THANKS

Hola mi familia!

This week was not nearly as eventful, but still awesome, nevertheless. My favorite missionary in Indiana, Sarah, sent me a talk by Elder Ballard about how to have success, and I have seen that the doctrines taught in that talk are so true.  He talks about how success and happiness in missionary work all depends on Attitude.  Essentially, if you can see it, you can achieve it.  As we have worked hard, visioned success, and MADE our situations happy, we have had awesome weeks.  I know that as we do everything in our power to look at things the way we want them to be, they will end up that way!  I have really been focusing on staying positive- on trying to make myself happy, and trying to make others happy.  I have seen my relationships grow with others, with missionaries, with members, with investigators. Definitely attitude is key to everything!

This week we reached the Standard of Excellence!  This standard is the ideal goal for the mission.  So it encompasses a goal for number of lessons, new investigators, baptisms, lessons with member presents, etc. that everybody in the mission should be striving for.  They are definitely difficult to achieve, but possible!  We worked SOO hard this past week, and reached 21 lessons, the standard for total number of lessons! I saw miracles continue to happen, as we found people on the street who we could teach, less actives who ended up being home so we could teach, etc.  When you set a goal with faith and you work hard, The Lord is going to provide for you.  I have seen that time and time again my whole mission!

Something I learned this week was the importance of Preach My Gospel! With the ipad, we have access to every single conference talk, teaching resource, and video available on the Gospel Library app.  It has been super easy to get sucked into the other things and forget about Preach My Gospel!  I was reminded on Monday that we have been called as Preach My Gospel missionaries.  The book wasn't written just for us to look at occasionally and then throw to the side as we study other things, essentially it has everything in it necessary to be the most successful missionaries possible.  I have been focusing on studying it more, and am seeing it help my focus as a missionary.

Yesterday we got hit by another snow storm!! I can't complain though, after reading emails and letters from Sarah in Indy, and Ryan in Ohio, I am so grateful to be in The City!  While others have been grounded, we can still work!  Yesterday it snowed for 14 hours straight, and we received about 2 feet of snow.  Let's be honest, it made me want to go skiing pretty bad…. Haha.  We live on a pretty steep hill, and while we were doing language study, we heard SO MANY cars struggle to get up the hill.  So at 10:30-ish we headed outside to go shovel our steps and help cars up the street.  At this point it had been snowing for about an hour.  We shoveled our steps, a little bit of the sidewalk, and dusted off some cars parked on the side.  We then saw this van struggling to get to the top of the hill.  So the two of us, Sister Richardson and I, went down and started to push him up the hill! Basically we felt like pioneers pushing giant handcarts in the snow. We were just praying for the help of angels.  We pushed it about a block--minus the last 15 feet.  We were SO close to the top of the hill when two men showed up out of nowhere.  Instead of coming to help us with the last haul, they went up the driver, told him he wasn't going to make it, and that he should back all the way back down the hill and go some other route.  And so what did the driver do??! HE BACKED UP ALL THE WAY DOWN THE HILL.  Even with the missionaries, representatives of Jesus Christ there at his side, when tempted to take the easy way by the whisperings of man, the driver followed man.  He totally could have made it to the top.  Boo.  Hahaha.  NEVER GIVE UP.  It's just ridiculous!! Hahahaha.

Love you all, stay warm! Thanks to my new boots, I am staying nice and dry and warm! ;) So THANK YOU!

LOVE YOU!

Hermana Dodson

Some pictures from last week's P-Day bowling activity: