Harry Potter and missionary work?

So this week has been good! We are working pretty hard and seeing a little bit of progress, but not as much as we want. We are still really struggling to find new investigators. Our zone is doing this thing based off of Harry Potter and house points where each area is a different house and since we have the Zone leaders in our branch and all of us have a great obsession with Harry Potter/ we all have some sort of Gryffindor apparel with us we are Gryffindor :). The Problem is that we earn points according to how well we do at meeting the standards of excellence which includes getting 3 new investigators each week. Our area has been a bit slow investigator wise lately, so we are losing and somehow Hufflepuff is way ahead of everyone, but we are trying.

This week we went through a lot of our former investigators and tried visiting them. No one was really interested, but at least we tried! We have also been trying to visit all of the less actives especially the ones we don't know up north in Oro Valley and Marana. We haven't been able to meet with anyone yet, but the active members of the ward are getting really excited about it so that's good! We are probably going to try again later this week!

We also did some knocking on Saturday.  We weren't able to really have many lessons, but we met some people who might be interested, so that's something! One lady we went to came out to talk to us for a while.  She was super nice, and we talked about how her son is living in Colorado Springs. She talked to us a lot about how our missionary work is going and how hard it is to find nice people here who are willing to listen. Apparently her daughter is friends with a family in our branch! Then we went to another house across the street and a teenage girl answered.  I kinda went off and recited the whole first lesson to her. I'm not so sure how interested she was, but she said that she would talk to her mom about it.  I know that at least I was following the promptings of the Spirit. I feel really lucky because there are a lot of moments where we go visit someone, and they ask us a specific question.  I always can think of a quote that I just read that answers it perfectly.  That's been happening a lot lately. I guess that's just part of the blessings that come from meaningful daily personal study!

One miracle that did happen this week is the girl who we set a baptismal date with last week has an older sister who is less active along with all of their family besides their dad who isn't a member. Anyways we've been wanting to start involving the whole family in lessons again, so that they can all be active again.  However, the older sister is never home or just uninterested.  When we went to visit them this past Wednesday night she was there and asking about fasting.  She even stayed for the lesson! It was super exciting because apparently she used to sit in on the lessons, but hasn't since I have gotten here! She told us that she misses going to church and wants to start going again, so we got to talk to her a bit about that.

We have also been blessed with a lot of meals lately! Apparently there is a set of 5 families in our branch who want to feed us all on the same day every single week which is insane.  It is kinda a problem because it means we won't be able to meet with all of the members who want to feed us besides them, so the sisters in charge of our food calendar are trying to figure out what to do about that!

This week I have been studying a lot about recognizing the Spirit, I really really like that section with the chart of scriptures that helps you identify how to recognize when the Holy Ghost is speaking to you, and I have been copying it down and reading all of the scriptures that go with it so that I can hang it up on my wall. I learned a lot from it this past week! I really like how it talks about when we are obedient we are able to have success and become better at different skills. I have found this especially true when it comes to learning Spanish! Recently it has become a lot easier to understand and speak to people because I’m constantly striving to have the spirit with me to teach me!

Not much else has happened this week beside the usual stuff.  Yesterday was the homecoming talk for the son of a sister in our relief society presidency. It was a really good talk and although I didn't understand all of it, I could feel the Spirit really strong. Just seeing his example really motivated me to try even harder and reminded me what it really means to be a servant of the Lord. I am super excited that right now I have the opportunity to be a missionary. It reminded me of why I am here serving to begin with! That scripture in D&C 4 about serving God with all your heart has been going through my mind all week. I really hope to be able to give my whole heart to this work! I only have 18 months as a missionary and I am almost done with 4 of them! It's crazy how fast it goes, so I better use my time here well!

I love you all and hope you are having a good week!!

Love,

Hermana Burgoyne