HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Dear Family,

Happy Thanksgiving!! This past week has been so much fun. We got a new Elder in our ward and he just came up from Groton, Connecticut which is right next to Westerly, Rhode Island (my first area!) so we are having fun :)

It is amazing here!  The youth are really catching on to the missionary work wave! A few of the youth have been inviting their friends to church and to listen to the missionaries. They are so awesome. We have one potential from the youth right now but I know that we will have more soon.

Monday we taught this lady, S, who has been investigating for about 4 years. She hasn't been to church since then so I invited her and she came! She is planning on coming next week :) We are teaching her again tonight so wish me luck! We are going to ask her if she has thought about being baptized because I don't think anyone has asked her that in a long time.

On Wednesday we went to an Atonement Fireside that President and Sister Haight spoke at. They are amazing. They told us about how they had two still births with their first babies, they were twin boys. I felt like I was watching my parents tell their story with Bethany. I hadn't met Sister Haight yet but she came right up to us afterwards. She is so cute. She looked at my name tag and said, "Oh, so you're sister Christensen" and nothing else. I wonder why she said that!? It kind of freaked me out a little bit.  But we had a great night. President Haight gave us some more guidance again. He is so awesome!! I just love our mission presidency! :)

Saturday we taught C for the first time away from the Barn and without the Elders! It went so well! She opened up to us and told us she wants to live the Mormon standards because she sees how happy Mormons are, though she doesn't know if she will ever convert. But I think she will :) We talked about the commandments and we are teaching her again on Wednesday. She even went to the YSA ward yesterday and went to all three hours! Things are going well.

Our work is definitely increasing now, it is great! We had the best ward council meeting yesterday. Our Bishop is incredible. He is so on top of missionary work and was bold in front of the leaders and telling them that he had consecrated his life and that time is not an excuse not to do missionary work. It was amazing! The leaders were complaining a bit but we were able to get two splits scheduled for this week!! So so excited.

I hope you all have a wonderful thanksgiving and remember all the amazing blessings the Lord has given to all of us, especially our Savior and His Atonement. I am so grateful for that and this opportunity I have to share it. I hope you all are getting that experience and sharing it with everyone around you! Missionary work really brings the most blessings. Love you all!

Love, Sister Christensen

Dear Family,

Sister Grant and I are staying here in Littleton! Yay! :) We are so happy, though we did not expect to be moved at all. Our big district was finally split sadly. There were 12 of us in my district, now we are the only sisters in the district again. I loved being in a district with other sisters and they were so fun! I will miss them.

This week, we had an amazing zone conference where Elder S. Gifford Nielsen spoke. He was amazing!! He was the one in General Conference who said "Exclamation point!" all the time. Our mission gave him and his wife a cute platter and plates that have an exclamation point on it. He and his wife were so inspiring and so much fun. His wife is so cute and spunky and super funny. It was a great time. They lifted and inspired us, just what I needed! I would share some of the notes I took during the day long conference but I forgot my notebook at home.. Sorry.

This past week we also got a new investigator!! Yipee!! She also works at the Barn, but only for a short time since she will be leaving to go drive trucks in about 2 or 3 weeks. So we better get her quickly! We met with her for the first time on Saturday and we mostly talked about God's love. The whole time Sister Grant and I were thinking of how we could invite her to church but then she just said "so I was thinking about coming to church tomorrow" what!? that was a miracle and a half! The way we started teaching her was that we were "practice" teaching her. So it was incredible that she wanted to come to church!

And guess what? She came! And us and the Elders sang in church. And you know what? It actually went really well! We got so many compliments on it, which was nice because we had been practicing since we arrived here in Littleton.

We have been having more and more success here in Littleton which I am pretty excited about! There is a reason why they put us here! I love being here so much. I hope I get to stay for a while. At least I will be here for the holidays! :)

Have a wonderful week of amazing missionary experiences!

Love, Sister Christensen

A member gave us an elliptical!  No more running in the freezing cold mornings for the winter!

BLESSINGS!

Dear Wonderful, amazing family!

                                    

                                                              Sister G and Sister C

I cannot believe how fast this week has flown by, let alone this transfer! T-text is this Saturday! Isn't that insane!?

                                     

                                                                   Apple Picking

We go to Hybid a lot during the week (the horse farm that a member owns). R (the member) asked us to be there and help the girls that work there. We have had a lot of fun feeding horses, mucking stalls, leading the horses, sweeping the never ending dusty, dirty, barn floors, and so on. We have a blast! 

                                                                                                                   

                                        

C, our investigator, is amazing. We usually help her out. She is the one who has a very difficult background and her conversion will take a while. Well I am not so sure about that anymore. She has sky rocketed this week! She actually went to FHE at the singles ward and LOVED it! That was a huge miracle because she hates making new friends. But she met some girls that she really clicked with. One being a convert of one year and actually went to school with her years ago and they knew similar people. The guy she went with was trying to drag her out so they could go home but finally one of the girls offered to take her home and she immediately accepted. That is SO unlike her! It was incredible. She also posted a picture of Sister Grant and I on face book and said she loved us and never wants us to leave. That is also a huge turn around because the night we got here, in Littleton, we met her and so told Rita that she didn't want to meet with us because she knows the Elders and trusts them. Now she basically only talks to us.. sorry Elders.. Many miracles have happened for C and I am so excited for her it is unreal.

I can't believe how much I love this area. I love my companion, I love Caitlin and JD (our investigator who is getting baptized in December!) and everyone else involved here!

We had so many miracles occur this week that it would take too long for me to list them. But good things are happening here in Littleton, Massachusetts!

Ok. So now for the big part: Yesterday was such a wonderful day it is hard for to know where to even start!

I had to speak in church yesterday... (That wasn't the exciting part), but I was so nervous because I knew that President Haight was going to be there. He is amazing. But luckily he wasn't there during church but came afterwards. He came because the Elders asked him to come and meet with us. At first I didn't know why we needed to because we were starting to figure things out and we were getting some really good ideas, so I was afraid that we wouldn't have anything to talk to him about. How silly was I!? I should have never assumed that President Haight wouldn’t come with something in mind... Can I just tell you how much I love him! Every time he walks in a room it feels like you are hit by a gigantic truck of the spirit. It is kind of intimidating.

He started off by telling us about an amazing missionary experience he had this week. I don't know if I will share it because I know I will totally screw it up. But it was perfect and really brought in the spirit for the meeting. (Side note; he made a covenant with God a few years ago to share the gospel with someone everyday, and has done it since then. He said he usually shares it with up to 14-15 people but sometimes it is only 2 or 3. Incredible!). He gave us a million new ideas of how to help the Littleton ward grow with missionary work. It is a big ward so it thinks it doesn't need converts. Usually the bigger wards have a hard time sharing the gospel because they don't "need" it as much as the smaller wards. Every few minutes President Haight would say "ok can I shift gears?" (like he needs to ask us..). He gave us so much that I got a little overwhelmed so he made it better and put it in a priority list. First, we are getting splits going with the young women and the all the leaders (President Packard told us we really need to focus on the youth in this ward). We need to help the leaders first, with their missionary experiences for them to lead by example. Then we are to brush up on the Susan Fulcher case study (ya'll should read it if you can, it happened in this mission in the 70's), and there are quite a few more ideas he gave them but I will save you the time :). Basically we now have A TON of work to do. where before we were kind of struggling with filling up our days. But we have a great project that we have ventured on because of President Haight.

When we finished with our meeting, he asked if there was anything else we would like to ask him. Elder Holt asked for a blessing and then president Haight went on to talk about how honored he is to give priesthood blessings and offered to give one to all of us, which of course we all took without hesitation. How could you not accept a blessing from such a powerfully spiritual man! I was so excited but nervous at the same time because he said to let him know what was on our hearts and minds to know what direction the blessing should go.

That experience was the most amazing experience of my life! He basically expounded on my patriarchal blessing. I was in there with just president Haight for a good ten minutes. He is one of the most loving, spiritual, and inspiring men I have ever met; He and president Packard, both. Before he started the blessing he said how excited and grateful he was that I was in Littleton. He asked me what areas I have been in and he was amazed to know that I was the one to open both of those previous areas. I immediately got even more intimidated becoming afraid that I hadn't done enough in either of those areas. But it wasn't that at all that was written on his face. I felt kind of honored by him it was so cool. After the blessing he told us four missionaries that we were all here together for a reason, we all had something similar to each other. I am guess we all had pretty similar blessings, which he seemed to be excited and amazed about it.

I cannot explain in enough detail how amazing those 2 1/2 hours spent with President Haight were. I will never forget that experience.

And something else that just was the tip of the iceberg was that my dear friend Pops from the Waterford, Connecticut ward was driving through the area with his two elders in his ward, driving back from Nashua for a baptism, wanted to stop and say hi. But sadly, we were in a dinner appointment. :( But I was able to talk to Pops for a few minutes,  which seriously made my day that much better. I love dear old Pops. He is so wonderful.

Well, that is the end of my lengthy letter. I love you all and love to hear about your missionary experiences. Keep them coming! :) :)

Love,

Sister Christensen

                                                       Fall in New England is Beautiful!

Members Needed

This week has been pretty slow but there have been pretty awesome experiences too. We worked at the farm three times this week and have had amazing progress with our investigators!!! We always help C around and she teaches us what to do around the farm to help the horses. She is so cool and seems to love having us around. One day we were distributing hay around the field for the horses after it had rained and so it was super muddy and there was horse poop everywhere! The tractor kept getting stuck but we still rode on it! It was so fun. Caitlin kept saying how cute we were and kept laughing at us trying to get around the horse poop. She put a picture of us on Facebook and said she wanted to keep us forever! That was a huge step! We didn't think she liked us at first because she has a ton of self esteem issues but we made a huge step with her this week and she wants to meet with us instead of the Elders!! :) :) it's pretty awesome. She is definitely progressing but her conversion will be slow because of her difficult background.

                                                   

                                        

So we didn't have much to do this week because the members still don’t really know how to use missionaries let alone two sets of missionaries. So we went tracting!! It was so fun! We only went for like 20 minutes because we did have an appointment to go to. We had no success when we tracked but it was a good experience.

This week wasn't very eventful... but I am excited for this coming week! Should be good :)

Have a wonderful week, love you all!

Sister Christensen