A Nice Cup of Tea

Sorry I didn't write a ton last Monday, we were getting our hair done! We had a ton of meetings this week, 2 Zone Training Meetings and of course exchanges but there were a few really cool things that happened:

We went to teach this cute lady who we are trying to take to the temple. We decided we needed to just go in and ask her about herself. Well little did we know she had quite the story! She married someone from Iran and moved there with him when she was still pretty young. I guess in that country the men sit around all day and the women do all the work-basically second-class citizens. She put up with it for quite a few years before she moved back to the states by herself. She got her master's degree and had a good career teaching special ed till she retired. What a lady!! I felt ridiculous telling my story: I have a perfect family and haven't really had a hitch in my life. Her faith was amazing to see shine as she talked to us. 

I was on an exchange with Sister Park and we went to see one of our investigators who is getting baptized. The elders taught her and set a baptismal date and then gave her to us to teach. We talked about her baptism and she told us how she wasn't ready to be baptized and how she felt pressured by the baptismal date. Well Sister Park is a convert of about 2 years and she explained how she felt the same way. She invited our investigator to pray and set her own date. It was a miracle because she seemed like she didn't really want to be baptized but when we asked her to set her own date she got really excited about it!! It was so cool that of all the days we teach her on we taught her when Sister Park was here. Church is true. Oh and ya know the old lady who always feeds us on Tuesday?? The one who is deaf and you have to yell the prayer? (And everything else) Well she always makes us herbal tea after dinner and she was pouring some into my teacup and she spilled it alllll over my dress haha it burned my leg it was the funniest thing of my life she didn't even really notice cause she can't hear anything...sooooo funny.

On Thursday and Friday we had Zone Training Meeting for Zones 2 & 3, Sister Lemmon and I were supposed to give a workshop for the second one but we COMPLETELY forgot so we were livin a little up in front of everyone but it turned out great! We did 2 trio exchanges and I went with Sister Lewis and Jahnel, I absolutely adore both of them! Sister Jahnel is from Paraguay and made us the most amazing empanadas I have ever had. And Sister Lewis just gets me so it was a great time. 

We helped one of our less-actives clean her house on Saturday, it was quite lovely haha. She was asleep on her bed the whole time so we did our thing. NY homes can be so awk, people sleep in what would be the living room back west and everything is just super open so there's no secrets! ....most of the time that's a bad thing haha.

I feel like Sunday is always the week's highlight, or maybe I should say delight, we had 6 people come to church, they are all progressing, and most of them are well on their way to baptism! It's so fun to work with our lil investigators, I love them all so much!! We also found some new investigators this week and set them up with baptismal dates so it's a pretty exciting time to be in Bensonhurst! Peyton is going to be baptized on the 8th and the whole ward is super excited, she is basically already a member! Ok this is too random but I hate the smell of weed. Someone in our building smokes it so sometimes when we get home at night it's like suffocating is its SO disgusting. I heart the Word of Wisdom FOR REAL. 

A scripture I have been lovin this week is in Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." We all need direction wherever were at in life, and that direction comes as we obey the Lord and put Him first in our lives. I love the gospel so much! It brings life to life.

Thanks for everything, I love ya all!

Sister Wadsworth

New hur don't care

Life with Lemmon=HAPPINESS

Rudy. He for reals has a mullet. Cutest kid ever.

Our mission nurse Sister Peterson! So cute...and my compie <3

My girl Sister Van (:

This guy was legit dancing around the mall with a clock on his chest...

iPad probs...haha I love Sister Lemmon

All the girlies we exchanged with..and Elder Banta #whywedontaskelderstotakepictures 

When Life Gives You Lemmons...

10-19-15

Well, not Lemmons necessarily, but a Lemmon. SISTER Lemmon is my new companion and is probably the greatest thing of my life!! I kind of knew she was going to be my companion haha glad I was right! She is from St. Anthony, ID so we totally get each other. We know some of the same people, places, and uh, we're both just country so that's a dream come true. We had an amazing first week!



We went to do a lookup and I read the address wrong so we went to the building across from where we were supposed to go. The lady who opened the door was (obviously) the wrong person and because of a slight language barrier we thought she was put out by us so we started to leave. But she asked our names and we taught her a mini-restoration lesson and she wanted us to come back!! It's so funny the little things the Lord does for us throughout the day. An unexpected prepared person, a bus coming quickly when it's freezing cold, nice people opening doors when we knock instead of yelling at us, a companion with a sense of humor. The Lord really cares about each of us. 



We also taught a new investigator that our elders found! (Shout out to our elders, they have found half the people we are teaching!) she is so sweet, she came to church last week and we were able to have a member come with us last minute. This member, Amy, is the mother of 3 and oh my goodness her testimony is so powerful!! I was close to tears the whole lesson it was SO GOOD. And Sister Lemmon is such a powerful teacher, just being with her I have learned so much in the last week! 



She actually taught me some super cool, simple things about being happy. We can't always choose our situation, in fact, we rarely can! Because of this we sometimes think we can't choose to be happy because our situation predicts our happiness. Not true! Maybe we can't necessarily choose to be happy, but we can choose to create an environment in our lives where the spirit can dwell and as it says in Galatians 5:22: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith." So maybe we can't choose to be happy in the way we think we normally would, but we can choose to have the spirit, which, in turn, will make us happy!! 



We also taught some other lessons which, if I went into detail would take forever to explain, I gave a talk in church about seeing the beauty in others....haha it was great. Oh one last amazing thing: everyone thinks Sister Lemmon is a Jew because she's a brunette wearing tights. Walking to church yesterday a Jewish lady went out of her way to greet us which is amazing considering that they never respond when we greet them! Hysterical.



Oh and it was freezing cold last night so we went knocking. "Hi! We're missionaries and were out here freezing because we know our message is true!" Most people said no after that part but one lady said no and then told Sister Lemmon she has hot glasses #truth. After about 10 doors this one guy comes down his stairs...he was younger and he gave us the horizontal and we didn't know what to do so we asked him if he wanted to learn more and he was like "yes!" We were both like "uhhh what do we say we've never gotten this far." So we taught him a short restoration while he just stood there smiling. He was obviously interested, just not in our message. I FEEL SO AWKWARD JUST THINKING ABOUT IT. But it's okay. We found a family at the next door so #worthit. 



Well it's getting rather cold here but the people of New York are warming up to the gospel and it is so fun to see people's lives (including our own) change because of it! I love being a missionary here, it's the best thing ever :) 



Thanks so much for everything, I love you all!
Sister Wadsworth

Brooklyn for life...

10-12-15

....or at least until I come home! Wow wow wow. I get to stay here for my last 6 weeks!! I'm so excited, I LOVE this area and feel super blessed right now.

This week started off with a lil sleepover at the mission home! A new sister missionary from China came into our Stake so her trainer, us, and the Assistants all went to pick her up at the airport along with President and Sister Reynolds. It was such a beautiful experience! And brought back so many memories of coming in on my first day, it's crazy how different I now feel after 17 months of serving here in New York! We spent the night writing some guidelines for newly called Sister Training Leaders with Sister Reynolds, I seriously love her so much! Our mission has been so blessed to have 2 great presidents and their wives lead it. Tuesday didn't slow down, we took the sisters to their new apartment and dropped into our district meeting just in time, taught a lesson, and then brought back groceries for the new sisters, and had some fun lookups for the rest of the night. 

So one morning I was studying and I realized that I needed to be a bit better at consistently being what I want to become as Elder Oaks says. I thought my language could use a bit of improvement, not that it's bad just a little immature especially for a missionary. So I made a list of different words I could use instead of what I was currently saying....well it's pretty cool when you try to be better because the Lord blesses you pretty hardcore! We had a lesson scheduled for the evening and some people to see throughout the day but nothing looked very promising. We ended up having 3 less-active lessons, 4 other lessons, and 2 new investigators! In the middle of the day we got a bible referral and when we looked up the address the lady lived in the same building as our appointment that night! We set up an appointment and SHE WAS INCREDIBLE. So in tune. It's not very often that you feel the spirit when you walk into a non-members house. As we were walking home I was chuckling a bit cause the Asians here do this weird thing where they go through the trash on the sidewalk at night to try and find things to recycle for money. My initial thought when I see this in action is "get a real job." Like how sad is it that you have to go through someone else's garbage. It reminded me of that Mormon Ad poster entitled "take out the trash" of the boy taking the trash out of his mind. These people going through the trash are looking for something of value, maybe it's gonna pay for their next meal. I don't know. But they don't have a choice of what they're gonna find in there, maybe a dirty diaper ha ha, maybe worse. It's the same with the Internet or on our phones, maybe our intent is to find something of value but more often that not we end up finding things that harm rather than help us spiritually. My challenge is to not go through the trash. If you go on the Internet, please have a purpose! The instant we go on without a purpose is the instant Satan has room to take over. 

So I went on an exchange with my favorite Sister Peterson, she goes home tomorrow and has had such a big impact on my mission! We were talking about what the personal result of our mission might be and I realized that if there's one thing I would hope has changed about me it would be that I am more humble. Can you imagine coming back from a mission and still being prideful? Seems like that would defeat the whole purpose if you came back and weren't humbled by the experiences you had on your mission. When I think of humility I always think of Job, it's crazy that he still trusted and held onto God through it all....what an example! I haven't gone through nearly as hard of things as him but we can all trust God no matter what we go through.

Ok so also when I was with Sister Peterson we taught a deaf lady and she couldn't read so Sister Peterson was signing to her and trying to help her read from the Book of Mormon Stories. It's so cool that this little old lady can be just as faithful as we can (probably more) when she is so unable to learn about the gospel. I hope we take advantage of everything we have, all the resources, to learn all we can about our Savior and His life. Isn't that why we're here on earth? 

The transfer ended SO GOOD!! We had 5 investigators at church and had many miracles and progress happen for each of them DURING the meeting! This area had like 5 investigators in all 3 pools and now our pools combined have almost 40! And we have about 8 people preparing for baptism...its been so cool to see the work hasten in this area. We talked to a member last night (she was teaching with us) and she said there was one branch in NYC 50 years ago, and now we have 4 stakes...how incredible is that?? I love being a part of the work in this area, it's the best thing of my life. 

Hope you all have a great week!

LOVE YOU,

Sister Wadsworth 

1. Some T-Bell sauce from a previous comp <3

2. Mission home with the new missionaries! Aren't President and Sister Reynolds picture perfect?!

3. I realized that I only have 6 more weeks of this pizza so we have been livin a little

4. I will miss this little hottie :'(

My Name is Sister Wadsworth: I'm a Missionary, A Hurricane Survivor, and I'm a Mormon

10-5-15

Time is going by so fast! Probably because we are so busy, but it's crazy!! For preparation day we seriously just took a break from life and stayed in our pad most of the day because of my foot and we were just tired. We had a lesson with our investigator who is getting baptized next month. We took her to a member's house and these poor members!!! I have never seen saints get persecuted as much as they do here in NY. Their neighbors were like, super mad for no reason and the straw on the camels back was when they said (after some other unpleasant things) "AND you're Mormon!" Now I see why some people might say New Yorkers are mean....they sure can be if they want to! 

Tuesday I went to Bushwick with Hermana Lewis, oh my goodness we had quite the exchange.  I'm not really sure why I have the flu but I think it's because of not ever fully recovering from my foot (although my foot is a lot better now!! #yessss) but I go with this sister to a member's house and I was seriously passing out from NyQuil and then the people's cat came up to Hna. Lewis so she petted it but she's allergic so her eyes got all bloodshot...we were both a wreck. The member was cooking us some Hispanic food but it seriously took her the whole time so from 7-8:30 we sat there, dying. She made stuff with shrimp in it and obvi I will throw up if I eat it so when I told her I was allergic she started making something different...bad mistake. So it took even LONGER and then when we finally got to the lesson she left the room and we couldn't even teach her! So we taught her daughter and then left. It was quite the evening, let me tell ya. People think the hardest part of missionary work is rejection but I would have to disagree, it's acceptance and then being openly ignored ..... 

The next day we had our Zone Training Meeting in Midwood, it's always good to go back to the motherland! People always think that I can play the piano for these things but I still can't play so it's always embarrassing but whatever, it was a good meeting. One of the sisters gave a workshop about being a consecrated missionary and it was so good, it totally applies to normal life, we should be giving our all to God wherever we're at in life. Oh and we were notified that there's going to be a hurricane. Not like we needed to be notified because it seriously already WAS a hurricane outside it was raining so hard! After the meeting I came to Bushwick with Sister Cox and Sister Skinner (yaaaassss) we had a great night, i.e. We got cancelled on for everything so we walked around in the rain trying to find people who would let us in. No one did ha ha. Probs got pneumonia but it was a good night anyways! Something I love about these two sisters is that no matter the circumstances they are ALWAYS happy and laughing about everything. Attitude is seriously everything in this work. Next day we went to THEIR Zone Training Meeting ha ha so many meetings!! And then the hurricane hit..

So it kinda hit the night before, but when we came out the meeting it was full on war between the rain, my hair, umbrella, and me. It's like trying to walk through a pressure washer in a dress holding your luggage cause you're on an exchange plus an umbrella that doesn't do anything to keep you dry, wearing the raincoat you got from someone who is half your height because you're an idiot and sent yours home because OBVIOUSLY it wasn't going to get cold before November 25th, all the while your hair is stabbing you in the eyeballs cause the lady who cut it when you were 15 didn't do the layers right so now they don't fit into a bun....you get the picture. And hence the title of the email seeings as how I am quite proud of myself for being alive to write this. I walked around with Sister Skinner and Cox for a few hours in this but we finally made it to back to Bensonhurst. I made em sit down while I made soup and biscuits. I was blending the soup and the round little plastic thing that goes in the lid fell THROUGH the lid into the blender so the carrot curry soup turned into carrot plastic soup. Also it's like 20 degrees outside but our landlord won't turn on the heat so I have been sleeping with like 15 million pairs of socks...yeah It was just a bad day. My comp got back from her exchange in Staten Island and we went out for an appointment. Well of course the bus wasn't running so we waited in the tropical storm for 30 minutes before we called a less-active to see if we could come over. She said yes! We went and had an awesome lesson, the spirit was strong and her and her husband both felt it. It was the best! The best worst day ever! Except for the day after that, Saturday haha. This doesn't end guys I'm just getting started. 

Obviously Conference is the best thing of my life. In between sessions one of our members was kind enough to make us some legit Brooklyn Italian food. Too bad it made us sicker than sick haha. We got on the bus to our investigator's house to watch the second session and had to get off twice to throw up. That doesn't even make me mad! I'm only mad because we missed the first of the session when they called the new apostles. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. ah. But we had massive miracles the remainder of the evening, we went to look up a referral and the person who referred them said that they wouldn't be too interested but the lady was so nice! We had a lesson and she invited us back! Then we had a miracle with prayer. One of our members was having some family struggles and asked us to pray for her. I usually pray when I get home at night but I asked Sister Anderson if we could pray right then. We did and the member texted us a short time later and said that things had worked themselves out!

Around 8:50 we arrived in front of our house. We both still felt sick from the food and motion sick from the bus. I was about in tears but me and my companion decided we wouldn't go in till 9. I wanted to go home. Not inside the gate and up the stairs...I wanted to go Nevada home. I felt sure that no one cared which is so dumb but that's just what I felt. As we walked I started to tear up for a different reason...how dumb was I being? I felt like the Savior was walking right next to me and He definitely cared. He was feeling everything I felt in that moment, and He wanted to help. I still wondered why we had to stay out in the terrible weather. There was no one in sight to talk to but we walked across the street to go see a woman I had met last week. We didn't have her apartment number so we said a prayer and called her. After about 10 rings she answered! She had already said she wasn't interested so I wasn't sure why we should try again but I just asked her how she was and she said she was sick. I told her conference tomorrow would cheer her up and we would pick her up the next morning. She agreed! 

OK I KNOW THIS IS SO LONG BUT THIS IS THE BEST PART!!!

We went to our investigators church and it was the most hysterical thing of my life! It was like EFY haha they had us stand up and sing while we clapped and danced. It felt weird to do that and then go into the chapel of our church and listen to the living prophet ha ha. The spirit definitely speaks quietly! The picture of her is the best, she was all gussied up and it was sooooo great, yaaaaas. I also see why our investigator is so confused. Their church didn't really teach anything, they just danced and messed around. We are so lucky to be in a church where people GET IT. I heart our church so much. It requires somethings of our soul...it isn't just a happy-go-lucky concert experience 1 hour each week. It is taxing, fulfilling, and joyful all at the same time. It is a lifestyle, not a Sabbath Day commitment. I love the gospel and the God that it leads us back to. I'm grateful for a Savior who loves us enough to let us go through hard things, so we can LEARN!! 

Love you all,

Sister Wadsworth

1. Exchange #1 of the week. These girls>>

2. Exchange #2: bro pic

3. Hurricane survivors!

4. CAROLINE.