What a week :)

Hey everyone!

This week was crazy, but so wonderful at the same time. It started off on Monday when we went on a member split...I was with Sister Bourassa and we taught Gary a really incredible lesson on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It went SO well! He said he'd be at church, but then he wasn't there yesterday...we have another appointment for tonight, so we'll see what happened. Then Tuesday morning we got up and went to Liline's house with her aunt and that was ROUGH. She hadn't gone to church on Sunday and had completely regressed (I think that's a word...). She had a hangover and was really frustrated that we were there. We started crying and I opened the Book of Mormon to read a scripture and she said "I'm not reading from the Book of MOrmon Sister Lindsey. If you're going to share a scripture with me, it needs to be from the bible." SO Sad! I guess her friends on Sunday had told her a lot of stuff about our church that isn't true and had convinced her that the Book of Mormon contradicts the Bible. She tried to share a scripture with us, but when she opened up the French Bible, the verse was completely different than it was in English and the contradiction wasn't there anymore. It would've been kind of funny if it hadn't been so sad. She told us she didn't want to be baptized anymore and that she wasn't interested in learning more. Her aunt got frustrated with her and they ended up yelling at each other and she left, slamming the door behind her. NOT good. We didn't quite know what to do, so we decided to write her a letter. We prayed constantly while writing the letter and gave her 3 pieces of advice: remember what the Lord has already taught you and done for you, don't turn to alcohol, and don't get discouraged -- the answers come little by little. We felt at the end that the letter really was inspired by God and we knew it was what she needed to hear, so we said another prayer and dropped it off on Friday. She called us on Saturday and left a message to tell us that she had read it over and over again and cried through the whole thing and she was so confused. We called her back but she hasn't answered. We're not sure if she'll start the discussions again with us, but sometime in the future I'm sure she'll accept the Gospel.

Also this week we taught a really great lesson to our member. She's struggling a bit and isn't able to get a temple recommend and just wanted to talk to her about her options. We had a really great lesson with her about the importance of going to the temple and the Spirit was really strong. She was crying through the whole lesson and at the end Sister Davis said "that has completely changed the way I will forever do visiting teaching. If every visiting teaching lesson was like that, everyone would do their visits every week." It was just a really powerful lesson. We also taught several other people. Felipe was one of them but it was so sad...we were supposed to visit him on Wednesday so we set up the lesson, went with Sister Medina, and knocked on the door for 20 minutes and NO ONE answered. We left a note and decided to try again later. That night he called us (he doesn't have a phone so he borrowed his friend's) and asked where we were. He said he'd been waiting at home ALL DAY and NO ONE had shown up. It was so crazy. So we set up an appointment for the next day and went back...turns out the first time we'd walked into the wrong apartment building and knocked for 20 minutes at the wrong door. Kind of funny :) But the lessons went really well with him and he came to church on Sunday and had a great time. I'm really excited for him :)

Also, we had a lesson with the Paul family (the less actives that we've been meeting with almost weekly since we got here) and it was SO great! They were SO excited to tell us that they had started reading scriptures together and praying together as a couple. AND they came to church on Sunday! It was the first time in over a year that they'd come, and it was so exciting! Everyone welcomed them really well and I think they enjoyed it :) It was a really great week.

I hope everything is going well with you...we have zone conference tomorrow and then we're going on a split and I'm going to a Spanish area on Thursday! I'm way excited. It should be fun. I hope you all have a wonderful week! I love you all tons! :)

Love, Sister Nicole Lindsey

Everything here is going great...I talked about the most exciting things in the bigger email. Some other funny lessons I learned though that I forgot to put in:

1. beets should never be made in to muffins. one of the sisters in our ward gave us oatmeal muffins and we told her honestly afterwards (she had asked us to) that they were kind of flavorless and the texture was strange. She agreed with us and then we talked about more foods and she asked if we liked beets. I said yes, Sister Davis said no. So the next day she brought me a beet muffin. It was not my favorite, haha.
2. Don't cook when you're tired. I made 2 loaves of banana bread and I ended up having to cook them for 2 hours because the centers weren't done. So the edges were burned, the center wasn't cooked, and it was way too banana-ie. I had no idea what happened, but it was a miserable failure. In the middle of the night that night I woke up with the thought "Flour!" and realized that I had doubled everything except for the flour. Kind of funny.
3. This one is a sad story instead of funny: I had to call Frere Caron (the member we lived with in Quebec) and cancel the contract on the apartment. They're not putting sisters there again in the near future. It was really