Hello on February 23rd

Hey everyone!

I hope you are all having a great week. It has been a good week here in Canada. Still lots of snow but someday it will be gone. :)

This week the 2 miracles were seeing Pam and Sam came to church! Pam is a less active we have been trying to see since I got here. Every time we would go, she would be gone or running out the door. This past week we were able to see her and actually talk to her. We shared Ether 12:4 and talked about hope, faith in Christ, and good works. It went well.

Yes, Sam came to church! He is the investigator we gave cookies to my first week here. We haven't seen him since. He has canceled meetings and has been very busy. During sacrament meeting a brother came and tapped on the Elders shoulders and had them go with him out of the room. We start to sing the rest hymn and when the Elders return they have Sam with them. Sister H and I just about died. It was awesome! He said he liked church and would come back next week. :)

A 3rd miracle not involving me, but the Elders is that there was an Asian man named Bill yesterday who just walked into the church. The Elders talked to him and he has only been in Canada for a week and he saw our church and decided to come check it out because he wants religion in his life. Cool right?!

The other things to happen this week was I got to drive the car. It was weird. Now I know that you are all probably laughing at this, but I haven't driven a car in 6 almost 7 months. It was really weird to be the driver for a day. No worries all went well and Sister H and I are both still alive and doing well.

I have also been asked to be the ward Relief Society pianist. I have been playing every week since I got here to LaSalle. The sister that normally plays is in the Presidency and she is often running around doing other things and can't always play. Wish me luck,

I hope that you all have a fantastic week!

Love you!

Sister Gardner

February 16

Hey everyone! I hope that you were able to have a good Valentines Day! It was good here. My companion and I even had a candle light dinner of waffles. 

This week we didn't get the chance to see many people. We were able to see India and Val. We watched The Testaments with them. They and Indra's other daughter Carrie (a member) cried through the movie. At the end of the movie it says that the Messiah has come and he will come again. Val asked when and if it would be next week. Carrie said she hoped not because she is not ready. Val said she was ready. Carrie told her it was because she was 7. India said she was ready too. Both of her daughters just looked at her and Val told her she wasn't ready because she wasn't baptized yet. I wasn't really sure what to say to that. They both want their Mom to be baptized so bad. Someday I know that she will, it's just a matter of when.

I know that I wouldn't be ready of the 2nd coming happened next week. I know there is often the joke that if your a missionary you will be fine. But I know for myself there is so much more I need to do to prepare for it. 

I hope you all have a good week!

Talk to you later,

Sister Gardner

Pics of our candle light dinner and Ti (the 5 year old with cancer)

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentines Day this week everyone! 

This week has been an interesting week. I would like to start off by asking everyone to keep our recent convert Rosa in your prayers this week. She is from Croatia and she offered to help us with our Croatian. Anyway this week has been a rough week for her. On Monday her parents got a letter in the mail saying they were going to be deported back to Croatia. Rosa is worried that her papers will not go through now. To make it an even better week her 5 year old son has cancer and he had a MRI this week and the cancer is back. So he will be doing more rounds of radiation and chemo. So if you could just keep them in your prayers this week that would be great!

We were able to see 2 other investigators this week Mari and Val.  Val is 7 years old and is super cute. We taught her about listening to the Holy Ghost by blindfolding her and she was suppose to find a picture of the Montreal Temple. We had her mom telling her how to get to the picture while her older sister was distracting her and telling her to go to another spot. She ended up going where here sister sent her. Later she came back and started to listen to her mom and she found the picture. We told her that the Holy Ghost speaks to us in quite ways and we have to listen carefully to what he is saying so that we can do what is right and go the right direction. It went well. Val's words of wisdom this week are to poke polka-dots, since they're made to be poked. 

Mari  is a little mentally handicapped so we are taking things really slow with her. I guess she was meant to have a lesson on the why we get baptized because the elders had gone over earlier in the day and read some scriptures on baptism. We didn't know that until after. So we had a type of object lesson/visual aid to help her understand it. I don't know if you know about the soap and the pepper trick but we used it. We had a small bowl of water and we put pepper it it representing sin. When we allow Jesus Christ in and repent he can help clean us. You put a drop of soap on your finger and put your finger into the pepper in the water and it all goes to the sides. But there is another step because we aren't completely clean. We get baptized to wash away our sins. So you dump out the water and put fresh in. Unfortunately we are not perfect and we sin again and we can't get baptized every week. So what do we do now to completely wash our bowl? We take the sacrament each week so that we can be clean again. The lesson went well.

Basically that was my week this week. I did have a Mrs. Polifax feeling though. I have been learning different ways to play Solitaire this week and I'm on a mission. The only thing I'm missing is a hat. :) (Sorry for those of you who will not get this reference, but it is a series of books and they made 2 tv movies)

Have a great week everyone!

Sister Gardner

There is more winter here for sure! Lol imagine that here in Canada? We have snow. Snow removal here is intense. They move the cars and if you don't it gets toed. Then the have all these trucks that they put the snow into and they drive it to what we call a snow mountain. It is seriously this mountain made of snow. I think they should open it up for sledding! That's what I wanted to do when I fist saw it!

February 2nd

Hey everyone!

I hope you are all having a good week. Things here in LaSalle are good. I am starting to settle in and know the people here. It will be a slow process, especially since I am terrible with names but they will come! 

Croatian is interesting! To learn it we have some books and I have a Book of  Mormon. We also have a recent convert named Rosa who has agreed to help us learn the language. So that will be nice. On my own I decided to work on the alphabet so that I could sound out words. We will see how it goes. Wish me luck with that and my French! On the good news someone asked me a question in French yesterday and I was able to understand it and reply back. :) The question was how are you and where are you from? 

My quick story is the power of cookies. We have an investigator named Sam  (Sammy). He had kind of dropped us recently. Anyway so we were texting him and asking if we could meet him and he really wouldn't say yes. We asked him if there was anything we could do for him and he was like, "like what?" So Sister H asked me what we could do. I offered a couple of things one of them being cookies. After we sent that we could make him cookies he was like, ya we can totally meet and Tim Hortons (coffee shop) and you can bring me cookies and we can talk. So that was awesome! We did make him cookies and met him at Tim Hortans and he wants to meet with us again.  :)

I hope you all have a good week!

Talk to you later,

Sestra Gardner (Croatian word I know)

Pic is of a ward game night and the girl smiling is my companion Sister H