What would you do if, Valentine's Day, planting seeds

Happy Valentine's Day! Having fun with the ribbons and balloons out of my Valentine box from home :)

February 9, 2015

Dear loved ones:

Here are this week's highlights!

Speed training

So we met with Brother Staggs again.  He is the really busy personal trainer who we went on a run with last week. This time we joined him for speed training! It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. We did sprints and basically he told me I don't know how to sprint. Which is true! I've never really had to do it before. So he'll be critiquing me each time we meet in the future. Btw, it's become a tradition! Every Thursday at 5 we'll do speed training with him because it's the only time he'll squeeze us in for a lesson. I'm very excited! He's making progress slowly. He said he might be baptized in the next life, but believe it or not that is a huge step for him!

Sister Worthen and me:  "What would you do if..."

"What would you do if..." 

Sister Worthen and I spend our time coming up with these ridiculous questions and scenarios and each of them start off with this phrase. We can stay up for hours laughing about these in bed at night. Or when we're walking to appointments or during contacting, this is usually what we spend our time talking about. 

Valentine's Day! 

Last P-day, we bought matching outfits so we can contact the entire Valentine's Day weekend. We go at great lengths to get people to talk to us, so we figured that matching, festive outfits might help do the trick.

Matching outfits for Valentine's Day contacting

As a joke we wanted to ask some couples in the ward if they had plans on Saturday night, or what they were doing the night of the 14th, to see if some of them might forget it was Valentine's Day and agree to have us over. We were just kidding, but Sister Goodwin invited us over! She said we could dress up in our matching outfits and help her cook a 4 course meal for her husband and then be the waitresses. So we'll be crashing the Goodwins for Valentine's Day! We're actually really excited because we hang out with Sister Goodwin a lot and are getting to know them better. 

Planting Seeds

This week I've been thinking about planting seeds. I'm sad because I know that I'll probably be leaving soon. I've met so many incredible people here and I'm not ready to leave them yet! 

I'm scared because I want them to keep progressing. Every missionary wants to be the one who sees the investigators at the end of their progression and gets to harvest, but it rarely works out that way. 

It can be hard to leave these people not knowing what will happen to them and wishing you could keep helping them, but I trust in the Lord's timing. 

Our apartment

In my Book of Mormon reading this week, I was reminded of the story of Abinadi in the Book of Mormon. How cool is he?!

But really, when it comes down to it, he had an awful "missionary week" in terms of numbers. Each week, we account for our numbers so we can see how the work is progressing and to help push us. 

Abinadi basically would have only taught 1 other lesson to a bunch of new investigators ... (The mission average here is 28 lessons a week). And from that, he only had one person get baptized and he wasn't even alive to see it. But that person happened to be Alma who went on to baptize hundreds of people and really changed the world.

Often times, we can't see the results of the work we're doing.  It was a great reminder to me that even if progression seems slow, it's still there.  And even if we might not get to see the harvest, those seeds that we are planting are important.

Lots of love,

Sister Hancock

P.S. Next P-day is the 18th because we're going to the temple on Wednesday! Talk to ya'll then!

Channing, Sterling and Mama: I love the scarf you brought me back from Sri Lanka!