Happy Labor Day

Happy Labor Day everyone! I hope that you were able to do something fun and exciting. It was a great day here. We had some awesome lessons and went apple picking with the Burger Clan. It was Sister T's first time picking apples so it was fun to share this experience with her. 

I don't have a lot of time so I'm copying and pasting what I wrote to President Patrick this week. It sums up the amazing experiences I've had this week.

Hello President! I hope this week has found you well. Thanks for the update on Sister A. That's so exciting for her and her family! 

This week has been a good week. Sister T. and I had a cool experience with weekly planning. We created our own 5-5-5 list. They are active members that we want to focus on and help them become member missionaries. We said a prayer asking if this was even a good idea and if it was to help us to know who to focus on. After the prayer we both felt good about it and so we started to write down names. We had 5 names in common come up and so those were the families we decided to focus on. So then we said another prayer and thanked Heavenly Father for the inspiration and also asked what we needed to share and how to help each family. Then we started planning and making goals for them. All of the names have a goal with a specific section in Preach My Gospel to go along with. It's just amazing how the spirit works. Sister T. or I would say something and the other one would say they thought that too. It was cool and I'm looking forward to seeing the members and helping them with this.

Last night we had our first taste of what it will be like. We went to the Best Family for dinner and shared with them what we had planned. We also told them about our experience with planning. Sister Best was surprised and felt touched. She told us that she really felt like we needed to come and see them this week, but she wasn't sure why. Our visit with them and what we told them confirmed her prompting to have us over. It was cool. 

Another cool experience we had was we made a Book Of Mormon challenge for the Burger Families (Mama. Papa, all the sons and their wives). It didn't start out as a family challenge. It all started with how do we help our investigator  May, she is the wife of one of the sons. One thing lead to another and we both felt like we should give the family a challenge. It's a simple challenge and we're doing it with them. It's to read 1 chapter a day. We presented it to them yesterday and they all enthusiastically accepted. It was awesome! 

People keep asking us if we are wasting our time and shouldn't we be trying to contact more? I'm not saying that those things aren't important, but right now Sister T. and I feel like we need to help the members. We've tried contacting and it wasn't very effective. We can still talk to people when we encounter them and try to reach our goal of giving away 3 cards a week and 1 Book of Mormon (which we gave away yesterday while we were with the Bergeron Families!) a week. For now I am going to focus on the members, of course not forgetting the investigators and less actives we are working with. 

I hope you all have an awesome week. Keep being amazing!

Love, Sister Gardner 

P.S. I forgot to mention who was in the pictures from last week. The first was of members cooking the corn. The 2nd was Sister T. and Sister H and her daughter. Sister H is the one who knows Zaq Brinkerhoff.