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