His(panics)

To start out, I forgot last week to say Congrats to Matt and Brooke for getting married!

The subject line has to do with the fact that a lot of the people in my area are hispanic and speak Spanish, so I freak out a little on the inside each time a person we start speaking to speaks Spanish. I use the little Spanish that I know, but it is not quite as much as I wish I knew. We also had a combined ward mariachi party with a Spanish Branch in our area. There were a lot a members who would start speaking Spanish and then realize that we didn't really know what they were saying haha

SO this past week has been pretty great! It was hard, but great. We had many lessons fall through, which is a first for me on my mission. It was hard to see so many lessons fall through, but at the same time it gave us time to go and try to contact more people, and we were able to find a few new investigators. Something else that was hard was that we called an investigator to confirm an appointment for that night, and he told us he wanted to take a break and try to figure things out and to think over some things. That was a hard conversation. But luckily, we called him this morning and he said he would be willing to meet with us at least one more time this week. We have some solid investigators though that we are trying to help reach baptism.

We were also able to do some service at a food bank on Wednesday. It was fun, but also hard work. We were loading carts with food and stuff to be taken out to people's cars. 

On Friday, we had Zone Conference, and it was soo good. We talked about a lot of different things, but something that I really liked was how we cannot teach repentance without the Atonement. We always talk about teaching repentance and asking ourselves if our investigators are developing faith unto repentance. We talked about how we first need to teach about the Atonement, then help them gain faith in the Atonement, and then they can repent because they have faith in the Atonement, and thus faith unto repentance. Repentance is only possible through the Atonement. Another thing we talked about was teaching the Restoration and how it is so important to use Joseph Smith's own words for the First Vision because there is so much power in his words. But yeah, it was all good, I just don't have time to write it all haha

And then, after Zone Conference we went to dinner with a member of one of our wards. She is a manager at a place called Organ Stop Pizza. Basically, they have pizza and then they have this huge organ that is played while you eat. The organist takes requests, and I can now say that I have heard "Let It Go" played on an organ haha. After that, there was the mariachi party that I mentioned earlier. Great food there too. 

That is about all that happened this week besides the generic finding and teaching :)

Love y'all!

Sister Smith