Inviting the Spirit in our daily lives

Dear Reed,

 

Is Rex really in Gresham? That's crazy! The white mountains are taking Oregon by storm. Gresham is the cream of the crop! I love it so much here. The people are great, my ward is great, and my companion is great. The weather is not getting cooler, nor will it ever get cooler I fear. It is blazing hot here! I thought Oregon was really cool but it's so stinkin hot! That's okay though, i still love it.

 

Tell the tiny boy I love him! I wish I could watch him play football this year. That would be awesome if you had Austin over for family home evening! Make sure to invite some non members to that.

 

Well, I better tell you about our crazy week. So we are teaching this guy named Scottie. He is a little older than me and his girlfriend is a member. We were able to set a baptismal date with him for the 27th of September! The real highlight is Lois, the blind and partially deaf lady. We set her date for a couple weeks away and she is so excited. I want to go more in depth with my emails but I don't have time and there's no way you can grasp how amazing these things are. I just can't adequately put it in words. My explanations don't do it justice. But we have those two baptisms coming up and I'm stoked about them.

 

We had an awesome experience this week that strengthened my testimony of God's timing. So we are teaching this family and the kids won't pray unless we bring them cookies. We really want them to pray, so we made cookies on our lunch hour and planned to bring them with us for our lesson later that night. Well, we forgot the cookies, so we had to run home later in the evening to pick them up and a few minutes after we closed the door we heard a knock. We went over and opened it and lo and behold, here stands in front of us the 22 year old comcast guy trying to sell us internet. We told him that we don't use internet on our missions and that opened up a ton of questions about what we do and don't do as missionaries. This discussion was a great opening act for him to begin asking questions that pertained to the plan of salvation. We started teaching him while we stood there and decided we wanted to go a little more in depth. Sister Morby makes each missionary these laminated cut outs of the points of the plan of salvation, so we all sat down of our concrete porch, laid out the cut outs, and began teaching victor the plan of salvation. It was amazing! He was so intrigued and he just kept asking more and more questions. We still had to go teach the cookie family so we had to cut the lesson short, even though we had talked for about 45 minutes. We exchanged numbers and he really wants us to meet some of his friends too. That night we got texts from him. He had been on Mormon.org looking up answers to more questions and texting us and asking the ones he couldn't find on there. He really wants to learn more and he asked us to meet him at this vegan burrito place somewhere in Portland. Portland is weird. I could never see Eagar having a vegan burrito place. I'm not even sure what that is. But, we were excited and we are going to be teaching him this week.

 

So every Tuesday and Thursday we teach New Testament and Book of Mormon classes down at the church. Remember the Free Masons we did service for? Well, we invited them and a couple of them came. We found out that they live in sandy so we passed them off to the sandy sisters, but that was really exciting! They are very interested in learning more.

 

I got to speak in sacrament meeting yesterday and my topic was "inviting the spirit in our daily lives." It got me thinking, when I'm invited somewhere, what usually is the driving force that makes me want to go? Food. It's always food. I believe that's the same with our spirit. We are promised as we take the sacrament that we "may always have His spirit to be with" us. The key word is may. He may stay, he may not. It all depends on what you feed him! I know that as we read our scriptures daily and pray and ask for the spirit to attend us, we can more fully enjoy His influence in our daily lives. And who doesn't want that? In Galatians we read that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance." I need each of those blessings and qualities daily as we all do. The spirit is just like Dad at any family function, He won't stay unless you feed Him. We need to nourish our spirits daily just like we do our bodies. Well, that's all I got for now! I love you all very much! Happy birthday to stellaphant! Work hard, pray hard

Sister U

 

Loving it in Gresham

dear mother,

hello all the way from Gresham! i cant believe i got the ax, but i must say i am super happy to be here up near the beautiful mt hood. yes dad, its in oregon. i cant believe you went to elder davis's homecoming! that is so weird to me.

 

we had a really great week here in the walters hill ward. we are teaching this woman named Lois. she's in her 70's or 80's and she is completely blind and a little deaf. i am learning so much about the importance of teaching by the spirit because nothing else gets through to her. we taught her this week about the priesthood and why its so significant that it was restored to the earth. every time i teach about the priesthood my gratitude for it grows. i know that the power of the priesthood is real and i know that it is found in this church because i know with all my heart that this is Christ's church. He told me Himself through the power of the Holy Ghost. its His church, He stands at the head of it. i know it. anyways we taught her about that and invited her to be baptized and she accepted! she is really nervous about going under water though since she cant see, hear, or walk. i know that this will be a challenge for her but what an act of faith! she was telling everyone at church that she is getting baptized and she is super excited about it.

 

something else happened that was pretty crazy, i met Rachel Poche's cousins! they are in my ward! and i cant remember their names for the life of me, but i'll figure it out and let you know. i was pretty pumped about that.

 

we had the opportunity this week to clean a Free Mason Lodge and it was a lot of fun. they took us on a tour of the lodge, which is similar to a temple. they asked us to play and sing a song for them on the piano so our entire district sang praise to the man. the spirit flooded the room. by the end of the service day the members of the lodge were super interested in what we believe so we taught them as a distrct and invited them to the new testament class that we hold every tuesday and they agreed. so it'll be great to see them all there tomorrow! 

 

we see a lot of miracles every day and its hard to pick what ones to share but i thought that those ones were pretty cool. i am blessed to be serving in this beautiful corner of the world and to be surrounded by the elect. oh, and are we related to morris udall? and if so, how? i get asked that every day of my life. tell baby boyee happy birthday. my birthday is on thursday this year too so we are birthday twins.  and happy birthday to kendall, she is going to love her mission. i love you all very much! work hard, pray hard!

supa dupa fly sista u

Dear mom,
This has been the craziest week yet. We saw so many miracles! We taught more lessons last week than had been taught in that area since it opened in October so that was really exciting for us. We both knew it was probably going to be sister sparrows last week in the area so we wanted to end with a bang!

We were able to teach Richard this week. He came to church last Sunday and he really enjoyed it. We set up a lesson for Wednesday and it was our first time teaching him ever. We were able to teach him the restoration and he just soaked it up! It's funny how sometimes the truth comes so naturally to the elect of God.  At the end of the lesson we invited him to be baptized and he accepted, and then I felt prompted to extend the date of September 13th to him. I don't normally extend dates on the first lesson, but what the spirit says goes, so we extended and he accepted and was really really excited about that. He said that the date would be perfect and he has no reason to wait, he already knows what he felt in church and our lesson is from God. He is 60 years old. I absolutely love him!

We went on exchanges this week and sister Slagowski came with me to my area. We started doing this thing called member power hour where we set up an appointment with a family in our ward and we prepare a 5-7 minute lesson on faith or miracles. I like to use Mormon 9 because it's so powerful. Then we ask them to exercise their faith by praying right then and there and picking a place for us to go tracting. They always get super nervous but they come up with a street and we go and work our butts off for the next hour and find as many people as we can to begin teaching. Once the hour is up we go back to the members and report all the miracles we have seen, and let me tell ya, every time we've done it we have had great success! Then we invite the members to pray for those we met by name and to join us for their next lesson. On the exchange we did this with one of my favorite families ever! They are Hawaiian and they always feed us really good food. Anyways, we had a member power hour at their house and the wife felt super inspired to have us tract her apartment complex. So we did and we found a few potentials but the real miracle happened on the second floor. We knocked on this lady's door and started talking with her about life and eventually led into the gospel and the restoration.  She was hesitant at first but finally she let us into her home to teach her, her husband, and their two sons. MIRACLE! Getting let in was huge but the fact that it was a whole family blew my mind. We taught them the restoration and parts of the plan of salvation and Megan really loved it. We set up a return appointment for Saturday so that will be sweet!

We had a really funny experience at the home of one of my favorite people ever! So she was breast feeding her baby during the lesson and all the sudden she decided to see how far she could shoot her breast milk, so she started squirting it near sister sparrow and I! Haha I couldn't believe I was being sprayed with breast milk. Missions are so weird. They need a TLC show about us. They can call it tracting wars or something.

So Saturday was the day we get transfer calls and to mine and sister sparrows shock, I am the one who got transferred. I was so sad! The area just barely started picking up and then I had to leave. I have come to love the people in aloha so much. I didn't think it could ever get better than Sherwood, but I've realized that I'm going to love all my areas. I'm now serving in Gresham up near mt hood with sister Larsen, she's from Brigham City, Utah. She's great and I'm excited to be here, even though I will really miss aloha, especially the family I lived with and the many people I was able to teach. Oh, and elder Austin Davis went home to St. John's today so I hope his family enjoys him because the people of Oregon sure did! Well, I love you all very much! Work hard, pray hard!
Love, Sister Udall

AMAZING WEEK

momma! 

how are you? i miss you so much! i had an AMAZING week! one of the best on my mission, despite what the numbers may say. so you know our investigator judy right? well, we set a baptismal date with her for September 6th! yay! she was so excited when we extended the date. we went over on wednesday just to make contact and confirm our thursday appointment and we told her to at least read 1 verse before our lesson the next day. when we came in on thursday she was so excited to see us and tell us of her experience. she said she took our advice and just opened her book of mormon up to a random page. that page just so happened to be 2 nephi 32: 6-8. she asked me to read it out loud, so i did and she just started crying. she said that she received her answer, she knows its all true, and wants to change her life. i have no idea why those specific verses stood out to her that much, all i know is that the book of mormon is the word of God. on saturday Peter (an investigator from my last area) got baptized, so we invited judy to come and she accepted. Judy is so sensitive to the spirit. she cries over everything, and this is coming from the girl nicknamed "crylie." i absolutely love it. the second we sat down and looked at the program she just lost it and didnt get it back for the remainder of the baptism. she kept saying "i hate these songs, they always make me cry" and "every time i get around you girls all i do is cry." ahh, i love her!

 

so, a little about peter: he is 89 and lived in china up until a few years ago. he was so hard to teach because of the language barrier, but the spirit speaks all languages. the day before i left sherwood we set his baptismal date and he made me promise to be there, but i wouldnt have missed it for the world! he has lived and been through so much! i absolutely love this man. judy went up to him and said "if you can do it, i can too" and peter said "you better do it! God says do it! ask sister Udall. she tell me God say do it and i read the scriptures and i do it." it was so cute! he bore his testimony and it was so powerful. peter has been to every church you can imagine, but he knows that this is God's church. Judy was able to make it to church this sunday and she also brought her son! so that was exciting. we also had a man named richard come to church this week looking for answers and we set up an appointment with him for this coming wednesday. so many things happened this week that i cant even list them all.

 

today we went to downtown portland for P day and it was so fun. some members bought us doughnuts at voodoo, i had the maple bacon bar, and i rode the Max for the first time ever! i even held the little rope things like the do in the movies. on our way home we met this guy on the max and talked to him forever. we talked about family and Jesus Christ and i showed him a picture of our family and a picture of cash (i carry them everywhere) and we talked about them for awhile. he asked us where we go to church so we told him and he wants to come this sunday! apparently he had been praying for answers and messengers! so that was cool. well i better let you go. i love you so much! you are the best mom in the whole wide world! oh, and happy 7 months to me this last week! can you believe it? it goes by way too fast! talk to you soon! work hard, pray hard!

love, sister udall