called to serve AZ a MESAnary: Juan on Juan

What do you call Spanish basketball? Juan on Juan.

These are the jokes that come from missionaries haha

Anyways, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

This week was filled with a lot of great things, a lot of miracles for the mission. To start, our zone and district were really struggling to find people to teach, so we did a fast. Last week, our whole zone only found 4 people, but this week, just our district set a goal to find 20 new investigators, and we reached that goal! Also, the visitors center set a goal of about 2,200 referrals this year at Christmas Lights (which is doubled from last year), and last night they had to get 200 referrals to reach it. That’s a crazy goal, especially because Christmas Eve had 151 referrals, which was the highest ever. Well, with the help of the Lord, they got 220 referrals last night. We all ended the year on a good note.

Sister Clark and I, even though we didn’t reach our companionship finding goal, we were blessed with a few more referrals, plus meeting and being able to talk with a few other people who showed some interest. This will hopefully help us in our finding goals in the next few weeks. We also have been in contact with a few investigators who we have had a hard time contacting, and it was nice because during weekly planning, we had a few more people to talk about and plan for.

We had one more exchange this week, and it was kinda nice to go to another area and not have to worry as much about planning for the day. It was also nice because I went on exchanges with Sister Caswell, and she goes home when I go home, and so we are in the same boat and understand each other on certain things. On this exchange though, we had one lesson where it was just natural to teach and testify of the plan of salvation. We stopped by a former investigator’s home, and they let us in. We really didn’t have a plan. We started talking to her, and by the end, we taught almost the whole plan of salvation. It was nice because I didn’t feel rote or like I had to teach the Plan of salvation because it was what we planned, but it really was by the Spirit and from the heart. I could feel the Spirit testify of the truthfulness of it to me.

I just can’t emphasize enough how much the Lord blessed us this week. It was a great week to end the year. Even church yesterday, even though it was super long for us, I really felt uplifted and ready to begin this new year. We also were able to help someone move into their apartment last night. Of course, they were moving to the third floor, and my body hurt after going up and down the stairs with stuff for about 45 min, but it was totally worth it to help someone out. You could tell that they really appreciated the help.

To start the year, the mission had a big activity for all the missionaries where we could play various sports from 8:30am-12pm and then eat lunch. It was so much fun, and I played about 2 hours or so of soccer. Needless to say, I am sore, and I will probably feel it even more tomorrow morning. I also played a little bit of softball. It’s just great to be around other missionaries who want to have fun and just play sports and everything be pretty positive the whole time while playing.

I love y’all! Have a great first week of the year!

Sister Smith