Week 57

Well.... Transfer calls. I'm leaving and going to Cookeville TN. We all saw this coming, but my 6 glorious months in Hixson are coming to an end😔 I will be leaving on Wednesday and it has been hard. Saying goodbye to people is the WORST. This ward has my heart and I don't know what I will do without them.

But besides the sadness of that reality, I have had a pretty solid week! Something Ive seen myself improving on is following promptings. All this time I thought I just didn't receive them, but it turns out I just didn't know how to recognize them. It's a very common problem, but this week I just felt really happy with the amount of promptings that I felt and followed! Here are some results of those:

We were at the tippy top of our area and had finished long house of knocking doors, lessons, and knocking more doors. I was so tired and super excited when I hopped back in the car to drive down back to town to get sushi with my comp. I had been looking forward to it all day cuz it was a long one. But then on our way back we both had charlene's name pop into our head. We weren't actively teaching her, but we were about to pass her street. We didn't make a desicion fast enough if we should stop by, so we passed it. But then the prompting came again as a thought that said "you'll feel bad for the rest of the day if you don't follow this prompting". That hit me because I hate "what if" thoughts. So I quickly spun around and drove back up to her street. Charlene wasn't even home, but her oldest son answered the door and he has been seeking peace, and he grew up religious but doesn't seem to have a super solid relationship with Christ, but he wants it. We introduced the book of mormon to him and he gladly accepted one! We will be teaching him in the future and it's all because we followed a prompting to spin the car around! He is really cool and I see SO much potential with him. It makes me really sad that I won't be here for it, but it was an honor to be the missionary to find him. Oh and we did go and get sushi after that, and it tasted much better than it would have;)

Leticia Simms got baptized!! She is an 85 year old Filipino women that the elders were teaching and she was SO prepared. It was a beautiful baptism😇

We also had an AMAZING lesson with our new friend named Bo and we taught him the whole restoration and he loved it. Yall this is huge cuz I can't remember the last time I got to teach a FULL restoration lesson and have them accept it ALL. It was so refreshing and the spirit was so strong. He was eager to take a book of mormon and read it. It felt so good to see a book of mormon be treated the way it is supposed to. Bo is amazing and he WILL be baptized one day, I can feel it. He just glows. 

We also stopped by a friend named Vivi's house and i got to play with 4 crazy puppies hehe it was fun:) 

Another wild thing! Jaquline Wilson who served a mission in this exact same mission four years ago came back to visit and met with us for like an hour telling us about a bunch of people we should go visit that weren't in our areabook! It was such a miracle!!! 

Yall, do you remember when I asked for prayers for us to find new people to teach?? MIRACLES have been happening left and right recently and there is no way to explain it besides the power of prayer! So thank you so much for remembering and caring 🙏

We had MLC on Thursday (a long meeting where the mission leadership gathers in Knoxville to talk about the needs of the mission) and it was a really edifying meeting. Normally meetings like this stress me out, but this one left me feeling uplifted and motivated to go out, work hard, and change the mission. It's really cool being in leadership because you get to see all the behind the scenes and how much the leaders care about each individual missionary. I grown to love the sisters in my zone, and I'll be sad to leave them. But luckily, I'll still be the STL over the Cookeville Zone!! I'm so excited to get to know and serve the sister missionaries in that zone! AND this it wild yall, my very first area was Crossville (the wild place) and I'll be over that area!! So I'll get to go in exchanges there and be back in that apartment and area! It'll be so trippy, but I'm so excited:))  it's been a year since I've been there! So I'm excited to the little things like that.

But yeah, that was my week! Quite a bit, but it was a good one! There will be a ton of changes this week and I pretty nervous, but I've done it before so I know I'll be fine 👌