Milagros y más milagros!

This week was AWESOME! I feel so blessed to be able to be here in the mission right now. In my ward here we have Elders and Hermanas. The elders have one half of the ward boundaries and we have the other, and this week we decided to do a change for one day. There´s a lot of men that live alone on our side and a lot of women that live alone on the side of the elders so we wanted to be able to reach everyone. It was....such a wonderful day! We ended up teaching 5 lessons over on their side. We visited some recent converts, less actives, and even taught a lesson to one of their investigators who´s a girl, and the elders have trouble teaching her because she´s alone. The people that we visited kept telling us how grateful they were to have us in their homes and we were able to build a stronger relationship with them and help them come closer to Christ. It was a wonderful day! In our area where the elders went, they ended up finding 2 new investigators for us!! A day of miracles let me tell you.

  We have this guy in our ward named Luciano who just returned from his mission in Peru about a month ago. He lives in our area and told us that he had a friend that he wanted to introduce us to. We set up a time and then we went out with him. We went to visit his friend but he was working so we set up a time to come back. Afterwards he says, "Don´t worry hermanas, I know some more people we can visit!" So we went and he introduced us to this couple and they let us in and we were able to teach them! Then afterwards he introduced us to another one of his neighbors, and we set up an appointment with him and went and taught him yesterday! After the lesson with him Luciano says, "Okay Hermanas, come back on Tuesday okay? I know a lot more people!!" Thanks to him we now have 3 new investigators! It was amazing. THIS is the spirit of missionary work that the members in our wards should have! If it was like this, if we didn´t have any fear to introduce the missionaries to everyone we know, if we truly wanted our friends and family to have the same blessings as we do, we would do this!

   This Sunday was the 5th Sunday, so the men and women met together for a class. The bishop was going to teach the class, but then he asked us if we would like to teach the class instead. He wanted us to teach us on La Obra de Salvación, or The Work of Salvation. It´s a program that the church is doing right now to have the members work more with the missionaries and it´s so inspired of God. I was way nervous, because we each had about 8 minutes to talk about the different parts of the program: baptism, retention, reactivation and temples. We prayed and prayed that we could have the spirit teach so that the members could have desires to be more united with us. The class went....absolutely amazing. The spirit taught the whole time and it was incredible. Missionary work..is truly the best part of this church.

   This weekend is GENERAL CONFERENCE!! We are all so excited!!  I want to encourage all of you to go to conference with a question in mind, or write a few down that you´ve been wanting to know, about anything. We always receive answers to our prayers during the conference. Don´t let anything stop you from being at all the sessions, because really, the words that we´re hearing aren´t the words of the people that are speaking, they´re the words of the Savior. Invite one of your friends to listen to one of the sessions with you. There is no person on this earth you can put more trust in than the prophet! The Lord works miracles in more ways than we can possibly imagine.

Cuidense,

Hermana Feldermann

Hola!

Hola familia!!! So this week was a good week, and I'm loving that it's finally turning into fall!! There's a ton of trees here but instead of turning pretty colors and things before they fall off, they just die on the tree and we get to enjoy a pretty tan color! This week some miracles happened....Romina found her ex-husband!!!! And he said that he would meet up with her to get divorced!! It was a miracle because no one in the whole world knew where he was and then he contacted her and agreed to go with her to get divorced. Then she can get married and finally baptized. She is still progressing so much. Last week we were going to pass by her house to pick them up for FHE at the house of flia. ferreyra. We arrived a little bit late and when we got there no one was there....so we called her and she told us that she thought, since we were late, that we had just gone to the ferreyras so she went there by herself! Also, she gave us the reference of her neighbor to visit and she shared a pamphlet with her and talked about if she would like to receive the missionaries and she said yes! What a champ. She always says it's weird how she always wants to share the things she is learning with everyone.

 

    This week my companion got sick...poor thing. She came down with a pretty hard cold. I love Hna. da Silva so much! She's like my best friend. And she's been teaching me so many great things as well. She is an amazing missionary and I feel so blessed to be with her right now.

 

   One thing that President Thurgood, our mission president, has really been focusing on lately is the cleanliness of our pensions. He says that if the pension is not clean the spirit cannot be with us, and he is so right! The thing I love about the mission is that everything that I learn can be applied to life as well. When our houses are clean and neat, we can have the spirit in our homes as well. Sometimes it´s the little details that make all the difference. 

 

   I feel so blessed to have Pres. Thurgood for my mission president! The way that he works with the missionaries and does things, is truly in the way of the Lord. He doesn´t set a ton of rules for us because he wants us to WANT to be obedient. He wants us to do things and follow the mission rules because we have the desire to be obedient to the Lord. I love this, because it´s how it is in real life, and how it is with the Lord. We need to learn to be obedient because we want to please the Lord, not because we´re compelled to. This is when we will be the happiest! Keep the commandments because you love the Lord. What greater reward is there than that! This gospel is amazing because it doesn´t only just change our behavior, but it changes our very nature. This change comes through obedience to the commandments and our love for the Lord. When we allow these things to go to our very center and change our very nature, the promise will be fulfilled that when He comes we will recognize Him because we will be like Him.

Cuidense mucho!

Hna. Feldermann

A cockroach got the best of me!

Hola!!! So much happened this week! Oh first of all...DON'T SEND ME PACKAGES!! We had zone conference with the President of the misión this week and this was what he told us. Before, there were some missionaries that would go to the capital and get the packages for us if you sent them, but now they´re not going to go anymore because it costs a lot more money than it´s worth. So if you send them, or are planning on it don´t do it please because I won´t ever get them.

   So last night I had an adventure with a cockroach! We pretty much always have cockroaches in our pension no matter how much we clean, and last night I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the bathroom. When I got in there was a cockroach on the back of the door so I grabbed a bottle of Raid and went to kill it. It ran out of the bathroom so I chased it with the Raid.....and then it turned around and ran towards me! So I jumped up and when I landed I landed where I had just sprayed Raid, slipped, and slid into the banister that blocks the stairs....By this point my companion woke up and I realized that when I slipped I had cut my knee pretty bad. So my sweetest companion ever helped me wash my knee and we put a band-aid on it and called it good. When I woke up in the morning it was still bleeding and Hna. da Silva thought it might need stitches so we called someone and they told us to go to the hospital to get it checked out. We went and....yay I don´t need stitches! :) He just told me to keep it covered for a week and it should be fine. No need to worry!

    This week we got amazing gifts from the mission....pillows and sheets!!!! We were all so excited because most of the pensions don´t even have pillows. Best gift ever. Something that also happened this week, we were at Romina´s house teaching her with one of the members. Before the lesson started, the member, her name is Rocio, was facing the window. As she was looking out there was a semi truck backing up and a little old lady waiting at the corner for the bus. Rocio started saying "they´re going to hit, they´re going to hit" and then we look and she goes "They hit!!" and the semi truck had backed into the old lady and knocked her down!! So we sprinted out of the house and ran over to her and helped her up and brought her into the house of Romina. She was all covered in mud, so we cleaned her off and the driver of the truck came over as well. It was a miracle, she just had a tiny little scratch on her cheek and her hand, and nothing else! What a trooper, she didn´t even complain or anything! Afterwards the man that drives the truck asked us about our plaques and and we told him we were Mormons! Then the old lady tells us that she´s Jehovah´s Witness and then the man tells us that he´s....Umbanda!!!! Here there´s a religión that´s called Umbanda which basically means devil worshiper. Then the old lady and the truck driver started arguing about religión and about what happens after we die and then we hand the truck driver a pamphlet on the plan of salvation. Romina was just standing there laughing about all of it! What a day. So Romina...poor thing. Please pray for her! She wants to get divorced so she can get married and then baptized but we found out this week that her ex husband disappeared. She´s called him and she even went to the área where his phone number is and...nothing. His mom lives nearby and she doesn´t even know where he is. We´re praying for a miracle, that he will show up somehow because it will take forever for her to get divorced without him!

    Right now we´re searching for more people to teach. We had an awesome activity in the chapel on Saturday and we got about 15 references between the elders and us! It was so great. I love this Ward, and the bishop is fantastic! He really has the spirit of missionary work, and it literally makes all the difference. This week I´ve been learning a lot about love. My companion is amazing, and one of the lessons that she´s been teaching me the most is how to love. She loves EVERYONE and is constantly looking for ways to serve and help everyone. Charity is the attribute that will bring us so much closer to Christ. Like mom always says, you don´t have to like everyone, but you have to love them. To love, is a commandment! Actually, to have charity is commandment! What a blessing that is, no? Because when we´re filled with love for others, we desire to serve them and to do what´s best for them and to help them. And then when we´re focused on helping others more than helping ourselves, we will find that we are soooo happy! It´s like a little equation! Heavenly Father loves us all equally. That´s what´s amazing, and we should love everyone equally as well. It doesn´t matter what someone looks like, or acts like, or what country they´re from....if we´re truly striving to become more like Christ we will see that these things are not the things that matter. We´ll be searching for the good, and see their potential. We will see them as beloved children of God, with the same possibility to become gods that we have. SHARE THE GOSPEL!!! This is the Lord´s work! Being a missionary is not just for those who are set apart to be, if we truly love our God, we will have a desire to bring other people closer to him as well. Our pday is getting moved to Wednesday next week because of the holiday so you won´t hear from me til then!

 Cuídense,

Hermana Feldermann

Where are you winter?

So summer is still in full swing here! I´m learning to enjoy it though, so that´s probably the best part.

This week I feel like I learned a lot of things. My companion is awesome, and she teaches me so much every day. We´re always laughing pretty much, and we always fight over wanting to serve the other one! Haa it´s so funny. We always want to help the other one at the same time, but then we´re both stubborn about it and then we end up "fighting" over who gets to serve who. This week my companion got sick...so we pretty much didn´t leave the pension for about 3 days. This was actually a good learning experience for me, because I realized how precious our time out on the streets really is. When we were able to leave, I found myself talking to more people and having desires to do more and work harder because I realized how valuable that is! We´re doing this thing in my mission called "Tres de la vez" Which means that we´re focusing on doing 3 things at once: Baptize, Retain, and Reactivate. It´s great because by trying to do all three things, we´re finding more people to teach. This week we were looking for a menos activo, and when we arrived at his house we talked to the people that lived there and found out that he had moved! So then we talked to them some more and then let us pass and teach them and now they´re investigators! AND THEY¨RE MARRIED!!!! It´s some kind of miracle I think. No one here that´s under the age of about 50 is married. So we´re going to see how things go with them!

  Romina is doing well...we´re working on her divorcement right now. She came to church on Sunday with all her kids! And then after we stopped by to talk with her and we taught her about the commandments. When we talked about honoring the sabbath day, she told us that the day before she had bought all the food and everything that they needed so they wouldn´t have to buy things on Sunday, that she had just realized that she wasn´t supposed to do certain things on Sunday..... !! She is practically just teaching herself!! Seriously. She has a son that´s 8 and the other day he kept asking us a bunch of questions about the things that you need to do to prepare for a mission so we talked about that and about temples and he was asking what you need to do to prepare to go to the temple. It´s just incredible.

   On Saturday we had a sort of open house thing in one of the chapels in our zone! We have to take 2 different buses and a train to get there, and we had just arrived at the train station and were crossing to the other side when we saw the train coming. The trains don´t pass by very often so we had to make this one or we would be late! So we started running to try to make the train, and then remembered that we still had to buy our tickets! So the train was stopped and letting people in and off and we were buying our tickets as fast as we could....and then the man who stops us to punch our tickets was encouraging us on. So after we bought our tickets he told us to just go so we sprinted and just as we entered the train the doors shut! ahh success.

   One thing that I learned this week was about the dangers of pride...I´ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and how letting pride get in our way can really inhibit our progression. When we think that we know all there is to know or can do all that needs to be done, we´re forgetting that everything we do, every breath we take and the chance we have to live day to day is completely reliant on somebody else. There´s someone granting us the gift to do all of these things! All the good that we do, all of things that we accomplish in our lives are do to the successes that God has granted us. When we are filled with pride, the spirit cannot work with us, because we need to be humble enough to be able to hear the whisperings of the spirit. We need to be humble enough to have the faith to follow those whisperings, and to recognize that maybe, just maybe, God knows a little bit more than we do. How wonderful it is really, that if we humble ourselves we can receive the help of someone who knows immensely more than we do! Who´s only interest is what´s best for us. How incredible is God´s love for us!

Cuidanse,

Hermana Feldermann

4 months!

Hola!! (Hello)

So this week so much changed, and it was great. My new companion, Hna. da Silva is awesome and an absolutely amazing missionary. Like I said before she´s from Brazil, and it´s so fun. I feel like I´ve already learned so much from her and I´m beyond excited to see what else I can learn from her during this time. I was realizing today that I´m probably never going to have a chance like this in my life, to live and work with and love so many people of another culture. It´s definitely time to take advantage of this opportunity!

   Some things that happened this week....last week actually we were walking down the street and saw this woman carrying a ton of bags. We asked if we could help her and she said yes, so we walked with her to her house and then set up an appointment to come back and....now she´s an investigator! Family history is also such an amazing resource to find people as well. Almost all the people her have Latin or Spanish roots, and so family history is easy to incorporate. This week we stopped and talked to this man, and when we started talking about family history he said that he was interested and so we gave him some other pamphlets and things and set up an appointment to go back and help him out with this! It´s amazing really the many ways that the gospel is perfect for everyone. Every single little hole that we have in our lives, can be filled through this gospel!

   So this last week Romina had surgery, and when we were visiting her the day before she was telling us how she was nervous and things like that, and then we offered if she would like a blessing. She agreed so we called one of the brothers in the ward and he came over and gave her a blessing. It was the most amazing thing ever, the spirit was soo strong. I love teaching with Hna. da Silva, because whenever we teach, we´re both almost always thinking the same thing. Sometimes she´ll say exactly what I was thinking, or afterwards when we´re talking about how a lesson went we´ll find out that we both were having the same sort of train of thought. I love it, because I feel like it means that we´re really teaching by the spirit.

   This week we had a lot of awesome moments, but then as well also some pretty intense rejection. It´s amazing sometimes, at the reactions that people have to us as missionaries.... it´s like we have the plague or something! What we´re really here to do is find the people that the Lord has prepared. I´m starting to learn that everyone has their own time in accepting the gospel and everyone is prepared at different times. We´re here to find the people that have been prepared right now! Somtimes at the end of the day when we`ve been rejected 20 different times, what keeps us going is our knowledge that the Lord has something better planned for us. That when we give our best effort, give all we have, we can still keep going. The gospel gives people the strength that they need to endure this life. Endurance is really all about your mindset. If you think you can`t, you can`t. If you think you can, if you remember that through obedience to the commandments we can recieve the divine help of our Savior, THAT is what makes all the difference. On Sunday Hna. da Silva really wanted to bear her testimony so we went up and gave our testimonies. When I was up there standing before all of these wonderful people here I just felt so full of gratitud for my Heavenly Father, for sending me here to be with his children in this little corner of Argentina. There isn´t anything I would trade for this opportunity to be here.

Cuidense mucho, (Take care much,)

Hermana Feldermann