The Miracle of the Restoration

Happy Monday!

Work, work, work. That's what the week has been-yep I love it more and more each week.

We did a lot of finding this week, which if you paid attention to the weather (like I know Mom does) we were pretty wet all week. But don't worry we have great rain jackets and an umbrella :) but we just like the rain. So that was always exciting, I can't remember if I have shared with you but door knocking is a favorite of mine..I know it's not always the most effective way but it's the most exciting by far I think. And this week many miracles happened because of it!

I have such a testimony now of the scripture that is found in Doctrine & Covenants 123:12 that shares about "[those] who are only kept from the truth because they know not where to find it". There are many many people like that in Georgia. That's what the 'Vision of the South' is all about! Individuals are noticing that there is a lot of corruption in churches today and they don't know what to do about it so they just stop going to church. Well we found some of those individuals this week and were able to boldly testify that Christ's church has been restored to the earth. What a miracle it is that we have that knowledge. It wasn't until this week that that really hit me. We know that God still speaks to prophets. We know that the authority of Jesus Christ is on the earth. We know that the authority to baptize that John the Baptist had is on the earth. We know that with that authority that families and be sealed together forever. How incredible is that!?

A few examples of individuals we met that felt the truthfulness of this glorious message:

Saturday we were out trying to track down some members who hadn't been at church in a while just to see how they were doing. Well of course I am still the designated driver and so I got us lost trying to find the house. But the Lord turns our weaknesses into strengths! We found ourselves in a neighborhood and just decided to make a better use of our time so we parked and we hit the pavement. Well as all mission stories go, it started with no luck at all. For a Saturday morning I was pretty surprised that no one was answering the door. But it's always worth it in the end. We knocked on one door and a guy maybe in his early 30s answered the door. We offered to say a prayer with him and he was pretty grateful for that, said that he needed some guidance. Well the conversation after the prayer was pretty funny, but turned into something amazing. He started off by telling us that he was thinking about starting his own church. He didn't know how to do it because he wasn't a 'preacher' he would keep saying. We then started talking about all the different churches and how they were all different and why that was. He told us that the reason he wanted to open up his own church was because he wanted to get it as close to the original as he could. He admitted that it wouldn't be exactly the same because he was just a man but he wanted to try. Well that led into a perfect opportunity to testify about the restoration and how there was already a church on the earth that had all the truth and authority. His reply: "I knew that must be going on somewhere in the world, I just thought I had given up looking". We just were able to have a great conversation that was completely guided by the spirit! We then invited him to be baptized and he just replied "Ya, of course. What do I need to wear?"

Haha if only every individual could have that response :) He came to church with us this weekend and loved it and we are going back to see him this week.

Another cool miracle that happened that day because we were out trying to find a less active member. Turns out they had moved and so we just decided to go finding in that complex. The first door we knocked on a young mom with two little kids answered the door. We asked if we could pray with her and she too was very open and grateful for the offer. After the prayer we started talking with her about God's greatest gifts He wants each of us to have. 1. Eternal Life 2. Remission of Sins. 3. Gift of the Holy Ghost. This young mom just broke down in tears and we talked. She shared with us that she had been praying and seeking for guidance and she felt like her prayers weren't being answered. She then testified to us that she knew that we were the answer that God was giving her. It was such a tender experience. I love being a missionary for many reasons. But one is because I am able to witness just how much our Father in Heaven loves His children! It's just wonderful.

Missionary Work is just fun! I also was able to serve in a YSA for a day. That was...interesting. I'll admit I'm glad I'm not assigned to serve that full time. We did exchanges this week and a set of sisters in our stake serves in the YSA ward and we went on exchanges with them. It was fun, while I was in their area for the day we did a lot of finding on different college campuses. I didn't realize there were so many colleges around us. We went to Georgia State, Georgia Tech and then some junior colleges in the area. So that was fun. We also had a member feed us...but having a YSA feed you means them having pizza delivered to your apartment haha. The pizza was good though, so I am not complaining :).

Hhmmm what else happened this week that was different than the norm...we had a new Ward Mission Leader called. That's awesome! I am really excited for all that he has planned. I think it will really help with getting the members excited for missionary work!

Oh and one more miracle that I wanted to share. So we are teaching this mom and her 9 year old son. The missionaries have been teaching her since November, so it's been a good amount of time. They are coming to church regularly and basically know everything there is to know, or at least sometimes it feels like that. Anyways, a few weeks ago, probably actually when I first got to the area she shared with us that she now knew that she needed to be baptized, but wasn't willing to set a date of baptism. She wanted to wait a little longer on that one. Well that has been our main focus this week has just been praying so hard that she would know that she needed to set a date or a goal or else she was never going to progress towards it. Well our lesson this week was no small miracle. It was set up a little last minute and we really wanted it to be just a strong lesson and so we hit our knees to pray for guidance. After that literally everything just fell into place. We wanted a member to come with us, but specifically a convert because she has tons of fellowship in the ward but it is all with lifelong members. That happened, we were able to get one of the strongest converts in the ward to come with us :) then we wanted to focus the lesson on the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and we received the prompting to watch the mormon message with her with Elder Holland's testimony of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. If you haven't seen it yet-please go watch it :) Anyways so we started the lesson off with that video and it just invited the spirit right away. You can always count on Elder Holland. She was really touched by his testimony and I think it finally put things into perspective for her. Then we just talked with her about baptism. She admitted she knew that she needed to set a date but committing to something was always hard for her. We had so many members of our ward praying for her the last few weeks and I know that our prayers were answered. We extended the date for the 23rd of May and she pulled out her phone and put it into her calender! She then asked us to make sure he son could be baptized with her :) It was exciting. She even felt a sense of relief, almost like she has been wanted to make that commitment this whole time but was just hesitant and the second she made it she was able to feel that sense of "that was the right thing" that came from the spirit. I am super excited for her and her family. I know that the Lord is watching over them.

Well that's basically my week :) I do have to do a shout out for the birthday brothers this week :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEVIN and COLIN! Don't have too much fun this week!

Love you all!!!

XOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

If You Don't Like the Weather...Just Wait a Minute!

Happy April Everyone!

Well I survived another Transfers week! Well at least I'm still in one piece :)

Its been a crazy week but I have loved it as always. The one question that I keep getting was if I missed Temple Square over conference weekend, and well I miss it but I don't miss it enough to want to leave Georgia..if that answers the question. There is just too much work to be done, but I guess it's like that no matter where you are serving.

Trying to think back about what has happened this week...Well Sister Perry went home. On Wednesday we drove up to....actually I don't know where we went. It was about an hour away and it was a church building and we had our transfers conference there. So that was fun. Transfers are a lot different here than when we have it on Temple Square. I was able to see Sister Mahoney! That was a tender mercy. Nothing for her really changed so she didn't actually have to come but they had to drop off a sister and someone told them they could stay. So that was a fun little reunion. It was fun to hear about where she is serving, her area is like the polar opposite from my area. We are going to have a lot of stories to share on our plane ride back to the west in a few weeks :)

So Sister Lund is my new companion, she is also from Utah, Brigham City to be exact. And believe it or not but we entered the MTC on the same exact day! But we didn't know each other, but still it's pretty cool.

​ We've had a crazy few days together. Tornadoes, thunder storms, heat waves and lots and lots of tracting! This picture was taken after we tried to contact a potential and right as we were walking out of the apartment complex back towards our car it down-poured on us...I don't look that wet haha but that's because Sister Lund had to back me out of our parking spot. So she was in the rain a bit longer than me :) Oh and did I mention this was the day we forgot our rain coats? hehe

But ya, leading out an area when you have only  been there for 5 weeks has been....fun, I guess. We haven't been late for any appointments yet or been lost anywhere so I think that's pretty impressive. I mean we do have a GPS so I guess that helps a bit. But still, we are alive!

The people we are teaching are doing wonderful and I just know that this is the transfer for all of them! We had a mighty miracle with one of the investigators who Sister Perry had been teaching for basically forever. He knows the church is true and wants to be baptized but he wanted to wait till things in his life settled, i.e. taxes, emigration, new job, and other things like that. And because of that he would never set a date to be baptized, he would just say, "eventually, I want to be baptized and it will happen but I can't set a date" or something like that. Well, anyways, the miracle is that we visited him this week and we shared with him Doctrine Covenants 20:37, which are the qualifications for baptism and then we shared with him a few of the baptismal interview questions and basically told him that he was ready, that the Lord thinks he is ready and all he is doing in denying blessings that he could otherwise be receiving right now. Well we invited him to be baptized on a date in May and he said "Sure!" Haha I just love how the Lord works :)

So a lot of cool things like that have happened, another miracle would be when we went and contacted a referral. We met a 13 year old girl and her aunt and we just started teaching them. The aunt is okay with her church but is willing to listen to us but the girl was like really excited. We invited her to church and she said "you know I feel like if I come to church I am going to want to be baptized and stay" - a missionary's favorite response! So we are now teaching her and her aunt and we are praying specifically for her aunt that her heart will be softened. We like this to be a family thing that we do together! But the Lord always makes everything work out.

A funny story to just close out, Sister Lund and I keep bringing this back up because we still can't believe that it happened. Well we had a return appointment with a man that I had met about 2 weeks back when we went on exchanges. He was a really cool guy and he told us that he wants to be as close to God as our clothes are close to us. Anyways, we went back this week for our appointment. We had tried and prayed so hard that we would have a member present so that we could teach him. Usually it's not that hard for us to find a member present because the sisters in our ward are very willing, but for whatever reason (we now know the reason) we could not get anyone to come with us. So we were already in the area so we just decided we would show up and hope his wife would join us and if not we would just reschedule. Well turns out that he was waiting for us....with his preacher. I'm sure you can imagine what happened. It was quite an experience. We explained to him that we couldn't stay or go inside because we didn't have another lady with us, but then he just asked if we could just stay outside for a few minutes to answer some questions he had. We said sure and he went inside to grab his Bible and came back out with a Bible and a preacher. You just have to love the South! Anyways, we basically testified our hearts out and invited them to pray and then left promptly. Yep we are still laughing about it. Hopefully something like that doesn't happen again...but you just never know!

So that's basically been our week. Always fun and crazy and always filled with variety.

I love you all and hope you are having a wonderful week!
​

XOXOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

p.s. my companion cuts hair....seriously best thing as a missionary ever!!!! :)

John 16:33

Family! It's April!! Where has the time gone?

This week has been a crazy roller coaster. Feels like we have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to get everyone at conference. But it was all worth it!

The area that I am serving in is a wonderful area! I'm sure that I have mentioned that many times but I thought I would mention it again. There are so many people though, we seriously need like 20 more companionships of missionaries in this area to help get everyone to the waters of baptism. It's also hard being the only sisters here, I did find out that there used to be two sets of sisters in this area but they have decreased in their number of sisters in the mission and so now it's just us. So we just drive all over kingdom come trying to get to all of our appointments on time while also stopping every time we see a family -which happens a lot. So we are blessed to have a pretty solid teaching pool.

It's a blessing to serve in the South because the majority of everyone we stop and talk to will talk with you about Jesus Christ! And the majority of those people will set up another appointment for you to come back! The hard part about being in the South is people are really relaxed and don't have such a sense of urgency as we do as missionaries. But hey, no one is perfect right?

This week though was crazy! To start the week off we had our week filled with appointments and members to come out with us and then every morning all our appointments and members would cancel! I don't know what it was about this week, but I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone canceled. By the time Friday and Saturday came around it was beginning to just be comical. All is well though because we spent that time out finding and getting everyone to conference.

Tracting is pretty fun, and adventurous! You never know what's going to be behind the door. And the people here are great because every single home has a different story! I mean very different :) So some fun tracting stories from this week:

I think it was Tuesday evening, we had dinner at a members home and then had plans to find near them. While we were eating dinner The member's phone buzzed and I  guess they got an alert for severe weather. Well we didn't think anything of it because if you looked outside it was bright sunshine and happy :) So we finished dinner, shared a thought and went out on our adventures. Well we found a cute little neighborhood to knock on some doors, and again I don't exaggerate, but it started thundering, lightening and poring down rain right when we parked the car. Sometimes I wish we were on camera because I would just laugh if I could watch myself. Sister Perry and I just looked at each other and then looked in the backseat to see if we had grabbed our raincoats only to see that we didn't. So we just kind of shrugged our shoulders, hopped out of the car and ran to the first house. You would think that more people would let you in if they saw two soaking wet girls holding scriptures right? Well the only people who let us in was a cute Vietnamese family who didn't speak a word of English. So we prayed and left them with a pass-along card. So even though we didn't really find anyone that evening it was fun and exciting!

Another cool thing that happened started with me making a wrong turn and it all turned into a great miracle of being guided by the spirit! Or at least that's how I like to tell the story :)

Well we were on our way to a members home for dinner and it was up in an area that I hadn't been before and I was using the GPS but our GPS is kind of funny when it comes to apartment complexes. Well Sister Perry was on the phone with one of our investigators and I knew that we would be arriving like any second to the complex where this family lived. But of course I turned into the wrong one and got us stuck in the maze of apartments. As we were trying to find a way to turn around and get back out we saw this cute little family taking a walk. So we pulled over and I rolled down my window to talk with them and the mom's eyes just lit up! Turns out she can't speak a word of English but her son does! They are from Moldova. Well we parked and got out to pray with them. The mom was just so excited and we don't really know if she recognized us or anything but after we prayed she just said "Church, Church ,Church" turns out her son told us that she wants to go to church! So we set up a return appointment for the next evening to talk with her about the church and General Conference this weekend. It was amazing! The lesson that we had with her the next day was great. Even though I don't think she understood a lot. When we showed up for it she was waiting outside for us and had both her Bible in Russian and her Bible in English on the table all ready to go! It was great! She definitely felt the spirit and we were able to have them come with us to the Sunday Morning session of General Conference.

Her family is super cute and her son speaks perfect English which is a blessing. We are right now in search of someone in the ward who speaks Russian and we ordered some Russian materials. But despite the language barrier I know that the Lord has great things in store for this family :)

So ya, miracles happen everyday! Conference just added to that. We got to watch all of the sessions at the church. The Sunday Afternoon session we ended up listening to it in the nursery because one of the families that we are teaching came and they have the cutest little 1 year old, but she is a bit of a handful so luckily conference could be speakered into the nursery. That was fun! It's hard being a missionary though, because all I wanted to do was take the little girl so that her parents could actually really listen with spiritual ears but everything will work out! They are reading the Book of Mormon and they come to church regularly. But things always come up and take their attention like work and medical things for their daughter and so that's been a little difficult. But it's the Lord's work and I know that He'll help us make all these things work out.

But ya, it's been a crazy week. Sister Perry goes home this week and I will be getting a new companion. We got the phone call this morning from the APs to tell us that we need to go to transfer conference. I am staying in the area so that's good, President had already told me that that would be happening though so I wasn't worried. We have tried to figure out who my companion will be but I don't know any of the other sisters and Sister Perry can't decide who it'll be so I guess I'll just find out on Wednesday. Out here you like never see any other missionaries so that's a little bit different. But it's okay because we are just so busy that I haven't really noticed until now. I'm excited to stay in the ward, they are great and I just want to keep working with them!

There was one family that we had dinner with and it's one of the few families who like forces us to eat a lot! At dinner with them this week (this was my second time over at their home) I got seconds and I told the Brother that I had learned my lesson from the first time. Anyways he muttered to his wife that he was going to get "meat on that girls bones by the time she leaves" haha it was really funny. I told him that you all would appreciate it and wouldn't be worried if I was getting fed enough.

So that's a piece of my week. Also studied the book of John the past few weeks leading up to Easter :) Easter is such a special day. I hope all of you had a great day listening to the words of our Prophet and Apostles. I can't wait to get the Ensign! So if anyone had any favorite parts or learnings, please feel free to share :)

Love you all!

XOXOXO

-Sister Fluckiger

Happy Easter!

Hey Family!

It’s been another sunny/rainy week here in Atlanta Georgia filled with many adventures!

It’s been a pretty interesting week though, many ups and downs, but I guess that’s the roller coaster of missionary work no matter where you are. The ups though made all the downs worth it of course.

We started out the week with last Monday, for P-day after emailing we went to downtown Stone Mountain to walk around. Sister Perry had always wanted to do that and so we did! It has a cute little main street with little shops and cafes but basically everything was either shut down or just closed that day. So we didn’t really do anything besides walk up one side and then walk back down the other side of the street. It was a beautiful day though so it was nice to be outside. We did have a cool experience walking back to our car! We had parked in a parking lot near the city hall and there were a lot of cop cars in the same parking lot as us and one was pulling out right and we walked to our car. We waved at it as they drove past us and then were about to get in our car when we watched the police car stop and sit and then back up to us. We weren’t exactly sure what to expect, but the lady rolled down her window and asked us if we had an extra copy of the Book of Mormon! I wish everyone stopped us to ask us that question! Turns out she had visited Temple Square a number of years ago and had taken a tour with some sisters and got a Book of Mormon. She didn’t know where it was but was really wanting to read it. So that was cool, she didn’t want to stay in touch of course, but that’s okay! She has the book and as long as she reads it I know she’ll find missionaries again. So we figured if we drove all the way to down to Stone Mountain to give someone a Book of Mormon then it was all worth it.

The rest of the week consisted of setting appointments with investigators and members to come with us, and then the investigator canceling the day of as we are on our way to their home with the member. So that has been a tiny bit frustrating, but in the end things always worked out. It was truly incredible. One particular instance that I was truly grateful for was on Friday, we were on exchanges with our Sister Training Leaders. I stayed in the area and Sister Perry went to the other area. I will admit I was a tiny bit nervous because I didn’t know the area as well (on Thursday the APs assigned me as the designated driver). Well it started out great, we (Sister Burckle and I) did some service for a member of our ward, their daughter was getting married this weekend so we cleaned and prepped many potatoes for cooking. We went finding and found a lot of solid families. Had a powerful lesson with a lady we are teaching, we read the Book of Mormon with her and then talked about Women’s Conference. The chaos of the day started towards the late afternoon. We were on our way to meet a member for lunch, she took us to a Jamaican restaurant -delicious! Anyways, we got lost going to that, used up a lot of miles and ended up being pretty late. We then had to drive to the church to meet another member who was going to a lesson with us, while we were on our way Sister Burckle called the investigators who we were going to see to let them know that we were going to be a little late and make sure it was still good for us to come over. Well, turns out neither of them were going to be home so they wanted to reschedule. I’ll admit, at this point I was getting a little stressed. The member we were going out with is one of the sweetest older ladies in our wards and I didn’t want to let her down. When we got to the church we let the sister know what had happened, we apologized and told her that the appointments had fallen through. She kind of sighed and then said ‘okay, what’s plan B’. :) So we called some potentials and other investigators and found one who was on the way out the door but said we could stop by for a little prayer. I truly have a testimony that no matter how much we plan and try to organize, the Lord’s plans are always so much better than our own! We ended up having a lesson on prayer, not sure how that even came up but our investigator opened up and let us know that he had actually never said a prayer before. The Sister who came with us opened up and bore powerful testimony about how prayer had worked in her life and invited him to say a prayer of gratitude just to start out with. It was just awesome, she was just loving and bold. It’s funny, every time I stress about something like this the Lord always fixes it and sometimes I just feel that He’s just trying to tell me to relax because He has everything under control-well I know that’s what He’s trying to tell  me.

After the lesson the Sister took us back to our car at the church and we shared with her 3 Nephi 5:13 telling her that we thought it was the perfect description of her and who she was. I don’t think I will ever forget her response “All I know is that I am a daughter of God and I love Him. I just keep trying to do what He wants me to do.” She really is the best, I love serving in a ward with these wonderful sisters who have such strong testimonies and are truly converted to the gospel!

But ya, that was just one experience but things like that happened basically everyday all week long. It was crazy! Gratefully the members that we take out with us are patient and are just along for the ride :)

For some fun things that happened, we walked for a day! Oh my goodness, we calculated it to be a little more than 7 miles by the time we got home. So, I have never spent a day walking so I don’t know if that’s a lot but it sure seemed like it! We were blessed though because the day that we walked the weather was super nice, the sun was shining and there was a nice cool breeze. Sister Perry did get sunburned and I have a nice shoe tan line now-oh the joys of missionary service! Luckily walking for that day worked perfectly because we were able to have enough miles to last us the rest of the week and we basically aren’t driving anywhere today so we will have enough for tomorrow! I hope my next companion is good about always thinking about miles because I have not been able to adapt that mindset yet. Probably by the time I get ready to leave the area I’ll have it all programmed into my little head. Hopefully.

So the work is moving forward in our fun little Twin Oaks ward! We were able to attend the broadcast for the Women’s Conference this last weekend. That was really good! It was fun to be with a stake and to see everyone. I did meet briefly Katrina’s husband’s sister? Haha, I really didn’t think I was going to meet anyone out here who had connections to our family-once again I was wrong! Anyways, the broadcast makes me super excited for conference, especially because I am able to watch all of the sessions! Yay, that doesn’t happen on Temple Square. The time difference is still a little weird to me, we didn’t get home for the broadcast until about 10pm because it starts so much later here. All is well, just made me think about the time differences in all the other countries. Wonder what conference is like there.

Well for those who saw the broadcast, did anyone have a favorite talk? Or insight? The thought that came to me was because we are in the week leading up to Easter, made me think about how the first person Christ visited after His resurrection what Mary and for Conference, the first group of people who get to hear and learn for our church leaders are the women. Just a cool connection that I made.

Well Happy Easter Everyone! I hope someone has an Easter egg hunt for me and dyes some eggs for me as well :)

Love you all!

XOXOXOX

-Sister Fluckiger

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!