Week 25

There is so much to be grateful for and that is why I love this time of year so much! Thanksgiving is a time that we can all reflect on how blessed we truly are. I am grateful for my friends and family who all love and support me, I'm grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ and how much it has blessed my life, and I am most grateful this year to be a missionary in the Missouri St. Louis Mission. There isn't anywhere else I would rather be!

We had some great things happen this last week! 

Miracle #1: So we have lunch with a member in our ward every week, Sister Moore. Well Sister Moore's husband Dennis is not a member. She has been trying to be a good example to him and help him want to learn more about the gospel, but she doesn't want to force him into it. They have been having the missionaries come over every week for a year now and Dennis hasn't been super interested in learning more. Well this last week we asked Sister Moore what we could do to help Dennis and she said she just wasn't sure what else she could do. At the end of our visit we shared a few scriptures from the book of Enos and talked a little bit about the spirit. Sister Moore asked Dennis if he understood the spirit and he said no, so we talked about it a little. Then Sister Moore asked him if he wanted to take the missionary discussion and he said YES!! We were shocked and so thrilled at the same time. Sister Hill and I couldn't even believe what had happened. A whole year of missionaries coming over and Dennis is finally ready to learn. It was pretty cool. I've been able to see how the spirit prepares people to finally accept the gospel. We taught him the restoration on Friday and he took it all really well. We're gonna have to take things pretty slow because he doesn't have much religious background but we are pretty excited.

Miracle #2: We found the cutest family to teach!! About a month ago we met Allyssa and we told her what we do as missionaries. She thought it was pretty cool and said she would want to learn more, but wanted to ask her husband first. Well we got pretty busy and haven't been able to stop by for a while but when we finally did Allyssa told us that she was waiting for us to come by and that her husband Gavin was willing to learn more too. YAY! So we taught them the restoration yesterday and the whole time Gavin was like "yeah that makes sense that we would have a prophet on the earth" and the whole time I was thinking "yeah that does make sense." We gave them Book of Mormons and they said they would read. They are SUPER YOUNG! but they have two cute girls, 1 & 3. After the lesson Sister Hill and I were talking about how every time we teach people about the gospel it just makes so much sense, how could you not believe it? I am grateful for the knowledge that I do have and that I get to teach people how they can have peace and happiness in their lives. 

Miracle #3: Andrea knows the BOM is true!! We taught Andrea this last week and asked her about how her prayers have been going and if she feels like she has received an answer about Joseph Smith and the BOM. She told us that she knows the BOM is true and Joseph Smith was a prophet! It was pretty cool actually, she told us that she was at a car place waiting for her car to get fixed and she pulled up the BOM on her phone. She said she opened up to 4th Nephi and started reading and she just knew it was true. HOW COOL IS THAT? Andrea is one of those "golden" investigators. She has truly been so prepared. Everything we teach her she agrees with. We taught her the Word of wisdom this last week and she goes, "I don't drink or smoke and i don't even like coffee or tea." WHAT? I swear everybody out here drinks tea so we were pumped that she said she would have no issues with it. 

I have seen so many miracles on my mission and I am grateful for God's hand in my life, he truly has blessed me so much! 

I am grateful for all of you and hope that you have the best thanksgiving!!

XOXO 

Sister Turpin 

wW

Enjoying our last few days of warm weather!

Thanksgiving with Joy, she doesn't like to have her picture taken.

One of our favorites, Sister Steinmeyer

Joy made me a cheetah purse, SO CUTE!!

Week 24

Today I got to check another thing off my bucket list! We finally made the "journey to the top" of the arch in St. Louis. We have been wanting to get permission to go up to St. Louis for Pday to hang out with some other sisters for the longest time and we finally got everything to work out to go today and of course it was raining all day long! Even though we were wet and rainy and cold we still had a good time:)

I'm getting really bad at remembering what happens each week.. I must be getting old or something;) 

Let's see here's the latest update from good old Missouri:

We had exchanges this last week. I went up to Glen Carbon, Illinois for the day with Sister Ewell. I have only had 4 exchanges on my mission so far and 3 of them have been with Sister Ewell. Probably because there is so much I need to learn from her! We always have a good time when we are together though and she is going home at the end of the month so that is really sad. Nothing too exciting happened in Illinois but while I was gone Sister Hill and Sister Walker had a good day in Potosi. They were able to pick up a new investigator, Josie. Sister Hill and I knocked on Josie's door about a month ago but she was busy. We have gone back a few times but she has never been home. Well finally on Tuesday the sisters knocked on her door and she was home. YAY!! Persistence is key:) it is so hard to be persistent in missionary work sometimes, but when we are then we are always blessed. Josie doesn't have much religious background but they taught her how to pray and about Jesus Christ she told them that she wants to learn more and that she felt the chills when they watched the because He lives video. We are super stoked to get to teach Josie more!! 

Andrea is still on the baptismal calendar for the end of the month. We taught her this last week about the gospel of Jesus Christ. She is so funny, she started taking out her notebook to take notes while we were teaching her. It's amazing to see the difference between those who are prepared to hear the gospel and those who aren't. At the end of the lesson we invited her to pray and she said "Please help me to know that these things are true. Well actually, you already kind of have, you've been doing a good job at that so keep it up." hahah it was so cute! I love hearing our investigators pray because they are always so sincere and from the heart. 

This weekend we had Stake Conference. President and Sister Morgan were there and we got to see them at the Saturday night session. It was the best, just like seeing our parents! Well not quite, but almost as good;) We got to hear from Elder Rhodes of the 70 and Sister Hill was called on to bear her testimony. Our Stake President, President Dixon gave a really good talk about doing the Lord's work His way. He talked about how sometimes we think we know what is best or how we should be doing things, but God's way is always the best way. 

Also, I can't believe it is already the holiday season. Thanksgiving and Christmas are right around the corner. I am mostly excited because we get these new pass along card for the new christmas video "A Savior is Born." It releases on November 29th so you all should watch it!! Plus President Morgan told us all today that we can listen to any christmas music from any LDS artist. WOOOO!!! Mom and Dad you should totally send me some more CDs:) Our mission can only listen to MOTAB during the week and then on Pdays we can listen to EFY music or other music from LDS.org so we are super pumped that we can listen to more than mormon tabernacle choir. The things that get missionaries excited right??

Well that's all for this week. Here's a quote that Sister Walker told Sister Hill and I.. "Be yourself, but don't be afraid to change."
XOXO

Sister Turpin 

Sister Hill and I are QT's!

We love our Sister exchanges, Sister Walker, Sister Ewell, Sister Hill and me!

Thanks for the scarves mom, I love them!

Getting creative with fall time pictures!

Wet and cold at the Arch in St. Louis! 

Week 23

HAPPY UNIFICATION DAY! I hope that everyone enjoys my favorite holiday.

lol just kidding. unification day isn't a holiday, but here's a funny story!

The first Sunday we had combined as a new ward was fast and testimony meeting and Brother Vinson bore his testimony and said "the unification of this branch and ward needed to happen." Sister Hill and I looked at each other and started laughing because we were pretty sure unification wasn't a word. Well we may have teased him a little bit about it and Thursday when we went over to their house for dinner Brother Vinson informed us that unification is in fact a word. So ever since Sister Hill and I have learned that, we have been using the word unification as much as possible:)

Anyways.... on to more important stuff!

We set a baptismal date with Andrea for the end of November!! YAY!! It seems like most of the people we have been teaching for a while just aren't progressing. it can be super frustrating! but, andrea has been such a blessing to us! We invited her to be baptized at the end of the month and she was a little bit nervous about it cause she feels like she isn't ready. We assured her that we would help her prepare for the date and that she will be ready by then and to pray and see if this is what Heavenly Father wants for her. She also came to church this week and it was great because we had a "munch and mingle" afterwards and she was able to make friends with some of the members. It's so awesome when we have members who help fellowship the people we are teaching. It makes our job a little bit easier! 

We went to visit Julie K last night to give her a big print BOM. She has a hard time seeing the small print in the book and mormon and we have been waiting FOREVER for a large print one to come in to give to her, but we finally got it! Julie told us that it was her birthday on Friday and we felt kind of bad that we missed it, but we told her that we got this BOM for her as a birthday present:) haha so then Julie tells us that she wants us to sign the BOM. She has had quite a few missionaries teach her in her lifetime but last night she said, "I like all of the missionaries that have come, but you two are by far my favorites. I really love youins (p.s. you-ins is a missouri term, super weird. everyone out here says it!)" OH yeah that's right!! Sister Hill and I are officially Julie's favorite missionaries. We are still working to get her a divorce... but we did commit her to read two pages from the Book of Mormon every day and we gave her a cute BOM chart to color in, she liked that!

A few other things: We got to see Hayden this week. It's been a minute since we've seen him because he's been busy with family issues/work. But we were able to reset his baptismal date. He picked January 8th, because that's his grandma's birthday that just passed away. 

We had president interviews this week in Cape. It's almost a 2 hour drive down to Cape Girardeau, but it is the prettiest drive so we always love when we get to go down! Plus it was good to see President Morgan, he's pretty cool I guess. 

We started teaching this lady DD. Her husband is a member and from Ohio. They just moved down here. He actually knows my friend Emily Bradford (I cheered with her at BYU) who is serving in the Columbus Ohio mission right now. SMALL WORLD!! 

Super Saturday was this last Saturday! It's just an activity that the ward does every year where they do a whole bunch of crafts and it pretty much takes up the whole day. Well Sister Hill and I got a little crafty so that was fun!

That's about all for this week.

I hope that everyone is doing well back at home. Thanks for all the emails/letters. I have the best family/friends out there!

LOVE YOU ALL.

XOXO

Sister Turpin 

We love the Fall time here in Missouri!

Rock On!

p.s. I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT THIS!! haha okay this is really funny actually. So two weeks ago Sister Hill and I got asked to sing a musical number at ZLT well we told the Zone leaders that the Farmington Elders are pretty musical so they called them and the Elders said that they would sing if we sang with them. So we ended up doing a musical number together. Sister Hill played the piano and I sang with the Elders. Well then the Elders were at a dinner appointment with the ward chorister and told them about our musical number we sang and the ward chorister decided we needed to sing in sacrament meeting. So yesterday in church we did the musical number again. You would be so proud of me mom:) LOL I have decided 2 musical numbers is enough for my whole mission right?

Week 22

Okay.. How is it already November? I swear it was just June yesterday and I was leaving to go to the MTC and now tomorrow is my 5 month mark. HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN? 

We had a great Halloween here in Missouri. I hope that everyone else had as much fun as we did;) (probably not because there is nothing as fun as being a missionary!) We did get a small break Saturday night to do some halloween festivities. We hung out with Audre of course. We carved a pumpkin and watched the Joseph Smith movie. It's one of my favorites. If you have never seen it then you totally should go watch it!! 

We see lots of miracles happen in missionary work and here are three from last week.

1. We went to Leadwood to hopefully see some of our investigators and teach some lessons. Well of course nobody was home! So we were trying to decide whether or not to stay or go back to Desloge. We were kind of short on miles since it was the end of the month so we decided to stay and knock on some doors. Neither of us really wanted to, but we did anyways. So we picked a street and started knocking. The first 3 doors no one was home. But the 4th one a lady answered and told us they had just moved there from Louisiana and were actually looking for a church. We explained how we were missionaries and I told her that my dad had served his mission in Louisiana. We told her we were both from Idaho and turns out that she lived in Salmon Idaho for a while. She had the cutest daughter named Aurora (I love disney princesses!) and their last name was Sasser (My best friend's last name!) There were so many coincidences with her that we knew it was not a coincidence we knocked on their door. It was cool! They said they would come to church, unfortunately we didn't see them there but we are hoping to go back and teach them this week!

2. WE SET A BAPTISMAL DATE WITH JULIE K!!!! Okay before I tell you when the date is here's a little background info. Julie wants to get baptized but she is living with a man she is not married to. She has to get married first in order to get baptized but in order to marry the man she's living with she has to get a divorce and she doesn't have the money to pay for it. So we have been working to try to figure out how to get her a divorce, so she can get married so she can get baptized. #TheStruggle. Anyways we wanted to set a goal for baptism in the future. Julie wasn't quite feeling it.. she told us maybe in 3 years from now. We told her that the only way God is gonna help her to get a divorce is if she makes a goal and starts working towards it. So we set a baptismal date for a year from now. October 29th, 2016! haha we were pumped!! And today we are going to the court house to learn more about divorces. Who would have thought I would be learning this on my mission? LOL

3. We invited our new investigator Andrea to be baptized and she said yes! This was only our second lesson with Andrea. We decided to watch the 20 minute restoration DVD with her and she really enjoyed it. She compares herself a lot to Joseph Smith because she is wanting to find truth. The best way for us to find truth is to go straight to the source and ask. AKA we need to pray! That is the only way for us to know for ourselves what is true. We are really excited about Andrea and can't wait to teach her more!!

i hope that all is well back at home! I love hearing from everybody. thanks for all your emails, prayers, and love.
XOXO

Sister Turpin

Sometimes you find a blue toilet on a porch while tracting.

Triplets! who wore it better?

Halloween cookies. thanks grandma hill:)