February 26, 2018

Hello everyone!!! I hope you are all doing fantastically! 

Our mission is finally getting to be a smart phone mission!!! YAY!!!!! We are so excited!!! We get our phone, that our parents bought and sent to us, on March 10th, and we have already had an on-line training on how to properly use them! Once we can start using them, we get to have an hour a day where we move the information off our areas books onto the phones..... honestly not too excited for that part, but the coolest part of having a smart phone is that we can skype in members to our lessons!! The work is going to move so much faster!!!! 

This week was an interesting week. We were able to meet with Victor twice!  On one of our visits he asked us if we would please kneel down with him and say a prayer with him! He is really excited to start going to church, but he is going through a lot. We are trying to do the best we can to work around the things he is going through. 

Allison and her son Andrew are doing fantastic. Allison loves church and has made friends with the women in our ward. We are planning a day that we can take her to the temple visitor center!!! She talks about how she is excited to be baptized every time we get to meet with her and I can already see how much happier she is with the gospel working through her life! She loves reading the Book of Mormon and she asked us if we could please write down all of our favorite chapters so that she could look them up and read them! 

We have been working with a recent convert named Brother Lamerson and his daughter London. London is eight years old and is going to be baptized this month. We got asked if we could teach her the lesson to help prepare her for baptism. We taught her the restoration and told her that when she prayed about it then the Holy Ghost would tell her that its true, then we asked her to pray for us. She looked me in the eyes and with a very sassy attitude told me that she would not be praying. Then with a smug smile folded her arms. It took every ounce of self control for me not to bust up laughing. Her parents were horrified! Sister Smullin and I started to talk to her about why we need to pray. We told her that Heavenly Father loves her like how her daddy loves her. We explained that it makes Him feel good when we talk to Him just like how it makes her earthy dad happy when she talks to him. As we testified of God's love we could feel the spirit come into the room and I was able to see her attitude about prayer change. Her mom then asked her who she wanted to have say the closing prayer. She looked at me smiled and said that she wanted to say it!!!!  

We were doing some drop-by visits in this kind of sketchy area. We found a less active member's house, but no one was in the apartment. Their apartment was on the top floor of the building. We were about to head down the stairs when I had the prompting to knock every single door in the complex. I told Sister Smullin and we promptly started knocking doors. No one was answering. We got to the last door and a young women answered. She flat out us that she wasn't interested. We 

told her that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ loved her and asked if there was anything thing we could do for her. With tears in her eyes she told us that her cousin had a premature baby boy that was not doing well. She asked if we would please say a prayer for him with her. As we prayed the spirit filled the stairwell and we were able to feel God's love.

I love you all!!! Keep striving to be the best you can be!

Love, Sister Howard 

February 20, 2018

Hola mi familia y amigos,

Week three in Mint Canyon has been a blast!!! 

Sister Smullin and I had a special fast for our area, and within minutes we started to see all of the blessing and tender mercies come poring in.

Allison, our amazing investigator, came to church this week and stayed for all three hours! Then she sent us a text after church and asked if she could please come back next week! She said that we have good morals and she wants to raise her baby in the church's atmosphere!!! She has been faithfully reading the Book of Mormon and she is loving the missionary discussions! It is so cool to see her excitement in learning more and wanting to be better! 

Victor is another really cool story. Sister Smullin and Sister Johnson were knocking in our area, on exchanges, and they ran into Victor. Victor was so not interested in the church, but they managed to share a scripture with him just before he slammed the door in their faces..... later on in the week we were doing some work in that area and he stopped us in the middle of the street, gave us his address, and begged us to come over because he needed to feel God in his life. We stopped by and he wasn't home, but we ended up sharing a little bit with his roommate and giving him our number. 

Sunday we get a call from Victor, and he is just heart broken that he missed us and that he missed church! He wants to feel peace in his life and because he had a Mormon friend in high school, he knows that talking to us is the way for him to finally be able to feel that peace. We meet with him and gave him a Book of Mormon, which he is so excited to read!! We have another appointment this week with him and he has promised to come to church!!

We also found a young boy named Isaiah while we were knocking doors this week! We introduced the Book of Mormon to him and promised him that if he just opened up the book and read the first thing that he saw, that it would relate to him and help him to feel Gods' love. He opened it, read the first thing he saw, and LOVED IT!!!!!  He loves Jesus Christ and happily took a Book of Mormon!  HE WANTS to learn more!! We have another appointment with him this week and he is so excited!

It is so amazing how powerful the Book of Mormon is and how much the Spirit of God can bring into our hearts and our lives!!! 

Love, Sister Howard

February 12, 2018

Howdy everyone!

I am currently having a blast in Mint Canyon! We just had another week full of miracles!  We decided to go stop by some of the less-active members of our ward this week just to see how they were doing, and to see if there was any way that we could help them out. 

We noticed that one of the addresses was in the apartment complex that we live in!  We stopped by and when the lady opened the door she was overjoyed to see us and promptly invited us inside! We shared a video with her about faith and she invited us to please come back and share a message with her son and his non-member girlfriend! Every morning when we go to exercise, we see her walking her dog and she happily waves to us! She has not been to church in a while and doesn't want ward members over, but she is very open to meeting with us!

We stopped by another family who's dad is not a member. They were glad to see us and invited us in to share a short message with them! Later they gave us a ton of food to take home and thanked us for reminding them how important it is to have the spirit in their home and to go to church! 

We stopped by a former investigator named Lori. She was so happy to see us and she still reads the Book of Mormon! We had a beautiful discussion with her about faith and the Book of Mormon and how God answer questions and she wants to have lessons again! 

During knock out we found an amazing lady named Allison. She invited us back for another discussion and she has accepted to be baptized in March!!! She cannot wait to go to church!! We have a church tour planned with her this week! 

We were trying to find a former investigator's house, but we soon found out that the address had been written wrong in our area book. We knew we needed to be on that street, but we just could not figure out why. We keep walking down the street looking for an address that might be similar to our formers when I noticed a young man sitting in a stair well. We started talking to him (Eddy) and he told us that he was looking for a church! We shared a little bit about what we believe and got a return appointment with him! 

I just love being a missionary! It is so cool to be able to see the gospel change peoples' lives! I just know that there is so much power in the Book of Mormon and that following the promptings of the spirit is so vital!

 I love you all!!

Love, Sister Howard

#keepingmintyfreshinmintcanyon

February 5, 2018

Dear Family and Friends,

Mint Canyon is such an amazing area!! It is seriously on fire! We were able to find five new investigators this week just by knocking doors and visiting formers! Their names are Johnny, Samantha, Alexis, Latica and Cristy! They are all extremely cool people who just make me so happy! Sister Smulllins and I are having so much fun trying to figure out this area! We planned a day where we would drive out to an area far away from our apartments and then just bike for the rest of the day... well turns out we read the maps wrong and all the streets were so close to each other that there was no point to bike, so our bikes just sat on our bike rack for a few hours while we walked. Then we accidentally over booked ourselves and had a meeting with the relief society president at the same time as the bishop. We ended up saying a prayer to know what to do and the relief society president promptly canceled on us!

For fast Sunday we decided to fast for our area and we had a load of miracles happen because of it. We went to church and the ward was overjoyed to finally have sister missionaries serving in their ward. Multiple people got up and bore their testimony of the power of sister missionaries and we really started to feel the pressure of what we needed to live up to. The ward loves sister missionaries so much! They honestly want to help us in any way that they can! 

We hurried home from church to plan for our day, but Sister Smullin wasn't feeling very good. I told her to rest and I would plan for us. I decided to plan around the area where we would be having dinner. I looked through the area book and found some part-member families to stop by and a few former investigators to try to visit as well. I decided who to stop by, picking everyone on the same street or streets next to our dinner appointment house. Two of the less active ward members I had originally picked to stop by were actually on a street way out of our way. I sat for a minute and decided to pick two other people and started to look for someone else but felt prompted to keep the original two I had down. 

We were on our way to knock doors when we decided to stop by the two out of the way ward members I had written down. The first house no one was home. We walked to the second house. It was Sister Burgess's house and when she answered the door we could tell she wasn't having a good day! We soon found out that her husband had just been taken to the hospital because of a stroke! We were able to comfort her, and help her until her daughter could come be with her. After dinner that night we were trying to find another former investigator's house. We walked past two young men Christopher and Jay, we had  a small conversation with them and left them a card with the church's number and web-site on it. Later that night we get a phone call from our zone leaders. A young man named Christopher had looked up the church's web-site and he really wanted to learn more! He called the church and was asking for missionaries to please come to his house!! They contacted our zone leaders and they were able to go stop by his house and get a return appointment! 

Fasting for miracles really works people!! I know that Heavenly Father blesses us to be at the right places at the right time! He is always watching out for us! I love you all!! 

Love, Sister Howard

#keepingitmintyfreshinmintcanyon

January 29, 2018

Hello Everyone!!

Well after six weeks in Studio City I am being transferred out! I get to white wash (pink wash)  Mint Canyon in the Santa Clarita Valley! Which means we will be taking over an area that has been an elders' area for over a year!  My new companion's name is Sister Smullin! She is just getting out of training, so this area is going to be getting two very young sister missionaries! Watch out Mint Canyon here we come!! 

This week was a really cool week! I got to take my recent convert Robert, to the Los Angeles temple, to do his first baptisms for the dead! I also had the honor of being baptized for two of his ancestors and he was able to baptize some people as well! While we were in the temple we started a conversation with one of the temple workers and he told us two really cool stories about the Los Angeles temple! 

There is a beautiful painting of Jesus Christ being baptized by John the Baptist, by the baptismal font. The painter who was asked to make the painting was almost done painting the picture when he hit a hard spot. He just could not figure out how to paint the face of Jesus Christ! Every time he painted it, it just felt wrong. He told the temple president the problem and ended up calling the current prophet, David O Mckay, to see what they should do. He told them to come over to his house and he would help them figure out a solution to the problem. They went over and the artist told him the problem he was having. David O Mckay looked him in the eyes and said. He has sky blue eyes and chestnut brown hair. The night before the temple was dedicated, President David O Mckay went to the font, stood by the painting, and said. "He did a perfect job". 

The second story of David O Mckay was when his wife and all the stake presidents, bishops, and their wives in the area, were going to do the first endowment session in the Los Angeles Temple right after it had been dedicated. They were following the prophet up the stairs to start the session and the prophet stops in the middle of the staircase, turns around, and says, our Savior Jesus Christ walked up these stairs last night! 

Once we left the temple I was talking to Robert and he said, I understand why we have to go through so many interviews to go into the temple. The spirit is just so special there!

I love you all, 

                    

Sister Howard