August 15

Hello Family!!

How are y'all?! This week has been super fun! Hermana Hazelton, our visa waiter, leaves for Peru tomorrow morning at 3 am (early morning for us!). I can't believe how fast the weeks go by here! It's been a fun week with her. She's a talker, so she keeps things fun for us! We'll both miss her when she leaves. I'm excited to be working with Hermana Southworth still though, she's a suuuper sweet woman, you can't not get along with her. 

This week we've seen several small miracles. We got to meet Laura Vasquez, who was a Head Quarter Referral. She just moved here and has been looking for a church, she had met missionaries in WA just before she left, who referred her to us. We had the opportunity to do a how to begin teaching lesson with her and it went great! She is so excited to learn, and seems to have a lot of potential. 

We had a lesson with a new investigator Jovita and her ex husband Alex, and Alex's parents this past week that went really well. She was a referral from President Becerra, who has been working with Alex for a while with the english missionaries. It was so cool! They are awesome! Alex already wants to be baptized, the only thing holding him back is that they are living together (yes...they are divorced...don't ask). But! now that we're teaching Jovita, I'm excited to see what changes happen! She is super cool, she's from Mexico, but speaks some english (i can't actually remember if I've ever heard her speak english or not...they both just kind of mix so I feel like it's all the same now). It's funny, they live in a nicer area than we're used to working in and their house is nicer than any other house I've ever been in on my mission, so we kind of feel a little out of our element. It's fun though. We're doing a family home evening with them at President's house in Arcadia this Thursday, which I'm kind of nervous about (because we're the one teaching it instead of him). It'll be good. She's pretty receptive to it all and she's really sharp, so she's fun to teach. She didn't get to come to church this week though, which was kind of a bummer. Alex came though and I thought it was funny- he is so social! He just walked right up to people and started talking to them. We walked out of Relief Society and he was out talking to a bunch of people exchanging phone numbers. yeah! if everyone we taught was like that, we'd have it so easy!

I'm so grateful I stayed here in Rimgrove for a lot of reasons. One of which is because I've gotten the chance to keep working with some of my recent converts from the last time I was here. I wouldn't say that they're struggling, but maybe just that they "have a long runway" as far as things go. So it's been a blessing to get to keep working with them, and strengthening them. There is nothing better to me than seeing them progressing still, and nothing more sad to me than seeing them fall. Because of that, I'm trying to do everything I can while I'm still here to help them keep going. I know that at least in part, this is why I was sent here- to help them persevere until the end and to inspire them to become true disciples of christ! 

We had a lot of fun and there's a lot of good things happening here. Little by little things keep picking up. I can't wait to see this place exploding with baptisms! Hopefully I'm here still to see it happen. 

I love the Gospel. It's amazing! Love you all. 

Love, 

Hermana LaPierre