Jan 28th

Hello everyone! This week has been fantastic! Miracles have been happening like crazy. I can testify that we have to go through trials because "we receive no witness until after the trial of our faith" (Ether 12:6)

Transfers were this week but me and my companion are staying together which I am very happy about! We get to continue to do the Lord's work here in Manteca! We had a couple of amazing experiences this week. 

So do you remember the girl I told you about last week? We had to drop her because she was simply not willing to change. But after a week of not teaching her, she came to us last night we talked more and now she has a baptismal date! You cannot even understand the excitement! So please keep praying for her. 

The other milagro (miracle) of the last week was meeting an amazing man named Martin. We got his name from the English Speaking Sisters and went to meet him. He was incredibly nice and has been through a lot of hard times but has a great desire to come closer to God and increase his faith. We were so excited to add him as an investigator and we began planning how we were going to teach him. We went to our next lesson with him and we were explaining that as he came to know that these things that we are teaching him are true he will have the desire to come to Christ through baptism. He then said (I'm going to put quotation marks but it is definitely not a quote because he was speaking spanish) he said "Oh yeah, I was baptized in your church 30 years ago in Mexico!" So that blew our minds. I felt the Spirit was burning in my heart during that visit with him. These words came out of my mouth "I feel that I have to tell you this- I know why the Lord sent us to your door. Because He loves you, He has always been watching over you, and He is ready for you to come back to His fold." 

We have had some really amazing meetings with him. I know without a doubt that Jesus Christ loves every one of His sheep, and He wants them to come to Him. That's my job, to find them and remind them of His love and that if they come to Him they will be healed.

That's all the time I have!

Love you all!

Hermana Hurley  

Feb 3rd

Hello everyone! This week was more of the same: we taught a TON of people this week, we had amazing weather except when it rained two days which California needed a lot and I'm still rocking it out in Manteca with Sister Sierra as my companion! This week we had a lot of success in finding people at home and seeing little miracles in that way. We set goals of how many lessons we will teach each week, and the last week we actually doubled that number in amount of lessons we taught! We have truly recommitted to working harder than ever. We know that the reason neither of us got transferred is because there are people here who will benefit from our combined talents, skills and personalities as a companionship- so we are determined to go find them! I hope you all are praying for missionary opportunities! If you are nervous just say the little motto that Hermana Sierra and I always say: These people need what we have.

Love you,

Hermana Hurley

blog week of Jan 20

Hello everyone! I'm writing to you at the end of a rough week but the beginning of a much better one! This week was very emotional for a million reasons but we are moving forward! I'm glad that Missionary work is hard sometimes, it helps us to recognize the importance of it and know that we need to depend on the Lord. He is guiding this work and it's good to humble ourselves and realize that it's only through His grace that we can do His work. 

Last night we were feeling pretty discouraged so we call our District leader and told him we were calling in a request for a pep talk. He said "I'm great at those!" Haha, he really is. He pep talked us and reminded us that Salvation is not a cheap experience. That's why the work is difficult sometimes. This impacted me a lot because it reminds me of our Savior. He suffered the pains, sorrows and sins of every single person that has ever lived and ever will live. This inconceivable pain helps me put in perspective my trials. People will always ignore, cancel and reject us. But it's worth the hard work and disappointments when we are able to bring just one soul to the healing arms of Jesus Christ. So this week we are prepared and excited to move forward! 

Something that added to our disappointment yesterday is that the investigator (which is the name for the people that we teach that are "Investigating" the Gospel" that I told you about before that is particularly special and that I felt was particularly progressing has made it clear she is unwilling to ever come to Church and doesn't want us to teach her as often, so we know we are going to have to drop her tomorrow. When it is made clear to us that an investigator is no longer progressing we have to "drop" them. This seemed strange to me at first but I've come to realized that we cannot fulfill our purpose which is to Invite others to Come unto Christ if we spend our time with people who are not prepared to come unto Christ at this point in their life. We drop them in order to use our time to find the people that Heavenly Father has prepared to receive His word. We have faith that our efforts have not been wasted by any means, but that these people were able to prepare a little more through our teaching and that one day they will be ready to accept Christ. This is sad but it's another way that the Lord is teaching me that it is never through my own efforts that we have success in Missionary work, but only through His preparation and His Spirit comes conversion. It's a hard lesson but I'm grateful for that reminder.

We had our follow-up call with our District Leader last night where we go over our numbers for the week (the number of lessons we had, investigators we found and added, etc.) And we realized our numbers were better than ever. We even felt a little silly for being so sad when our District Leader pointed out the success we have had this week.

Well everyone, please keep praying to find opportunities to share this message of hope and peace with others! I'll keep on going as well!
Love,

Hermana Hurley