Searching and Finding Truth: Surprises

Ola!
This has been a pretty great week. We had our zone training meeting on Wednesday, and then we also had a special sister meeting on Thursday! All of the sisters in the mission met in Raleigh with the mission president and his wife. They shared some insights with us and it was a great day! There are over 70 sisters in the mission now, apparently in just January there were only 8! We learned a lot about staying positive and only trying to worry about our "circle of influence", or those things in your life that you have control over. We also got to go Christmas caroling this week with the youth, and we delivered stockings to people in an assisted living home. It is so nice to do service and help bring some joy to people during the Christmas season. That's really what it should be about, is serving others and helping them to feel Christ's love. We also watched the Christmas devotional last night! It was great! (http://www.lds.org/broadcasts/archive/christmas-devotional/2013/12?lang=eng).

Miracle story of the week: We were biking all day on Tuesday, visiting less-active members and talking with people along the way. We stopped to talk to a man on his porch for a few minutes. He really wasn't interested in learning more, but was nice and talked with us. As we were talking, I kind of starting feeling like we should just keep going since he wasn't interested anyways. But, when we asked if anyone he knew would be interested, he pointed us to his neighbors to try. We knocked on the door, and a little girl opened. Before we could even explain who we were, the mother just said "Come on in!" and talked with us for a little. We came back a few days later to teach her, and she committed to be baptized in January! It showed me that the Lord really does know what He is doing, and that as long as we are obedient, He will provide a way. Although we can't foresee how something is going to work out or why a certain thing happened, He knows exactly how it will be. We can trust in Him to take care of us and as long as we follow Him, we will be fine. We may certainly have to go through struggles along the way, but if we have the right attitude, we can learn from those and have some pretty neat experiences. I know that the gospel is for imperfect people. Jesus Christ teaches us how to change our very natures and become the best version of ourselves. Though it is a difficult process sometimes, we truly become better as we are obedient and faithful.

Com amor,
Sister Dieter