Saturday, August 30, 2014

Miracle Desk is my Favorite!

Hope everything is going well. I feel a little bit bad, this week has been such a blur that I really couldn't tell you what happened. Except I'm sure you've heard that I ran into Uncle Mike and Aunt Judy! That was so fun, I love running into people that I know :)
Taught lots of lessons and took many tours. 
I kind of want to briefly explain just what my mission is like, since I'm realizing just how different we are from the missions around the world.
So we have 9 different zones, after this transfer we'll probably lose some because a lot of sisters are going outbound because the summer season is officially over. I'm really glad I came in the middle of summer. Helped me learn a lot faster, I got so used to things being crazy busy with people all around that I didn't realize that that wasn't the normal year round craziness. So this last week has been dead, a lot less visitors because school has started. We'll still run into a couple tourists who are traveling the states, just not as many as say the week before. 
Each sister has a different schedule and assignment. Assignments are split up by zones. So my zone is west gate and guest services. I only serve in west gate though, and usually you are with the same assignment for two transfers but because Sister Bomgren served in west gate last transfer she doesn't think we'll have it next transfer. I wouldn't complain if we did have it though, I'm starting to really like it. Then there are a few sisters who only have square as their assignment, which is what my schedule was before my zone got switched during week 2.
And then we have different desk assignments spread out through the day, but those are only for an hour. Desk assignments are fun, Map desk is my favorite. It's located in the North Visitor Center and Sister Bomgren likes to call it Miracle Desk because miracles happen there all the time, and I agree. Map desk is where we met the less active family that we are now teaching. They literally just walked up to us and told us that they hadn't gone to church for many years but wanted to go back and they were just unsure as to how. Beautiful right? So yes, Miracle Desk is my favorite!
Then while we have square we just contact (talk) to the different people on the square. And try to take tours. And really, tours are lessons. So I'll call them tours because that's what they're called, but each tour we teach a lesson. The restoration is probably what we teach most often, but we teach everything from prayer to eternal families. What we teach is all based on what we feel the individual(s) need to hear the most. It's fun, we do a lot of teaching here! So yes, we share history on the tours but very minimal. That's always the joke between all the sisters, how when we're introducing ourselves to our tour group we always explain our purpose as Temple Square missionaries, which is to share the basic history and belief.... anyways every once in a while we'll get an individual with a very strong personality who will say something along the lines of, "well I'm only here for the history." and we always just laugh to ourselves about it, because we're not tour guides so we never only share history. And we usually will only share like a sentence of history, like we'll share when a particular building was built and why, and then we dive right into the gospel. But really the history is the gospel. There's not really a defining line between which is which. Which is what makes it so easy to bridge from history or doctrine.
When we don't have an assignment or on the square we're usually in the Teaching Center (TC) which is where we call all of our investigators. It's hard because during the summer we have very little TC time but I've been told that after the summer months we're given a lot more TC time. So for this transfer TC time is very sacred and precious because we meet all these investigators on the square and then only have an hour to contact all of them by phone. So it's always a little crazy, but on the rare occasion that we do not have any appointments over the phone is when we take calls and chats. I love taking chats, it's so much fun. Haven't developed the love for inbound calls yet but I might get there eventually if we had more time to take them. When we take inbound calls we usually do it by ourselves so that way more calls can be taken at a time, we're only supposed to be on the phone with our companion if we are teaching a lesson. So believe it or not, but earlier this week was my first time taking an inbound call because it was our first time in the TC without any appointments. I talked with a sweet sweet older lady who was a member but wanted the DVD Finding Faith in Jesus Christ for her inactive children. She was so cute. Those phones calls are usually supposed to be short and sweet, especially if they are members because of how many people are usually calling in at a time. Well this sweet lady had a lot to say and basically talked my ear off. I was on exchanges at the time with my District Leader, Sister V (her real name is literally like 12 letters long and no one can pronounce it so really her name is just V), and she was just listening into the conversation and she was laughing so hard, it was hard for me not to laugh just watching her. But this lady just went on and on and told me her whole life story, she got talking about her son and well, she kind of starting selling him to us a little bit. Told us about how amazing he is and all the nice things he does, oh and did I mention he's still a bachelor? Haha it was so funny.
Sundays. I've gotten some questions about my sunday meetings and how they work, well it's very simple. Sunday mornings before the square opens we have sacrament meeting in the Jospeh Smith Memorial Building. We usually have 4 speakers and a special musical number. The speakers are usually sisters in either there 10 or 11th transfer, so it's like their farewell talk. Depending on how many sisters are in their class decided on how soon we start hearing their class speak. We refer to the sisters that are in the same transfer as in the same class. 
Just teaching you some of the Sister temple square lingo :)
So a quick little miracle before I say goodbye :)
The apartment right next door to us had a sweet old lady living there, we had never met her before but our roomies, Sister Tiritelli and Ranama have met them. Well they moved out yesterday, so wednesday night, we're home doing our studies and she knocks on our door. She has three giant bags of food and she asks us if we could use it. Of course I feel bad, like you don't have to give this to us. She then goes on to explain that they're moving out of the state and the refrigerator food would just go bad if they tried to take it. She was so sweet about it and really wanted us to take it all. It's a miracle because like an hour before that happened Sister Bomgren and I were taking about how we needed to go shopping but we were afraid that we would get paid after P-Day so we weren't really sure what we were going to do. And then, a miracle. Heavenly Father really looks after His missionaries. It gets even better, Thursday Night when we get home we find even more food by our door with a little cute box that had a note from her inside. I now know that there are really angels who live among us, and she was one of them.
I love you all and am so grateful for all of your love and support!
XOXOXOX
-Sister Fluckiger

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