December 18, 2017

Hey everyone!

What a crazy week! I got my transfer call and will being moving to Studio City, North Hollywood zone! I will be in a trio with Sister Keller and Sister Parker and there will be five girls in our apartment.... ( this will be interesting for sure) I will miss my two wards so much though. Hopefully I will be able to serve in Copper Hills and YSA again sometime. 

This week at district meeting I got the honor to role-play the restoration to President Henrie and Sister Henrie..... Sister Trujillo and I were panicking so hard. But we had a really good role-play and then Sister Henrie took a picture with us. I now feel invincible! 

We got to go to the Los Angeles temple on Friday and it was so beautiful!! Oh my gosh.... the temple is such an amazing place. I encourage all of you to go visit it as much as you can. Even if all you do is walk around the grounds. Temples are one of the best places to get closer to your Heavenly Father. I know  this is true because I had a question and He answered it for me while I was there. Don't be afraid to ask your Heavenly Father questions. 

We taught the Gill family this week and they are coming along and learning so much! I am so sad to have to be leaving them, but I know the new missionaries will be taking great care of them! 

We were knocking doors this week on Tuesday and a huge fire got started on the street over so we had to evacuate the area. We later found out the fire was started by arsonists... but no one was hurt and they got the fire out before it got any houses.... never a dull moment in Cali!!!! 

I love you all! 

Sister Howard 

December 11, 2017

Hello all my dear sweet loved ones!! 

This has been such an amazing week! The Book of Mormon experiment was amazing! Between all of the missionaries participating we were able get in contact with 1,500 people!! The displays were placed at parks, colleges, and busy shopping centers. People would read one page in the Book of Mormon and highlight all the names of Jesus Christ or Heavenly Father that they found on that page. 

I got to participate at the display at the College of the Canyons for three days. It was so weird to be be wearing pants, without a name tag and going by my first name! I will be honest though, I loved every minute of it (well expect when kids wanted me to come hangout with them and I had to explain to them that I actually was a missionary and couldn't.)

We all got clipboards and would walk up to different students and ask them to participate in a social experiment. Most of the kids thought they were reading the bible or would ran away the minute you said religious experiment.  My first day I was standing on a sidewalk trying to get people to talk to me as they walked from class, and it was not working.... I realized I needed to make a new game plan.  I looked around and noticed there were people sitting on the grass by themselves everywhere. So I broke all social norms and started sitting next to these people and starting conversations with them, and thats when I started getting people involved. 

It was so cool to watch people read the Book of Mormon for the first time. Seeing the light come on in their eyes... was stunning. I noticed a girl sitting way down this hill by herself and I felt impressed to go talk to her. I invited her to do the experiment and she accepted. She read the page and started asking me questions about it. I felt impressed to tell her about God's love for her and it lead to this huge conversation about all the struggles she is currently going through. I was able to talk to her about her Savior's love for her and she asked me if it was okay if she got a Book of Mormon!! She told me she had been looking for something like this for a while and had had no success in finding it. The spirit was so strong. When it was time for me to leave she asked me for a hug and she can't wait for the missionaries to come talk to her. Sadly she lives in the Glendale Mission so I can only hope that those missionaries take good care of her because she is so ready for this gospel.  Because there is opposition in all things I ended up getting the other missionaries in trouble because apparently when you do displays at the college you can only stay in a certain area and that means that Sister Howard can't go sit on the grass and talk to people.  Satan will stop at nothing to stop people from hearing the truthfulness of the gospel.  

Monday we were at a Lawersons' house for dinner, and we hear a knock at the door. They answered and our ward missionaries leader, Brother Leavitte, his family, and Sister Roos, and Sister Fletcher's family members started caroling to us, and gave us a beautiful christmas tree!! Then Sister Fletcher gave us a long loving hug from our moms. We may or may not have gotten teary eyed. I have such an amazing ward! 

So you might have heard about all the fires that are going on here right now..... well one of them was pretty close to my apartment and a lot of the ward members from both my wards that we are over were evacuated! Our apartment was super, super, smokey so I made my companion pack a suitcase and we slept out in our living room so we would be ready if we needed to be evacuated. The traffic was crazy because of all the roads that were shut down, but it starting to calm down and we were never evacuated and all my ward members are safely home now! The fire was only 4 blocks away from our apartment. 

So Saturday morning I drove my companion and two other sister missionaries to Chattsworth where we got to go help at Operation Gratitude! Our whole zone went. We got to make care packages for the fire fighters, police officers, and military service men. It was so cool to see all the missionaries and people who showed up to serve. Some things that we put in the bag were toys, wipes, M&M's, energy drinks, hand warmers, etc.  

At zone activity some of the elders brought ropes and were teaching us how to rope chairs! I can proudly announce that I can officially rope chairs!!!! The things you learn on a mission....

Well  love you all and hope you are all doing well!! 

Don't forget to Light the World!!! love, Sister Howard 

December 4, 2017

Hello my dear sweet loved ones! 

 

I hope you are all doing well! I am so excited to announce that I have been asked to be a part of the Book of Mormon experiment! Only three missions in the whole world get to be a part of this!! What it is is that they set up Book of Mormon displays and the missionaries dress in normal clothes (incognito) and we invite people to read a page of the Book of Mormon and highlight all the things that talk about God and Jesus! It is a way to get the Book of Mormon into more peoples' lives! I even have to go by my first name and will not be wearing a name tag! This will be going on all this week! Last night I got to be in a special conference call with the aps the missionaries president and his wife and all of the missionaries who will be involved! we will have special people coming down from Salt Lake to help us with this! I am so excited! wish us luck this week!!

When we were knocking doors we couldn't get anyone to listen to us. Which made us pretty sad, then this really cute cat came over and let us pet it. Then it  followed us around through out the whole neighborhood and let us pet it, as we continued to knock doors. It really made our knock out go so much better! 

Sadly, I need to repent because I forgot to invite you all to do the "Light The World Challenge"! If you haven't already heard about it from all the other missionaries. Its 25 ways to serve people in 25 days! The service ideas are really simple and there is a video for each day! It started December 1, but it is never too late to start. They got all the Elders and sisters together form last year and asked them to share stories  that they had with "Light the World" last christmas. 

One elder told his story about their recent convert.... she was a single mother who was barley making ends meet. She had promised to take her kids to a movie. Well she was sitting in the movie and her tooth started to hurt.  It was bad enough that she had to get up and walk out of the movie. When the movie was finally over she was driving home and realized she needed to fill her tank up with gas... she didn't have the money but you need gas so she went to the gas station any way and filled up her car. A random guy walked up to her swiped his credit card and paid for all of her gas. Then said "Light the World" and walked away... she was shocked. Later that night she gets a text from one of her old high school friends, asking her how she was doing. She told her that she had a really bad toothache and probably needed a root canal but couldn't afford it. Her friend said well my husband is a dentist and he is just getting out of the temple. I'll give you his number and I'm sure he can help you out. The husband texted her and invited her to come down to his office and he would talk care of all her dental needs for free.  He wrote #light the world at the end of the text. Because of these people sharing Light the World with her she was interested in the church and started taking lessons from the missionaries and is now baptized in the true church! I promise you that serving people is one the easiest ways to bring our brothers and sister closer to our savior. If jesus was here he would be serving everyone. 

I would just like to invite you all to serve the people around you this Christmas because I know that there are people that only you can touch! 

I love you all, Sister Howard