Email received March 5, 2012


Subject:  Investigators totally prepared by the Lord



Hey yall!

First of all thank you everybody for the letters that I received this week! I received letters from the Bowers, Kelsey Davis, Jaclyn Burgess, Sister Parks, and mom and dad of course. I will try and write back when I get some time eventually.  I love hearing about what is happening with everyone back at home. I would also love to hear from my two younger siblings whom seem to have already forgotten me :) That would be great!

This week has been a very interesting week for me. We started out last preparation day going to the Dallas Zoo with a bunch of the Elders from our Zone. That was actually a lot of fun and cool. Sadly, there are no type of bears at the zoo, not even pandas... i guess because of the climate.

The rest of the week was full of ups and downs, but overall kinda discouraging. I have learned more fully how to look over these discouragments though and I know that dissapointments will only increase the joys I feel with each soul that is saved (though I definitely had to word at bettering my outlook at the beginning of the week). Right now we are doing quite a bit of tracting to try and increase our teaching pool, but it never seems too sucessful especially if we go late at night. Sometimes it is hard to have a good attitude while tracting, but my companions are good at making up little games to play along the way. the other day we played follow the leader and tried to all walk a funny different way in between houses. I'm sure we looked ridiculuous but it kept us happy even though we kept getting doors slammed in our faces. Gotta love it!!

We have met a lot of people this week that are totally prepared by the Lord. One new investigator is Adah.  We talked to her getting out of her car and she had actually heard about the Mormons from her baptist minister because her friend needed help getting through a hard time with cancer. She started talking to us and said she was super interested in family history work and knows that our church has many resources to help her. She has totally been influenced by the spirit of Elijah and our first lesson with her was awesome becuase of that, although definitely wasn't the best lesson that I had ever taught! I am so excited to meet with her again and show her more about the church.  This week we had a couple of other investigators that were totally like that: they let us in and are letting us come back because they have been prepared by the Lord for His gospel and through his love.  
On the other hand, this has been one of the worst weeks for our current investigators. It seems like they are all just stuck and we can't move anywhere with them until they get some sort of confirmation that what we teach is true. We still tried to help them a bunch, but as a companionship we started to do a lot of less active work. We have been visiting many less active members, and many of them were super willing to let us talk to them. We have even set up some appts to go back and take their families through the missionary lessons to help strenghten and rekindle their testimonies. Although it can be hard to do less active work because the results don't appear as easily (especially in the numbers) I know that it is important to strenghten all areas of the church and these people can bring us even more referrals of others to teach. the less actives are some of the most interesting people to talk to and I am excited to start helping them, especially a few specific families that seem ready and willing to come back to church.

The week has also been rough in regards to the companionship. It is more difficult to get along with three of us all of the time. When one of us is upset or struggling we can just hide in the background and let the other 2 focus on the work. This is not the best, so we have really been trying to work on unity as a companionship. I have been tying to be more discerning about my companions, but it can be very difficult, so I jsut keep praying for love and charity.  Similarily, I am not always the best missionary, and may have contributed to many of the issues in the comapnionships, but I am trying to be better. I am learning that if I focus on being a representative of the Lord and a missionary, then I am less likely to notice the faults of others. Working with and being loving to a companion 100% of the time is something I definitely need to work on, so I guess that it is a good thing that I have 17 more months to do so! As we slowly get over our issues, our companionship becomes stronger and able to teach with more unity. I love both of my companions and am so grateful for their support and encouragment. I hope we can continue to grow together by the spirit and become even better missionaries like unto Alma and Amulek. As Sister Heaton always says, WE are going to become the greatest missionaries ever!!

I love yall! and I hope and pray that everything is going well! Thanks!!
Sister Peck