Miracle after Miracle

Hello Family!

I hope I can remember what all happened this week. We went to the temple on Wednesday which was sooooo nice. We always do the 7am session which is hard to stay awake, but this time I was really alert and learned a lot. I am so grateful that I get to be so close to a temple and even work on temple ground on my mission.

We had a meeting with our zone and I was assigned to give a talk. I don't know what it is, but I have to either give a talk or a training at every one of those. I guess it's because we are the only sisters in the zone so they want to mix it up. My talk was on showing charity to our investigators and implementing how Christ would extend the baptismal invitaion. I learned a lot. I looked up a lot of stories in the scriptures where Christ is giving committments and he doesn't invite, He commands, "Follow thou me" "Be baptized in my name" Well... I know we can't command our investigators, but I think the reason Christ extended invitations in that way was because He always has an eternal perspective and He see's what we can become. Its like if you saw your brother or sister hanging off a cliff, would you say "oh.. I invite you to give me your hand so I can save your life" ?? You would plead with them, because you know if they just do their small part in giving you their hand, you have the tools to save their life. And the way Christ did it was he ALWAYS promised blessings. He never gives us a commandment if it's not going to benefit us. Pretty simple. Anyway.. I just talked about giving committments with charity. Learned alot.

We had Miriam, an 18 year old in our ward come out with us for 2 days straight. She wanted to see what it's like as a missionary to see if she wanted to go. She is amazing. Sister Sordes and I prayed really hard to let her see miracles and that we would have success. Well it started off in 120 degree weather knocking on a million of our investigators doors with no response. Great. We prayed and prayed and followed the spirit and as we were diligent the blessings pored in. Miracle after miracle. Even Miriam said, "I just had a thought come.. we could go to my exboyfriends house and try and teach his parents." She was super nervous, but said it would be okay. Well.. just shows that we always need to be a good example because they let us all right in and ate everything up! Turns out they had met with missionaries before too. Even the dad said.. "I'd like to come to church one of these sundays to see what it's all about" Cool. We were blessed with 6 new investigators in 2 days with a total of 11 for the week! Our problem definitely isn't finding, but organizing. It's hard to figure out how to get all our investigators to progress because we can't see them every day. We have about 40-50 right now and it's super stressful, but i'm so grateful that the Lord is putting peple in our path. This time we are NOT loosing our planners!!!!

Brandon called me at the VC and left me a message yelling on the phone. He said that he just had an epiphany and that he's getting baptized. Apparently him and his gf molly were fighting and she hadn't been talking to him.. so he said a prayer while he was driving (hopefully not with his eyes closed) and said "heavenly father please just help molly to forgive me and that she will talk to me and work things out" well right when he said amen, he got a text from her saying that she's sorry and that she wants to work things out. That's not all! Right after he got the text he looked over and there were two missionaries on bicycles! He couldn't believe it. So September 8th he will be baptized. That was such a testimony to me that technology is inspired. The missionaries had dropped him, but because I still kept in contact with him, he's getting baptized! I'm so excited for him.

We just got back from "mission tour" about an hour ago. It was AMAZING! We had Elder Marcus K Eidukidus from the 70 come talk to us. He was really inspiring and I know that we will see more baptisms from it.

As far as the allergies.. I'm gonna call another doctor I think and try and get another opinion. One of the sisters made me think when she said that maybe something else is happening to my body and this is just the way it's reacting to it? Anyway.. I don't think it's anything big, but I'm gonna see if another doctor says something different.

We had dinner with Miriam and her family and they were sooo cute! They figured out everything that I was allergic to and planned accordingly even though everything didn't go together. So I am being taken care of :) Thank you so much for your prayers! I really am fine.. no one notices that anything is wrong with me unless I tell them and it doesn't bother me as much anymore.

Love you all so much! The chapter this week is D&C 64. ALOT of good stuff in this one. I will be reading it this week too :) Love you

Love,

Hermana Cottrell