Sister Breanne Turpin : Week 16

Hello everyone!

It's been another great week here in the Missouri St. Louis Mission! We were able to have a mission conference last Thursday and it was pretty great! Elder C. Scott Grow from the quorum of the 70 came and spoke to us. He said SO MANY good things. I'll just share a few of my favorites:) One thing he focused on was the difference between hastening missionary work and hastening the work of salvation. We should all be hastening the work of salvation. This includes reactivating less actives (home & visiting teaching), teaching people the gospel, doing family history and temple work, and retaining recent converts. We need everyone to be apart of this work, not just missionaries!! The members really are so essential to hastening the work of salvation. We talked about different ways that we can work with our wards and branches to do this. Elder Grow quoted Elder Packer saying "Things that never change, tend to remain the same." We get so into our comfortable routines sometimes that we don't want to change. However, how are we going to hasten the work and improve it if we are doing things differently? Elder Grow's wife also spoke to us about being active missionaries. She said that if we wanted to remain active when we get off our missions then we need to be active missionaries right now. We can't just go through the motions of missionary work, we need to live and apply the principles of the gospel that we are teaching to others.

I learned so much from listening to the both of them talk. We also each were given the opportunity to shake each of their hands and talk to them briefly. I know that everyone says this about their mission... but the Missouri St. Louis Mission really is the BEST MISSION EVER! President and Sister Morgan are so wonderful and do so much for our missionaries. Elder and Sister Grow both said that they would be happy if any of their grandchildren got called to serve in this mission because of what a great mission President and wife we have. That's pretty cool:) I feel super blessed to be able to be apart of the Lord's work especially here in this mission!

This week really just flew by! Here are some of the highlights:

Tuesday was kind of a rough, boring day. We had some people cancel on us and nobody seemed to be home. Those happen quite a bit in missionary life, but you learn to deal with it! I was getting kind of down though and prayed that Wednesday would be a better day. Well Heavenly Father always answers our prayers! Wednesday morning we got a text from the mission office with a referral. We were so excited! This rarely happens. Also we went to try a lady that we had left a pamphlet with and she was busy eating dinner but told us we could come back next week but we saw the pamphlet on her table and it was open and she had totally read it! We were way excited about it! It turns out that the referral we got that morning wasn't actually in our area, but it's okay because it was just the pick me up that I needed that day. Heavenly Father blesses us with tender mercies every day we just have to be aware of them!

We had some exciting news on Friday. We texted Rose and Steve to see what day we could meet with them and Steve said "send me the address to the church building and we can talk after church" we were like wait, what just happened?! We have the hardest time getting our investigators to come to church but this week Rose and Steve finally came!!! It was such a blessing. We went over to their house afterwards for dinner and asked them what they thought about it. They both said it was a little boring, but that they would keep trying it! They are such good people and really do want to know the truth. It's hard for me to try to be patient with people, but I am definitely learning.

Anyways that's about all that happened this week. I am grateful everyday that I get to be apart of this great work. Being a missionary truly is the best!

XOXO

Sister Turpin