こんばんは！

Hope everyone is doing well! Sorry you New Jersians with 2 feet of snow. Hope you're all doing alright and enjoying it! It's still cold here haha surprise. It gets down to -20s in the early morning, and we wear 3 pairs of tights and our legs still sting sometimes. But there are a lot of really nice people that give us rides around so we don't have to be outside too long. Angels.

This week was really, really good. I feel like I'm finally starting to have more patience with myself and I felt really happy again this week. My first transfer our zone did this thing where we each wrote a talk to build the faith of our zone, and then the zone leaders compiled them and sent them to everyone. I was reading through them the other day and one really stood out to me. She said, "the missionary who tries to do everything right and the missionary who tries to do everything for others are hard to tell apart. But God knows." And reading this helped me refocus on what is most important, because as hard as we try we will never be able to do everything perfectly. I hate that feeling of always falling short, but I realized that through those moments is when we grow. And it would be quite a sad life if I didn't grow at all and learn about the power of the atonement in my own life. And without learning it, I wouldn't be able to share that with others. So I can either stress myself out and feel guilt about not being all that I feel I should be and want to be for these people, or I can choose to have joy in every minute I am with them and enjoy these precious moments with them.

The other day we had a really good lesson with our investigator who is really close to baptism. It was at a members house and the elders were there too! And we all shared our favorite scripture and explained it, but while we were all flipping through the pages trying to open up to the place, our investigator was like, "well in the mean time I have a scripture I've been liking lately and when I first read it last year I didn't know what it meant at all but I feel like now I've started understanding it more." And it was the same scripture that my companion and the member had. Too ichi. She also talked about how she felt the spirit stronger than she ever has before, like it was inside her, and it was the same feeling she feels when she goes to church and is with the missionaries, so we testified again about the spirit and that it teaches truth. It was a really good experience!

We also found more young investigators that are our age and that's really exciting. One of them wants to come to church and as we testified about prayer and what is has done in our lives, she was like, "I want to start praying more!" She's a cutie.

We also invited one of our investigators to baptism! She was happy and receptive and said she wants to do it, but she has a far away image of it and didn't want to make a date. She has so much potential and we're excited.


Thanks for all your love always.


Love
Massey shimai