Oh Canada :)

Hey everybody!

This week was wonderful! It finally started warming up and the snow started melting...on Friday it got up to 10 degrees! That's the warmest it's been in a long time! We were outside in just little sweaters...so nice :) But then it started getting cold again and today it's back to -12 or so. But at least for a little while it got warm and we can actual see the road now instead of just snow everywhere.

Sister Palmer and I had a lot of fun this week as well. We taught Denis on Saturday at a member's house in our ward and it went so well. He told us how the Plan of Salvation that we had taught the week before had answered questions that he didn't even know he had. He was always unsure as to how a loving Father in Heaven could help us right up until we die and then send us to hell for the rest of eternity or how a little child who died before being baptized could be stuck in limbo forever without a chance of seeing his loved ones again, but the Plan of Salvation taught him how merciful and loving God really is. He does want us to succeed, so he gives EVERYONE a chance to hear the Gospel and to be baptized, even after this life for those who don't have that chance here. And for those who don't accept it, they are still given a place in one of the glories (telestial or terrestrial). So they don't receive the same reward as someone who does try their hardest here, but they won't be eternally miserable either. And those were things that he had wondered about since he was really little but had kind of forgotten about and then the Gospel answered those questions. It was so neat. So this week we taught him the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it was so funny because it was at a member's house and she was there talking a lot when we talked about faith and repentance and then when she saw that we were going to talk about baptism she was afraid that we were going to commit him and so she left the room to go get juice and cookies and then came back and said "So have they gotten to the gift of the Holy Ghost yet?" Kind of funny. We told that to our zone leaders and Elder Mongillo said "Yeah, members are chickens." We laughed quite a bit about it especially since that baptismal committment was probably the easiest one we've ever done. He accepted so readily. He really is trying to follow Christ and learn as much as he can. Even yesterday when we talked about the Word of Wisdom in Sunday School (that was a HORRIBLE lesson by the way...we were teaching it but we didn't have a single solid member in the class and our less actives and recent converts went off on all kinds of random tangents and we had the hardest time bringing it back to what we wanted to talk about. Luckily Frere Angulo came in halfway through and was able to respond to some of their questions....it was not the best lesson we've ever taught) he just came up to us afterwards and said he'd like to discuss the word of wisdom another time with us, so we're teaching it to him next. It could have scared him away completely because he doesn't follow it completely now, but it'll be good. I just love working with him :)

Oh, we also had a pretty funny experience this week: we ran to the supermarket one time during our lunch hour to pick up a couple of random things and I got distracted by the valentine's day candy (it was 50% off...I had to at least look :) ) and this man came up to Sister Palmer and I and asked if we were sisters. I said yes, just assuming he was talking about sister missionaries because really Sister Palmer and I don't look anything alike, but then he really meant sisters and so he looked at me and said "tu es la plus belle" and then turned to Sister Palmer and said "et tu es la plus jolie." So I'm the prettiest and she's the cutest. It made our day :)

Also, we had a cray adventure...we went to this one street on Friday and tried to visit a less active who wasn't home so we just knocked the rest of the street. We were parked in our car afterwards making a couple of calls and we saw this police car drive really fast right in front of us then back up really fast all the way to the street right behind us and set up a road block. We weren't quite sure what was going on, so we decided to drive away and saw a fire truck coming with another police officer. We looked to the other side and saw a tempo (one of those canvas/plastic tents that they cover their driveways with like in the picture I sent you a couple of weeks ago) was completely up in flames. Crazy. Then the next day we went back to that same road to visit some of the potentials that we had found the day before and a little farther down there were 3 fire trucks and a million police officers and a 4th fire truck came while we were there and there were firemen on top of this smoking apartment building. It was so insane. We decided it had to be arson. And we even knew who did it! There were these 14 year old boys the day before who had started yelling at us for being "temoin jehovahs" and then had tried to throw snowballs at us (they didn't have very good aim.) and we decided it was them. We thought about telling the police but then decided they could probably figure it out themselves. Just kidding....it was probably just a coincidence that there were 2 fires on the same street but we've decided to take a break from knocking there anyways, haha.

So other than that we also taught a couple of new people. one was a pass off from the Spanish elders named Jean and he was this 70 year old retired man who was really not worth visiting. He had told the elders that he didn't believe that woman could teach but they gave him to us anyways. So we went over and he told us this 30 minute story about how he switched religions about 15 times and then wanted one with a prophet and found this other church (I forgot it's name but I've met a couple of people from it before) that has a prophet and he was saying how a prophet's main role is to denounce false practices. I told him it was also to testify of Christ and tried to share a Book of Mormon scripture and he just kept interrupting me to talk about the Bible and how the Bible says that woman can't preach and he told the story of Paul twice and we said that we knew it well and then I tried sharing a scripture again and he said that before I shared that, he wanted to share a story with me in the Bible and if I reacted well, he'd listen to me; if I didn't react well, he wouldn't listen to me. I knew exactly which one he was going to share...there's one in Corinthians (I think,...or Ephesians) where Paul says that women should not speak in church and if they have questions they should ask their husbands at home and their husbands can tell answer their questions or ask the preacher, but women shouldn't talk in church (Joseph Smith Translation says "rule") and we knew that if he read that and we still kept trying to teach, he'd not listen, but if we read it and stopped teaching than he'd be more sure than every that he was right. So we just left. We encouraged him to read the Book of Mormon and he told us he had great respect for us, but was worried about our salvation since we said we believed in the Bible but weren't living it. It was so frustrating because there were all kinds of scriptures we could have shared or stories we could have told about women in the Bible and there's a scripture just a chapter or so before that one that talks about how women can prophecy if their heads are covered and long hair is a covering of the head, but all of those stories and scriptures would have just been to argue and not to listen. It's sad sometimes when people come so close to the truth but then get hung up on little things or listen more to their own reason than to the Spirit. oh well...it made for a good story in my journal :)

So this week was good. We had a lot of fun with the members and worked hard. I just love this ward and I'm so glad to be able to serve here...I really love it :) Thanks for all your support and I hope you all have a wonderful week. i love you!

Love, Sister Nicole Lindsey