Week 33

Hello all!

This week has been stressful but really good. It seems like that is how most of my weeks have been going lately. Our investigators who are doing good are doing really good, but our investigators who are not doing good are just not prepared to have the gospel right now or don't want to act even when they know it is true. So that has lead us to do A LOT of finding this week. That is when we block off a chunk of time to just go find people to teach. We have been going through our ward list and visiting every member in our area and inviting them to the Easter Pageant coming up. We also spend a few hours at the park passing out cards. We haven't been knocking on a ton of doors lately, though. That is our last resort to find people because it really isn't productive.

This week we had the really cool opportunity to go to the annual Missionary Musical Fireside that our mission puts on. There were different choirs from different faiths (Dad, I was thinking of how you always said you liked gospel music when the Baptist choir was singing), and a few from our church. We had the stake choir from Mesa as well as the mission choir. I, with no ability to sing whatsoever, was a happy audience member. We had five investigators who came and LOVED it. It was so cool to see them be touched by the spirit. Each of our investigators had a different impression come to them as the music was sung and played. At one point, one of our investigators who has never come to church leans over to me and says, "I know all of these songs! Maybe I will come to church next Sunday."

We had a good talk with a less active member about preparing to go to the temple. The father of our family of investigators got to meet President Sweeney (President Sweeney doesn't speak Spanish and our investigator speaks very limited English) and President asked him if he was baptized and our investigator said "not yet!" So...That's awesome. And my very favorite thing that happened was that the director called all of the children up, because they were going to sing the song they had been practicing for weeks, and our nine year old investigator pops out of his seat and just walks up to the stand and stands with all the primary kids as they sang. IT WAS SO CUTE. We were a little nervous he would be embarrassed when he got back down but he seemed to really enjoy it, so overall great experience. The car ride there was SO funny. Our 75-year-old investigator was driving and Sister Ferre was in the front seat with the directions. So first, Sister Ferre accidentally missed the freeway turn off, and then we realized we had bad directions. Our investigator was getting so upset (her version of upset that just makes us laugh, because we know she loves us more that she is truly upset) and just kept calling Sister Ferre an idiot. I was dying. It took us 50 minutes to get there instead of 25, with a huge amount of U-turns and a stop at Jack In The Box for directions. But we made it!

Sister Ferre braided some cornrows on my head
during our weekly planning meeting. Fun times.

That investigator I talked about in my last email is progressing so well. He loves church and hasn't missed a week since he was introduced to the church. He is super excited for his baptism and the members that introduced him to the church are just as excited.

We teach a part member family whose 8 and 9-year-old daughters are not baptized yet. They are just the cutest things ever. They had their baptismal interview this last Saturday and passed, so they will be getting baptized this week. Their whole family is so excited for them, and so are we!

Tonight I have our second exchange of the transfer, and I get to go into the YSA/French area and I am PUMPED. Sister Ferre got to go to the French area already and said it was an amazing experience. I will have no idea what is going on if we have French lessons, but I am excited to be introduced to another culture. Hopefully they actually have French lessons tomorrow - I will let you know how it goes! The French work in our mission just started a few months before I came into the mission and it has already grown so much.

Well that is mostly it for this week. I am doing great and loving being here. For as much stress as there has been these last few weeks, it has been worth it. These people are so amazing and getting to teach about Jesus Christ all day is a dream. My testimony of my Savior has grown so much. Every time we speak of Him or sing about Him or read about Him in the scriptures I have an undeniable feeling in my chest that He is real and He died for me. I feel so blessed to be able to rely on that knowledge. It brings me comfort every day, especially in the more stressful times.

I love you all and hope you are doing great at home - have a wonderful week!

Sister Doxey

Week 32

Happy late Valentines Day!

This week was a lot better than last week (that is an understatement). We had a lot of meetings but overall it was pretty good!

Every month we have what is called Zone Training Meeting, where we get trained on how we can change and improve to teach better or be better in some way. Sister Ferre and I got to go to both the Zone Training Meetings from our zone (Biltmore) and the Paradise Valley zone. We had to give trainings at both which was super stressful to prepare for but overall went fine. We were already super nervous, and then President Sweeney showed up to the meeting, which he doesn't normally do. We had to give the training he had just given us a week earlier back to him. That was probably the most stressful part of my week. 

Selfie with Sister Ferre

We got to go on exchanges this week and it was super fun. Sister Suter came with me in my area. I used to dread exchanges – okay, I will be honest, that hasn't completely changed - but I now look forward to them because I always learn a lot. Sister Suter showed me a lot of good ways to talk to people on the street, so that was awesome. She is an English sister and the only Spanish thing we had that day was dinner. It was so fun to see her in a home where the people only speak Spanish. She was super calm and happy and loved the people. She is the coolest. I remember freaking the freak out at my first all Spanish dinner. 

We also had a baptism this week! The sweetest little girl Diana got baptized on Saturday. Not going to lie, baptisms come with a fair amount of stress. But it all went well. Well...except the music. We forgot to get someone to come who could play the piano, so Sister Ferre was a champ and took one for the team using her piano skills from six years ago to try to play the right hand of a hymn. Bless her heart, but she got through like two lines before she just started laughing at the train wreck. I was leading and started laughing. So we just stopped the song and I grabbed my ipad and we played the music off of that. It was so funny. 

Diana's baptism

We did service this week for a member of our bishopric, and his family is awesome. First of all they all have bright red hair, how could they not be cool? But they are just so fun and sweet. We are going shopping with the girls later today and I am so excited!

We had mostly normal lessons this week except for one - we have a new investigator! He is so awesome and his story is even cooler. He was walking outside and just didn't know what to do or where to go. Literally looking for direction. When along comes an 80-year-old member from our ward walking down this back road street. He said she just looked like she knew where she was going so he went up and talked to her. They started walking together and the gospel came up. He has been to church for the last four weeks and we finally got to have our first lesson. He already has a testimony of the gospel and knows it came into his life at the perfect time. Miracle. The power the every day member has to share the gospel is insane.

Well I love you all and I hope you have a wonderful week! Stay warm wherever you are - I will continue to be sweating over here in the February heat. Got to love Phoenix. 

Hermana Doxey 

Week 31

I honestly don't even know where to start this week. Not trying to be dramatic, but this week really has been the hardest week I have had on my mission by far. In fact, I can't think of many weeks I have ever had that were harder than this last week. It was one of those times where you are just like, wow I could not take anything else - and then it gets a whoooole lot worse. It seems like every person we teach is struggling with something so hard and so beyond my ability to help them. I can't really say what happened this week because these are really people with real problems. But everyone's struggles came to a climax this week and pulled Sister Ferre and I into it. It wouldn't be so hard if I didn't love these people so much. Life would be a lot easier if I didn't feel like I was going through their trials with them. I guess that is how the Savior must have felt to some small degree. I read a talk this week that said the Savior could have known how we feel by revelation, but he chose to suffer and go through our pains and struggles and heartaches. I am in no way comparing Sister Ferre and myself to the Savior, but I think that this experience has helped me understand the Atonement to a new degree. We kept thinking that this week must be preparing us for something. I'm not sure if I will ever find out if that is true, but I do feel stronger. I don't remember who said it or exactly what they said, but a woman in general conference once said - speaking of an experience talking to a friend going through a really hard time - I don't know your situation or how you feel, but I do know the atonement, and because I know the Atonement I feel like I can help you. Or something along those lines…

I know I could not have gotten through this week without sister Ferre. We are so close and this week has just brought us to a new level of closeness. I can't imagine having any other companion, and I am a little stressed by the fact that I will obviously have a new companion next transfer. But I know that everything will work out. God knows us, he knows the people we teach, and he will get me through anything. I trust God and know he wouldn't put me through anything I couldn't handle or didn't need to go through. I know my savior lives and I will preach that during the toughest times.

The girl in the middle is getting baptized :)

Along with an amazingly supportive companion I know I wouldn't have been able to make it through this week without the leaders that I have. I have a new love and respect for my mission president, President Sweeney, who we called multiple times this week to give us advice with things that were frankly above our maturity level. We also ended up driving to Scottsdale to meet with him for a meeting filled with a lot of crying on our part and a lot of kindness and love on his part. I also got the chance to work a lot closer with the bishop this week as he worked with us to help the people in this area. He just got called as bishop two weeks ago and is so amazing and understanding.

Along with the high emotions of the week, we did find a lot of reasons to laugh (sometimes out of stress, but mostly out of joy) and be happy. We found a new investigator this week that is AMAZING. It's kind of a cool story how we found her. We knocked on her door about two weeks ago and talked to her roommate who was mildly to not at all interested. Then we got a self-referral on our iPads for someone who wanted a bible. Luckily, we had one in our car, so we drove to the address and realized we had already contacted there. But anyway, we met the woman and gave her the bible and we were able to set up a time to meet for the next day. We have now had a lesson with her four days in a row – every day since meeting her. She is so excited about the church and says how she knows it is true because of the way she feels when she reads the Book of Mormon and from the circumstances we found her in. She came to church and mostly just cried the whole time (happy, spirit cry). She even got her own ride and stayed the whole time, which never happens. She has also started inviting people to her baptism already, which is just preshy. It is amazing how God blesses you when you are going through hard trials - I have seen that this week in my life as well as those we are teaching.

I also realized that I really gained my testimony of the church backwards, starting with the living prophet and ending with Christ. I think this week has taught me that the most important thing to know is that God is real, Christ is our savior, and then we can gain a testimony of the restoration of the gospel. I don't know how to explain it, because I don't feel like I lost my testimony ever, but I feel like I have regained my testimony from the ground up this week. Really just feeling that there is a God. The best part about this week was that at the end of it, sister Ferre apologized and said she had been praying for a humbling experience...Haha, oh man did we get one! But I know it was for the best and that my faith is stronger and I love these people even more.

Me and Sister Ferre

Okay, this email is so scatter brained - sorry about that. But here are some more upbeat things that happened this week:

We went to this Tongan family’s house for a pig roast. Like a legit pig that had just been killed with a stick through it slowly being turned by a large Tongan man over a fire. Our dinner conversation consisted of multiple stories of people eating their pets...and at the end the kids did the Hakka for us. It was sweet.

We went to a lesson this week and the members explained that the only way they could describe sister Ferre's personality was "yummy" and mine is “hippy.” It made us laugh SO hard. The lesson ended up being more for us (happened right after our trip to Scottsdale) than it probably helped them.

Sister Ferre also started this weird thing where she puts the food that she doesn't want to eat on my pillow. There is no way to explain this story over email that won't make us just seem so weird, but for some reason it made us laugh so hard every time. I think it started off because it was so gross that we started laughing and then it just escalated from there.

Anyway, as hard as this week was it really did help me gain perspective and helped me grow. This week will be better!

I love you all,

Hermana Doxey

Week 30

Happy February, everybody!

Another week, another transfer. Thankfully Sister Ferre and I are still together! I realized today that because both of our transfers together were randomly the two seven-week transfers, I am the companion Sister Ferre will have the longest. Score.

This week was really cool yet, once again, I have forgotten to write things down to write home about. One amazing thing: our investigator Isaiah got baptized! I feel like I can’t write home before baptisms happen or it will jinx it or something...That's not doctrine. But it was very cool. It was simple and small, but the spirit was so strong. I gave the talk on baptism and Sister Ferre talked about the Holy Ghost. Our Zone leader who actually met him first got to baptize him. I am so grateful I got the opportunity to be a part of teaching him.

The baptism with my insanely frizzy hair

We go on member splits every week and this week I went with a member who we are helping prepare to go to the temple. None of the people we were hoping to teach were home, so we got to have a spur of the moment one-on-one lesson about the temple and it was so cool. Her testimony strengthens my own. She is so ready to go, we just have to finish all the lessons. Sister Ferre had a lesson with another member and a new family we found a few weeks ago. We found them by knocking on doors. It was like 10 minutes until our curfew, and it takes us about five minutes to drive home, so we just knocked on one door in this huge complex and it was them! They invited us back another night, though, because we had to get home. We couldn't get a hold of them for a few weeks but kept having feelings like we shouldn't give up on them. I was sad that they finally got to teach them when I couldn't be there, but Sister Ferre said that the lesson went so well. I am so excited to teach them - families are the best!

We also teach this young member who is the best. She is in high school and is the only really active member in her family. We went over for a lesson and by the end she was crying (okay, so was I) and saying how she didn't know how we knew that she needed us but she was so grateful we had stopped by when we did. Stuff like that just makes my heart happy.

I am growing so much out here. It is so weird how close Arizona is to

Oregon, because it seems like a different world. I guess that is because my purpose right now is so different than my purpose at home or in school. It feels good focusing on other people’s needs and how I can help them. I am so happy all the time and I know that is because I have a Heavenly Father to rely on and to talk to.

Thank you all for your kind notes, prayers, etc. - I have the best family and friends in the world.

Love you all, have a great week!

Sister Doxey