Group E-mail 5/19/14

Well this week was really slow. I was recovering from a cold and Sis. Hassell got sick this weekend, and pretty much all of our appointments fell through. But that's okay. This week will be better. We spent most of this week trying to get to know the area and the members better. So we cleaned up the area book because it was a mess and organized the area. And we visited lots of members trying to get to know people -- since neither of us really know anybody -- so we can start building relationships with them. 

Wednesday morning, after studies we walked to our car to go visit a less-active, and one of our tires was flat. I was kind of excited to change the tire. I was just glad that I knew how to change a tire, since my dad taught me how about a year ago when we got a flat tire on the way home from BYU. So we started changing it and then a guy named Mario came over and offered to help. He's a mechanic so he did it a lot faster than we could have. And then we spent the rest of our morning at the car shop getting our tire fixed. A nail had popped the tire. And we gave Mario a Book of Mormon. 

That is pretty much it. Not much to say. 

Something I have been thinking a lot about this week is how Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are always by our side and God's hand is always guiding our life. He has a perfect and personal plan for each one of us. All we have to do is let Heavenly Father into our life and let Him guide and help us. He loves us so much and everything He does is to bless us, even though we might not be able to see how in the moment. 2 Nephi 26:24 says "He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for He loveth the world, even that He layeth down his own life that He may draw all men unto Him. Wherefore, He commandeth none that they shall not partake of His salvation." The littlest things that might not seem to make a difference, matter. Things that happen to us and decisions we make everyday. For example, Megan, the lady who got baptized a few weeks ago in my last area. We started teaching her in December. February hit, and we stopped meeting with her because she was so busy. We were still texting her trying to meet with her, but it wasn't really working. We were thinking that she was done with everything and that we would probably be dropping her sooner than later. But then, we accidentally pocket dialed her. That pocket dial changed everything. She called us back, not knowing we hadn't meant to call her. So we talked for awhile. She brought up church and how she needed to start going again. She told us that she was still reading the Book of Mormon. And all of a sudden we knew that we couldn't give up on her because she was ready, even though she was busy. So we kept trying until we finally met with her and a few weeks later she got baptized and she is doing great. If we hadn't have pocket dialed her, there is a good chance she still wouldn't be baptized. Little things like that can make a big difference. God is always guiding us. 

Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love us so much. They will always be there for us. Their arms are always outstretched toward us. We just have to reach out to them. They will never give up on any of us. We are never alone. 

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 5/12/14

First of all, I loved talking to my family yesterday. It was so great! I love all of them so much and I am so grateful for all of their love and support!

Well transfers happened this week. Monday was a great last day in Oak Ridge. Like I said last week, I'm really bummed to leave Oak Ridge because it is such a great ward and I love everyone there so much. But that's okay because I know that I will love my new area just as much. We had a busy P-day getting everything done. We had to go the mall and send off mother's day packages and hang out with our district. And then we went and said goodbye to some of our favorite members in the ward. I miss all of them. The ward was the best. 

Tuesday, Sis. Colton and I drove to transfers. Sis. Colton is still in Oak Ridge and I know she will continue to do great there. I am now in Bear Creek in the Katy zone and my companion is Sister Hassell. She is from Oregon and she is really cool. We get along well so far and I think we will have fun and be able to get lots of work done here in Bear Creek. 

So a little about Bear Creek. We live in really nice apartments. Really nice. And we have a really nice gym. And we are in a car again, which I am kind of bummed about because I wanted to try a bike, but I know that I will love that car when it starts getting really humid. We have a lot of investigators and less-actives we are working with. And apparently it isn't very hard to find people to teach. There is a lot of work to do here and I think it will be really good. 

Megan and Tim are doing really well. On Monday night we had an appointment with them and we had to say goodbye. Tim asked what he needed to do to get baptized and asked about the Priesthood. He really wants to do this. He is starting to read the Book of Mormon, again. We went through the baptismal questions with him and set a baptismal date for him at the end of the month. So we are excited for that and I'm glad I will be able to see them again, soon.

Anyway, there isn't much to say so far, yet. I hope you you all have a great week and I hope all of you mom's had a great mother's day!!

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 5/5/14

This week was a really, really long week. It seemed to drag on forever. There's nothing wrong with that. It was just long...

We went on exchanges this week, and that was fun. Sis. Colton went up to Montgomery with Sis. Bonner and I stayed down here in Oak Ridge with Sis. Bowden. We did service with our district for most of the day. And then we visited a couple of people. We visited this one less-active family that we've visited a couple of times. We shared a message on prayer, and we asked them about their testimony of prayer and the husband started to cry while sharing his feelings. The Spirit was really strong. You can tell that they love Heavenly Father so much. And they have a strong testimony of the gospel and church. We just wish they would act on that testimony and come to church so they can be even more blessed and have an even stronger testimony.

Megan is doing awesome! We weren't able to meet with her this week, but she called us on Thursday and we talked for quite awhile. She told us that the week leading up to her baptism was a really terrible week and she was depressed and annoyed and nothing was going right with her family, with work. And then she got baptized and that was great. And then the day after her baptism, Saturday, she said if felt like her whole world was about to fall apart. And then on Sunday she received the Gift of the Holy Ghost. When she received the Holy Ghost, everything just melted away and all of her worries were gone. She felt so great! And then the whole rest of the week was great. She felt so happy and calm and peaceful. She had more patience. Things were going really well. Her husband told her that her whole demeanor had changed and that he could tell she was much happier. She just went on and on about how great she felt. And she said that she knew everything wouldn't always be so smooth, but that it was ok because with the Holy Ghost she could continue to feel that peace. She is almost done reading the Book of Mormon. She's been reading the Gospel Principles book and the Relief Society books that she got when she was baptized, and they make her feel great, too. She told us that on Thursday morning, she was having a rough morning, and she saw one of the Relief Society books on the table and thought she should read some of it. She read a chapter and said she felt so much better. And then at the end of our phone call, she said "And that's my testimony." It was the best phone call! I love the gift of the Holy Ghost so much! The Holy Ghost can bring us so much peace and comfort no matter what is happening in life and it is so amazing. Definitely one of the best gifts God has given to us.

Not much else to say, that I can think of. We got to hold some baby bunnies. Ate a lot of delicious food, including my favorite, Chicken Tetrazini.

I'm getting transferred to a new area tomorrow. I have mixed emotions. I'm really excited for a new adventure and I'm sure I will love it, but I am also really sad to be leaving Oak Ridge. I love this area so much. The ward is so amazing and I just love all of the members. And they are just starting to really catch the missionary spirit. We've been able to work hard and have a lot of fun. A lot of good things have happened here. I love it so much and I will definitely miss it a ton!

I hope you all have a great week. And HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 4/29/14 (Her Birthday was 4/24)

Birthday and a baptism! It was a pretty great week!

My birthday was really great! Definitely a great start to my 20's. We ate a ton of food to celebrate. Sis. Colton filled the shower with balloons. And a member decorated our car with sticky notes and made me my favorite meal, chicken tetrazzini. It was so delicious! And the member loved it so much that she is making it for us again this weekend. I won' complain :) Please. Make all the chicken tetrazzini you want. Thank you so much to everybody who helped out with the video that was made for my birthday! You guys are all so great and I love all of you so much! It made me so happy to see all of your beautiful faces!

But the best part of this week was Megan's baptism! It was so great! Lots of people came and the Spirit was really strong. She received the gift of the Holy Ghost on Sunday and was confirmed and it was really great. Her son, Tim, said that she looked really peaceful during it, and Megan said that she felt really peaceful and that all of her stresses and worries melted away. She is so great! I've been meeting with Megan for almost 6 months now, and every time I talk to her, I get more impressed. It's ridiculous. For example, last week when we visited her a couple days before the baptism, we were going to talk about family history. She pretty much taught us the whole lesson. We've never talked about it at all before and she already knew everything. She's so great. And she's excited to do family history. She even went to the class on Sunday.

Anyway, I love all of you so much! You are amazing!! And I hope you have a great week!

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 4/21/14

On Tuesday mornings, our district does service at a Nature Center. This week we went, and after being there for awhile we decided to go walk the trails and pick up trash because we hadn't done that in a long time. As we were walking I found this really long trail of fire ants carrying leaves. I was following and watching this trail, and all of a sudden I looked over and there was a snake a couple inches from my foot. I bright, black, red, and yellow striped one. It was scary looking. Anyway, I jumped really high and ran a few feet. Sis. Colton said that I made a noise that sounded like Scooby-Doo. It was pretty funny. That has been our story for this week. 

Megan is getting baptized on Friday! We are very excited about that! Tim isn't getting baptized this week. He isn't quite ready yet. He still has some lessons left and stuff, but he will get baptized in a month or so. Megan is excited about her baptism and its going to be great.

This weekend we started teaching a girl named Sarah. She is the sister of a lady who was baptized last year. She said that she just found God, and wants to learn more. So we met with her and answered some of her questions and gave her a Book of Mormon, and then the next day taught her the Restoration. Her sister is very excited about all of this. Sarah came to church yesterday and told Sis. Colton that she was really glad she came and she really liked it. We're glad she came, too.

We did more service this week for members, nonmembers, and inactive members. It was great. On Wednesday, we helped a potential investigator with her yard. She is an elderly, single lady (never been married) and is the neighbor of one of our members. We met her at dinner at their house about a month ago. Her name is Mary Ellen. She is hilarious and really nice. She loves it when we come over. She really appreciated our help with her yard. We ended up stopping by again on Friday night, and she ended up telling us about how she feels like God hates her and He is punishing her and has just left her all together. He doesn't have any hand in her life anymore. It was so sad. PLEASE never forget that God loves you perfectly and that He will never leave your side! He will always be guiding your life with His hand. Anyway, it broke our hearts and Sis. Colton started crying a little bit. She says that she likes her church and isn't going to get baptized into ours, but goodness, she needs the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. She has so many questions and is confused. We assured her that God loves her very much and that He will never leave her alone. And talked about the Atonement and taught a brief restoration lesson. She was really touched by what we had to say.

I hope everyone had a great Easter! It was so great to be able to focus so much on the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I'm so grateful for His sacrifice. He loves us so much. He suffered all that He did because He knew that we were all worth it. He knows how great of a potential we have as sons and daughters of God.

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 4/14/14

We did lots of service for people this week. On Tuesday we did our usual service activity with our district, at a Nature Center. That is always fun. On Wednesday we ended up helping a member with yard work in the morning. Her family's relationship with the missionaries kind of got ruined last year, so it was good to build that back up. We ended up having dinner with them on Thursday and we are having dinner with them again next week, so I guess they like us, which is good. Sis. Colton weeded and I raked up the yard. In Texas there are a bunch of brown, spikey balls that are all over people's yards. So I picked up all of those. And then on Thursday we ended up helping a potential investigator, Caleche, with her yard. She is friends with the Relief Society president, and we have been trying to set up another time to get together, but she has been really busy. Anyway, Caleche is pregnant with twins and hasn't been able to do her yard. We called her to offer our services, and she said we could help, but her lawn mowers weren't working. So we borrowed the Relief Society's president's lawn mower and did her lawn. Sis. Colton weeded again, and I mowed the lawn. It was quite the adventure. Her backyard consists of a ton of really tall weeds, and so. much. dirt. And I got covered in the dirt. You know when you are on trek, and you get covered in a thick layer of dirt all over? Yeah, that is what I looked like when I finished.

After being in Houston for almost 11 months, I officially feel like I have experience Texas because this weekend I ate crawfish. Our stake had a huge crawfish boil on Saturday night. I think around 2000 people were registered to come, and I'm pretty about that number of people came.So many people. And lots of nonmembers. It was really great. We got to try crawfish. I like it. It was really good. The only problem is that I'm not very skilled at getting the shell off of the crawfish, so it took awhile for me to eat it. I was really hungry, and it was taking a long time, so I didn't eat very much before I went and got a hamburger to fill me up. They had activities for the kids going on inside of the church, and so we had missionaries roaming the halls the whole time. Lots of people asked for church tours and a lot of copies of the Book of Mormon and other materials were given away.

We met with Megan this week and taught her a little bit more. Tim wasn't there because he went to Mutual. Apparently, at Mutual they decided to ask Tim to give the spiritual thought, and he did a really good job. He shared what he learned from General Conference. Anyway, Megan is great. We went over the baptismal interview questions with her. We have never officially taught her about the Word of Wisdom, but we found out she had already been cutting back on coffee and tea, and so we invited her to stop drinking it all together, and so far she has. And we had never talked about keeping the Sabbath day holy, yet, but a member in our lesson last week had talked about how they had made an effort to not work or do school work on Sunday, and so Megan decided that she should do that, too, and she has been working on that. She is so great. She had her baptismal interview yesterday and passed, so she is getting baptized on April 25th. We are really excited. Tim will have his interview next week.

I hope everybody has a great Easter this weekend. I'm so grateful for the chance that we have to focus on Christ and His Atonement this weekend. I am so grateful that Christ loves each of us so much that He was willing to suffer not only for all of our sins so that we can repent and be cleansed, but also for all of our temptations, afflications, infirmities, etc. so that He can help us and strengthen us. Jesus is the Christ and He is our Savior and Redeemer. Only through Him and by living His gospel can we be cleansed of our sins, and live with God again.

Love,

Sister Sylvester

Group E-mail 4/7/14

Sister Colton and I had a pretty great week this week filled with laughs, adventures, living prophets, and miracles.

So April Fool's day was really funny, but kind of a fail. I shall explain. I will just skip to the afternoon. So we went to service at the nature center in the morning and afterwards we went to Sis. Farnsworth's house. Sis. Farnsworth is a member in the ward who is Carrie's age (a lot of people in our ward are Carrie's age and it really throws me off) and she is hilarious! She is one of my favorite people. We were going to her house to role play with her so she could practice answering questions about the gospel that her friends have because she has a hard time with that, and asked for our help. When we got there, she said that she had to go and take dinner to somebody, but that we should just stay and wait there because she would only be a few minutes. So she left. Sister Colton and I were really in sync that day and didn't even have to talk. We just looked at each other and ran out the door. We parked our car on another street, ran back to the house, hid all of our stuff, and shut the blinds and turned off the lights, so that it looked like we had left. Then Sister Colton hid on the stairs and I hid in the pantry. And we were going to scare Sis. Farnsworth when she walked into the kitchen. When she got home, she took the one path we didn't plan on her taking, and went up the stairs. Sister Colton scared her and Sis. Farnsworth got a really big kick out of it. She really likes to get scared.

Then we went to our original plan that we had come up with. Cockroaches are a problem in Houston. We have had a few conversations with Sis. Farnsworth about how she really doesn't want cockroaches in her bathroom. So what did we do, on Monday at Walmart, we bought fake bugs and then painted them all black so that they looked like cockroaches. We had just come straight from service, so we needed to change into our proselyting clothes. Sis. Colton went into the bathroom to change first and hid all of the bugs in the bathroom. We've also had conversations with Sis. Farnsworth about how she is embarrassed when we use her bathroom and there is no handtowel. We don't care, but she does. So, Sis. Colton took the handtowel, so that when I went into the bathroom, there wasn't one for me to us. So I had to ask Sis. Farnsworth for one, thinking she would come into the bathroom and see the bugs. She just threw the towel at me and didn't come into the bathroom. I changed and when I came out Sister Colton made another attempt to get her into the bathroom. That didn't work either. So we gave up, thinking that she would find the bugs in a couple of days. We started role playing, and then Sis. Argyle, another lady in the ward, came over to drop something off. She told Sis. Farnsworth she needed to use her bathroom and went in. Sis. Colton and I just started cracking up laughing. When Sis. Argyle came out of the bathroom, she told Sis. Farnsworth that those bugs got her for a minute before she realized they were fake. They both got a kick out of it.

Then we went to dinner at the White's house. Our plan there was to tape one bug to the inside of their toilet bowl. So after dinner and a message, Sis. Colton went to use the bathroom. She was in there FOREVER! It was so awkward. And to make it even more awkward, you could hear her getting the duct tape. It was hilarious. We left and Sis. White texted us a little while later and told us thanks for the present. We asked if she had gotten at least a little freaked out. She replied, "No. Sis. Farnsworth posted a picture of what you did in her bathroom on Instagram, so I went to go check my bathroom." We tried. Sis. Farnsworth did text us later that night and told us that her son went into the bathroom and said "Mom! Come here. There are big bugs in the bathroom that will get us."

Anyway, it was a pretty humorous April Fool's despite us not be very successful.

General Conference was awesome! I loved it! My favorite talk was probably Elder Holland's. I also really liked Elder Rasband's, Elder Andersen's, Elder Scott's, President Uchtdorf's, Elder Ballard's, and Elder Bednar's. What I personally got out of General Conference was the importance of being obedient and living the gospel. I also thought a lot about how we should treasure up the words of the living prophets, as well as the scriptures. There was a quote that I noticed was used in last October's conference and this conference. It is from President  Harold B. Lee: "The only safety we have as members of this church is to … give heed to the words and commandments that the Lord shall give through His prophet. There will be some things that take patience and faith. You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your [personal] views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord Himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; … and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name’s glory’ (D&C 21:6).”

When we follow the words of living prophets, we will not be led astray.

Elder Hales in the last conference said, "The greatest blessings of general conference come to us after the conference is over. Remember the pattern recorded frequently in scripture: we gather to hear the words of the Lord, and we return to our homes to live them." And 1 Nephi 19:24 says "Hear ye the words of the prophet [...] and liken them unto yourselves." Now that General Conference is over, make sure that you take what you heard in conference, then notes you took, and the feelings you felt, and make a game plan for how you can become better. Listening to their words doesn't mean much if we don't become better because of what we heard.

And to wrap up this long email, an update on the Guidry's. We haven't been able to officially meet with them in a long time because they have been so busy. Megan told us two weeks ago that she shouldn't be too busy this week so that we could meet with her then. I texted her on Tuesday, but she again said she was busy. On Thursday morning I texted her and told her "It would seriously only take 20 minutes and the Lord will bless you." And then told her that if she didn't want to meet with us anymore, that she just needed to tell us. She responded and said, "Tonight's good. We can meet tonight. How about 6?" So we met with her that night and it went really well. They've still been reading the Book of Mormon. We talked about how the gospel can bless our lives and invited them to watch General Conference. Sis. Noorda was their with us and invited them to watch it with them. And we set another baptismal date with them for the end of the month. So yesterday they went to the Noorda's and watched the Sunday morning session of conference. Megan texted us last night and told us that she really loved conference. And Sis. Noorda called us and told us all about it. She just kept saying "It was so awesome. It went so well." Megan and Tim both really loved it and they played Conference bingo, which they also enjoyed. And Megan went up to Brother Noorda and started telling him about how she was getting baptized this month and asked what she needed to bring and what it would be like. She texted Sis. Noorda later that night and asked if there was a way she could watch the whole conference. So the Guidry's are doing great! And General Conference is amazing! You can always count on the power of a living prophet and apostles.

I am so grateful for a living prophet and for the chance that I have to be a member of the restored church of Jesus Christ. It is a remarkable blessing.

I  hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Sister Sylvester