cars 1-2 times a week
and bike. We tried that this week and the day we did we had a HUGE
thunderstorm roll through. We biked a few blocks and were completely
soaked through. We stopped into a store to get out of the lightning
and the first person that saw us had her mouth drop to the floor
because of how wet we were. We pretty much stayed that wet until the
end of the night, but it was worth it! We had some great lessons with
people we would have normally passed in a car.

We also had a big move this week. They are no longer allowing Sisters
and Elders to be in the same apartment complex, so we are now living
in the Arlington area. I will send you my address a little later today
when we find the phone. We definitely upgraded apartments. We switched
with the zone leaders and of course we planked them and they pranked
us.  We left upside down glasses of water all over their apartment and
they took all of our toilet paper and put our beds in the living room.

Last p-day we also went fishing. I didn't catch anything, but one
Elder caught a sting ray! It was so much fun! First time fishing!

HUGE Facebook Challenge

So this week feels like it has been two weeks jam-packed into one. We had Zone meeting, then President interviews, and then District meeting all this week. We also had our trade-offs with our Sister Training Leaders. We also have been given a HUGE challenge for Facebook.

So our mission is hosting a HUGE Facebook even that I have invited you to join. It will happen tomorrow and will be the first of four events that simply involve changing your profile picture on Facebook. I need you to invite everyone on your friends list to attend. Spread the word through the ward and at work. Tell everyone to look up the discover the book Facebook event page and join it. All of the information for the event is on that page in the event info section. It has the potential to reach millions of people all over the world. We need as much support as we can get. We have a few Mormon celebrities joining us (like Alex Boye). I messaged LDS Living magazine and they said that they would love to help get the word out about this event. We basically have decided that we are going to use the resources that the Lord has given us to reach everyone in the world. This will help with that. There is a prophecy that was given by Ezra Taft Benson it states:

"I have a vision of homes alerted, of classes alive, and of pulpits aflame with the spirit of Book of Mormon messages.

I have a vision of home teachers and visiting teachers, ward and branch officers, and stake and mission leaders counseling our people out of the most correct of any book on earth--the Book of Mormon. I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

I have a vision of thousands of missionaries going into the mission field with hundreds of passages memorized from the Book of Mormon so that they might feed the needs of a spiritually famished world.I have a vision of the whole Church getting nearer to God by abiding by the precepts of the Book of Mormon. Indeed, I have a vision of flooding the earth with the Book of Mormon."

(Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon) Ezra Taft Benson October 1988

This is part of fulfilling that prophecy. Please get everyone you can on board. This is very inspired and very simple. We need your (you and Dad) help. This is how we are going to flood the world with the Book of Mormon.

So this week has been pretty good. We have been trying to find people like always. We actually had a miracle with our Bishop's wife. We went on splits with her and the investigator that we were going to see wasn't home, so we went to see some of the elderly sisters in our ward. At the last sister's house we met her home health nurse. We had a great gospel discussion that was started by our bishop's wife! It was amazing, she just started to talked about the gospel. She introduced us and the Book of Mormon. We ended up setting a return appointment through facebook, because she lives just outside of our area. It was truly a miracle.

Tuesday we get to go and help out again with Habitat for Humanity. We finally got Mormon Helping Hands shirts, so it will be good "publicity" for the church. It will also be fun to just do service as a district. There are quite a few people leaving this next transfer and I will really miss them. It will be nice to have one last big service project to do with them.

President's interviews were just what I needed this week. He helped me realize that I am doing okay. He also helped me to understand more about the enabling power of the atonement. It really helped me to see that I can do this because my Savior will give me strength.

Anyway, I love you so much! Keep staying strong!

Lots of love,

Sister Williams

Keeping my chin up

So this week has been good. We have had many miracles this week. Things are still very hard. I am just trying to keep my chin up and press forward. I wish that things would just get better sooner, but I know that the Lord is on my side and He has a purpose in all of this. It is so very frustrating to want to do so much, but to only be able to do so little. I know that things will get better in the future, I need to learn something from this and I haven't figured it all out yet. I know that I am being made stronger through it all. I just have to take things one day at a time, (and you know how hard that is for me, I want to take everything all at once).

This week has definitely been the refiners fire for both of us and our investigators. Our investigators who were unmarried have decided to separate, and it didn't go so well. They still are wanting to meet with us, but things between them have become complicated. It was an unexpected, double edged, answer to prayers. We have been trying to know what we could do to help them progress in the gospel. One of the largest obstacles that was preventing them from moving forward was getting married, because of this new change they have many more opportunities in the gospel. It is a very hard situation though, they are both still wanting to come to this ward and they don't want a blow-up to happen at church. We are praying that this will bring them closer to God instead of further away.

We have also had one of our investigators surprise us by coming to church yesterday! She is in the navy and her ship has been coming and going for exercise practices, so she has been out of town a lot. She came and loved the testimonies that were born. We had a lot of little children get up and bear their sweet, simple testimonies. It really touched her heart, and she wants to come back! We have really been struggling to have people come to church, so it was really nice to have an investigator there.

Hurricane season started yesterday. We are expect 13 named storms roll through in the coming months. Needless to say we have emergency preparation all taken care of. We have been blessed with a few rainstorms that have rolled through in the past few days. Normal storms here are the really bad ones back in Utah. At about lunch time everyday there is a thunderstorm that usually shakes the buildings and pours for a few minutes. Within an hour all signs of the storm are gone. This week is tax free week for emergency preparedness, so I will be stocking up on bottled water.

This week we also had a wonderful district meeting. We were asked to think about one act of disobedience that we could sacrifice. I choose to sacrifice my fear of opening my mouth to everyone.  It felt so good. I felt a sense of relief come over me. I gave my fear to God and He is in control now. I am so grateful for an inspired district leader. He prepared trainings that were meant for me. It was one of the most spiritual meetings that I have been in. I needed to know that everything was going to be alright. This brings to mind a talk that Jeffrey R. Holland gave a while ago called "missionary work and the atonement." Inside of it he says:

"Anyone who does any kind of missionary work will have occasion to ask, Why is this so hard? Why doesn’t it go better? Why can’t our success be more rapid? Why aren’t there more people joining the Church? It is the truth. We believe in angels. We trust in miracles. Why don’t people just flock to the font? Why isn’t the only risk in missionary work that of pneumonia from being soaking wet all day and all night in the baptismal font?

You will have occasion to ask those questions. I have thought about this a great deal. I offer this as my personal feeling. I am convinced that missionary work is not easy because salvation is not a cheap experience. Salvation never was easy. We are The Church of Jesus Christ, this is the truth, and He is our Great Eternal Head. How could we believe it would be easy for us when it was never, ever easy for Him? It seems to me that missionaries and mission leaders have to spend at least a few moments in Gethsemane. Missionaries and mission leaders have to take at least a step or two toward the summit of Calvary.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. I’m not talking about anything anywhere near what Christ experienced. That would be presumptuous and sacrilegious. But I believe that missionaries and investigators, to come to the truth, to come to salvation, to know something of this price that has been paid, will have to pay a token of that same price.

For that reason I don’t believe missionary work has ever been easy, nor that conversion is, nor that retention is, nor that continued faithfulness is. I believe it is supposed to require some effort, something from the depths of our soul.

If He could come forward in the night, kneel down, fall on His face, bleed from every pore, and cry, “Abba, Father (Papa), if this cup can pass, let it pass,”  then little wonder that salvation is not a whimsical or easy thing for us. If you wonder if there isn’t an easier way, you should remember you are not the first one to ask that. Someone a lot greater and a lot grander asked a long time ago if there wasn’t an easier way.

The Atonement will carry the missionaries perhaps even more importantly than it will carry the investigators. When you struggle, when you are rejected, when you are spit upon and cast out and made a hiss and a byword, you are standing with the best life this world has ever known, the only pure and perfect life ever lived. You have reason to stand tall and be grateful that the Living Son of the Living God knows all about your sorrows and afflictions. The only way to salvation is through Gethsemane and on to Calvary. The only way to eternity is through Him—the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

I have to go through some hardship so that I can truly know how precious salvation is. Salvation is not easy, but it is attainable. I am trying my very best to trust in my Father in Heaven and Savior Jesus Christ. I know that they will bring me through. 

I can't believe that school is out. It feels like it was yesterday that it started. I can't believe how fast time flies. And yes it is so stinking hot and muggy here, I feel like I am in a sauna.

This week has been another hard one, it had its good days and its hard days. I wish that life could be one constant, but I guess it wouldn't be very fun if we had everything stay the same. We has a few miracles. I don't know why, but Heavenly Father has seen to bless us with three weeks of amazing numbers in a row. I have never seen higher numbers in my life. We are having 10+ other lessons in a week (my previous average was 5) and at least 2 member presents (which we usually get none of). We have also been having new investigators come out of nowhere. I think that the Lord is trying to help me see that even though we are going through a tough time, we are still being blessed and watched over.

I had one amazing miracle happen this week. I got a facebook message from Hailey's and Abbey's father Jeff. He wrote to me and said that he had seen a change in his family and that he had been talking to Tracy and that he wanted to take a leap of faith. He noticed that the change had come when they joined the church. He asked if he could meet with missionaries! It was amazing, I about flipped out of my chair when I read that message. He hasn't had any religion in his life for over 20 years, but he really wants to find God and happiness. I sent a referral for the Elders in his area, and Sister Houtz and I will teach him on facebook with Tracy's help. I am so excited! Maybe one day Tracy and him will decide to get married and they can be a forever family!

Today we are going to play volleyball with our district, and then heading to get a haircut (actually more of a trim) and a new satchel from target. It should be a good day. We haven't done anything fun for a few weeks because of miles and so we can't go far. It will be nice to get out and about, I have found that I need to do something "fun" on P-days to help me stay focused on the rest of the week.

Anyway, I love you all so very much! Thanks for all of the encouraging words. I love you!

Lots of love,

Sister Williams