March 21, 2011

Hello Family!

Can you believe how fast the month of March is going by? It's so crazy! I can't wait for general conference though! This week was pretty great! We had some fun times and taught some great lessons! We are starting to volunteer at a Nursing Home each week just for a couple of hours and we were able to go this week and have some fun with the elderly there. We went and had karaoke with them. Ha-ha... it's so fun to watch them though and help them out. We are teaching a few people still. Not very many of our investigators are keeping their commitments and so it's hard to keep teaching them. We might have to drop some soon sadly if they can't do what they say they are going to do. Almost all of our investigators said they would come to church last week and none of them came on Sunday. It's just hard to work with these people when they are not willing to do the work to get the blessings. I believe that is one of the hardest aspects of missionary work. We find these great people to teach and we really learn to love them and we desire their salvation but then they don't do the things that are so essential to conversion. We want to keep helping them forward but we can’t pull them into the baptismal font. They have to use their agency. The highlight of this week was on Saturday. Saturday we woke up at 5:30 a.m. and got ready and drove down to Columbus. 4 Zones got together and we were able to get instruction from Elder C. Scott Grow from the Seventy. It was amazing! The things that he had to say were so inspired! I am excited to implement the things I learned! He really talked about the importance of planning. It's one of those things that you do every night as a missionary but it kind of just gets routine. We really should be setting goals that are inspired and that we desire. Sister Lillywhite and I set some pretty high goals for this week and we are going to work our hardest to really reach those goals and show our faith in God and do everything with in our power to reach them, while still respecting the agency of others. It's so great getting instruction from general authorities! I learn so much and you can really feel the spirit. It was really nice to go because after the meeting we had a little Sister's meeting and I was able to see Sister Hazleton, LeSueur and a bunch of other sisters that I have really come to love! It's always great to get with the other missionaries. I am trying to see what else happened this week. We did do some more tracting and found a great new investigator. Her name is Cindy Ford. We taught her the first lesson and the spirit was really strong. She asked a lot of great questions and has been looking for a church to go to. Sunday was also great because we went to PEC and Ward Council and the high counselor and a member of the stake presidency was there. We did our report the best we could and then the president martin told us that it was the best progress report he had ever seen and he told the ward council that they needed to work better with us because we are some amazing missionaries and they are not using us to our full advantage! It made me feel pretty great! And hopefully we can get the work moving here! But I am grateful to be a missionary and I love this work so much! I hope that you all have a wonderful week!

I Love you! Love, Sister Madison Whitney