March Showers Bring April Flowers

Hey Y'all!

What another great week doing the Lord's work here in Atlanta Georgia!

I promise that we are staying super busy. We are always running from appointment to appointment, which is awesome. But...our area is huge and now we are getting to the end of the month where we are worried about miles haha. Woops, not something that I am used to thinking about. We should be fine though, and if not I need the exercise!

This week was ward conference, that was really nice. Felt like I haven't had one of those in a long time! I didn't get to meet President Sullivan though, only one of the counselors came. It's weird hearing his name. I have seen Meet the Mormons so many times now that it's weird to be close to the area where they are. Anyways, it was a great Sunday. We are teaching this couple from Africa who have the cutest 15 month little girl and this week the dad was sick so we weren't expecting any of them to come but the mom and little girl did! We were so surprised! It was fun having them there, they are the only ones we are teaching right now that doesn't have the best fellowship with the ward so we stuck with her and introduced her to many people. Our other investigators are basically a part of the ward now and fit right in :)

Being a missionary is hard though because this little girl is the most trusting little baby ever and will just crawl on top of everyone and we can't hold kids or have them on our lab :(. Anyways, so she just played with our keys during the entire sacrament meeting.

Oh and the rain this week, talk about crazy! I loved it. One day we did have like all of our appointments cancel on us so we just decided that we were going to be detectives and track down all of the lost sheep in our ward boundaries. It's always exciting and we always see many miracles. One happened yesterday when we went to a lady's home who lives within our boundaries but probably hasn't been to church in a while. She lived in an apartment complex and no one was home, so we just starting knocking on peoples doors. It was raining and late afternoon so no one was answering. We ended up walking across the complex to try another set of apartments. A lady answered the door and let us in to pray with her and her daughter....turns out she was the exact lady we were originally looking for! She had moved apartments and we didn't even know. It was such a tender mercy because she is so open and has wanted to see people from the church but because they moved they never saw anyone. So we set up a time to come back and invited them to the Women's Broadcast this weekend. "No effort is wasted" is what we like to say every time we end up in an area where either no one answers or no one wants to talk with us-doesn't happen too often but this time we realized that there is always a reason why we are in a certain area knocking doors. Sometimes it just isn't as evident as it was this particular time.

We also had an opportunity to have training by President Harding this week. He came out and talked with our zone and then we were able to have interviews. I'll admit the majority of the time he talked with the elders about being 'men' -that was new to me. There's so many things that you don't really experience when you serve on Temple Square haha. It was good though, afterwards I got to meet with President and he made sure I was adjusting okay. I really don't feel like there has been an adjustment-the work is the same no matter where you are! He did share with me though about my ancestors and the impact they will have on my mission and the impact my mission will have on those who come after. It was really cool, I just love the idea of how big our family is and how we are all linked together. How special it is that we have the knowledge of forever families.

Well I am loving the South, and the people here are just great! All so different and all have an amazing story to tell.

I love you all!

XOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

Georgia Peaches!

 

Hey Fam!

Where do I even start? I feel like I am going to be feeling like this every week while I am here in Georgia! I love Temple Square, but Georgia is just so exciting and different every single day!

But I do want to answer some of the questions I got this week before I forget:

My area is huge! I am serving in the Twin Oaks Ward in the Atlanta Stake. My ward is about normal size I suppose. Maybe a little smaller than Loomis was when we were in that ward. The ward consists of converts and some young families that attend Emery University. So the ward does have a high turn over because of the university. There are three sets of missionaries in our ward. Two sets of elders and then us and because we have a lot of single sisters in the ward we are always driving all over the place! The members though are awesome when it comes to missionary work! There is always someone who is willing to come out with us to teach which is really nice.

Oh and my stake president is President Sullivan from Meet the Mormons :) Next week is ward conference so maybe I'll get to meet him.

The weather has been really nice, a little back and forth but I don't mind that. This week is was pretty cloudy and raining but yesterday the sun came out and now all of the trees are blossoming.

I also realize that I gave you the wrong address, the address I gave you was the mission home and I'll probably not go up there for the three months that I will be here so if any of you feel so inclined to send me a letter my mailing address is:

814 Walden Walk Circle

Stone Mountain, GA 30088

Back to this week! We had an awesome week and I just have such a strong testimony that that Lord is just taking care of everything! Something that I really like in this mission is that they encourage what President Harding calls "Masterful Planning" -meaning you should be planning all day long and not just in the evenings. Whenever we were in the car (we are driving a lot!) I was consistently making phone calls and setting up appointments to fill our schedule. It's a lot of fun actually, almost like a puzzle. We want to fill every time slot but then also organize it so we are visiting people in the same area to avoid driving all 'over kingdom come' It doesn't always happen that way, but we try our best.

We did have a lot of investigators cancel on us last minute which was a little frustrating at the beginning of the week, but I have just learned to roll with it, because every time someone canceled on us we just found someone else to go visit or we would knock on doors and find an awesome family who was ready for the gospel!

This week we taught lesson #1, the Restoration, probably like a million times. Which is so fun! We are teaching a lot of great people, they are all very different which is what makes it fun. We taught one family this week, the mom was very receptive. To her the idea of a restoration just made sense, and after meeting with her family I realized that there are a lot of people who believe there needs to be a restoration but they are just waiting for people to tell them that it has already happened! There is a specific mom and son who we are hoping will get baptized pretty soon! The little boy is 9 years old and the missionaries have been teaching him and his mom for a few months now. Things were progressing with them but only to a certain point. Well we met with them this week in a members home, we had a little lunch all together and we taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was a fun, spiritual lesson! The mom had actually prepared herself beforehand by reading the pamphlet that we had given her and then reading a few different chapters in both the Book of Mormon and the Bible about the doctrine of Christ. Her preparation was key in making that lesson a powerful one! She basically just taught us the lesson and towards the end when we were talking about baptism she told us "I don't know why I wouldn't want this immediately"

When I was talking with Sister Perry about this cute little family afterwards, she explained to me that the mom has not progressed this much in all the months that she had been teaching her, and we know it was because she opened up the scriptures to learn on her own that allowed her to really be touched by the spirit. Our bishop has scheduled baptism times to happen every other Saturday so the soonest she could get baptized would be the day of the Women's Broadcast-we don't know if that will work out, but we are working and praying that it works so we don't have to wait even longer.

We're teaching a lot of people, but there is another cool guy that I wanted to tell you about! We met him on Saturday knocking on doors and of course that day no one was answering and then we saw him get out of his car a few houses down and we just like booked it (well we didn't actually run, that wouldn't be missionary appropriate) we ended up talking with him and he was very receptive, we prayed with him and then starting doing what we call the Destination and Route -which is just talking about God's three greatest blessing: Eternal Life, Remission of Sins, and Gift of the Holy Ghost and then the route to get there is to have Faith, Repent, be Baptized, Receive the Holy Ghost, and Endure to the End - anyways when we got to baptism he stopped us and told us that he was baptized as an infant but that he didn't believe in that because he couldn't even remember it! And then said that he was never baptized again because he wanted to be baptized by John the Baptist. Perfect lead in to the restoration. It was really cool, and he has such a fun and animated personality which made teaching him just a fun experience. We invited him to church and set up a return appointment and now he is reading the Book of Mormon and on date to be baptized in April!

There is about 2 million people living in our area and we are determined to bring the gospel to every single one of them so they can all make the decision to have it or not!

Now the members here are so great! We don't exactly get fed a lot but they love having us over! Older southern ladies are my favorite, there are two ladies that we go over to see a lot because they are always doing missionary work and have people for us to teach. But they are both so funny, one of them always has a bag of chips to give us or a cookie. After every lesson in her home she always says "okay kids, now lets go have a snack" - one day she even had what looked like a mini Subway in her kitchen, she had different types of bread, meat, vegetables so that we could make ourselves sandwiches! It was fun.

The other lady that I have really grown to love always says when she sees us "look it's my beautiful girls!" She really is the cutest. It's funny though, the other day I think she finally got a good look at me and her eyes got all wide and she said "Oh my! How old are you? Do your parents even know where you are?!" Now she just asks me that every time to make sure that my parents know where I am, hehe.

Oh, I also realized I never told you about my companion! Woops. Her name is Sister Perry and she is from South Jordan, Utah! She actually goes home in a few weeks which is not cool but everything else about her is cool! She has been serving in the Twin Oaks Ward for about 9 months now so she knows everyone! Well at least everyone in the ward. We are pretty similar, we love doing the work but we also are having fun while doing it! She's not excited to go home but I told her she could come visit me on Temple Square and be a member present for my teaching :)

​I'm totally slouching in this picture-but it's the only one we have. We are repenting and working on taking more photos. :)

Today for P-day we had apartment clean checks this morning-our apartment is Celestial! yay! and then after emailing we are going to go to a Farmers Market and then probably sleep :) You know you had a great week when your body is just exhausted when p-day comes around!

Well I love you all! Hope you are having fun and staying busy!

XOXOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

Georgia!

Hey Ya'll!!

I'm really working on this ya'll thing, it's pretty fun!

Okay, but really, where do I even start!? I love Georgia so much, I may not like it in the middle of summer or in the middle of the winter but right now is the perfect time and I love it!

Our area is the best, I am not in the city (answer to prayer), it's almost like we are in the woods. There are trees everywhere and you can always smell the pine trees which I love. In some areas it actually feels like I am up in Donner-pine needles all over the ground, dirt sidewalks, fresh clean air. I'm loving it.

Our area is huge, I don't know what other areas are like but ours is pretty big, there are three companionships of missionaries in our ward, us and two sets us elders. I'll admit probably the weirdest thing about being here are the elders. The ward is a decent size which is nice and the members are great, they love us and love to come teaching with us which is awesome. We've really only had about three days of work so far. I feel like so much has happened the last few days.

I'll just tell you about the time I've had in Georgia. I arrived Wednesday afternoon, the plane flight was horrible and I am convinced that I will be driving back to Utah after my three months are over. Some elders picked us up from the airport and drove us to the Mission Home. Again that was a little odd. When we got there, President Harding was having mission council and so all of the zone leaders and sister training leaders were there. Of course he interrupted everything when we arrived and had us come up front to introduce ourselves. That was great. Then sweet Sister Harding fed us some food, we met with President and then got paired with our companions and started off to get to work.

Then on Thursday we had zone conference for half of the day which was great. It was like the perfect thing to get me transitioned into working here in Georgia. Since then we have just been working, working, working. We are teaching a lot of wonderful people, people from all over the world! It's almost like I never left Temple Square. There are a lot of people here from Africa, Burmese, and Nepal. There are entire complexes with families from these countries. It's fun, hard because the majority of them don't speak any English, but still fun.

President Harding's main thing is teaching and baptizing families, which is so exciting since I haven't been able to teach a family really on Temple Square. We have met some beautiful families that we are going to start teaching! One was just a miracle, we were driving to go drop by and visit a less active in the ward when we felt prompted to go visit another lady in the ward, so we quickly made a U-turn and went to go see her. We had a little spiritual thought with her and her grand-kids and then asked if there was anyone she wanted us to stop by and see. This individual just loves doing missionary work and really understands how important it is for everyone to hear about the gospel, she's been rejected a few times and so we think she was a little discouraged, but when we asked her she perked right up and told us about a cute young family that had just moved into the apartment right across the complex from her (there are a lot of apartment complexes in our area) so we went on over! The member walked over with us and we knocked on the door and the cute mom and her kids answered the door, at first she told us that she had already found a church and was pretty content with staying there but then we just asked her if we could just say a prayer together (Georgians love to pray!) and so she allowed us in and we asked about her kids and how everything was going and what she would like us to pray for. She let us know of a few things that were causing her some stress as a mother and so we said a prayer with her asking for a few specific things, and it was awesome. Her heart was touched by the spirit during the prayer and she was totally open for talking with us more about the church afterwards. We taught about eternal families and baptism and she committed to baptism right there!

So many experiences like that have happened, I could probably write for hours about all the people we have met. I wish I could. We have met people who are so prepared and then we have had the opposite, which is just fun :) The way people react when they really don't want to talk with missionaries is just so funny to me. It really hasn't happened that often, maybe like 3 times with the many people that we have talked with over the last few days, so that really surprised me. But it definitely keeps you on your toes.

Some funny experiences that I have to share because they just made my week. For one, the members  do feed us here, not a ton which is really fine to me. But they will call last minute and just ask if we can stop by and then they will have a little snack (meal) for us. Something that happened which was just so funny, a sweet old member had us over, we are teaching her granddaughter and she was supposed to be there but last minute she had to reschedule, but the member still wanted us to stop by because she had prepared a little 'snack' for us all. Well we were starving that day because we had appointments all through lunch so it was a little tender mercy. Well we start eating and I have no idea what it is, she didn't say. But lets just say I wasn't liking it, but I was eating it like a good missionary. Then she makes a comment that it was cooked Salmon....... My companion just looked at me and I tried so hard not to make a face while I just kept eating. Then the sweet member gets us to grab something and Sister Perry just grabbed my plate and switched with me. She's an angel. What's funny is we had brought a recent convert with us to the lesson so she was eating with us and she saw the entire thing! She just stared at us and then said "I didn't see anything, I'm just looking at the paintings"- From all of this I can now say that I have had fish and I do not like it.

Well there are other funny things but I am actually out of time-these computers have time limits-yikes!

I'll tell you more of my Georgia adventures next week. We are teaching many wonderful people! This is going to be a transfers of miracles! I can just feel it in my bones :D

Love you all!!

XOXOXOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

Sorry if I rambled, always so much to say!