HAPPY NEW YEARS

December 30, 2013

My Dear Family!!

To answer some of your questions…Christmas Eve was pretty chill. We went to a member’s for dinner and then went home and redid some of the maps in our area. We cover the whole stake so we spent time organizing everyone into quadrants. It’s been really effective. Before we were guessing if people lived close and it just turned into Sister Pillar driving a lot in LA traffic. Not a fan. Now we know where everyone in the ward lives and don't spend so much time in our car. Instead we can walk or save miles. So I've been happy with it. 

Christmas was great. My favorite part was skyping for obvious reasons haha! I am on the look out for Lucky grocery stores. I asked Sister Olson about them and she knew what they were. 

Editor's Note:  Mikayla had mentioned that she and her companion cook for themselves more in their current area than she previous had so her mom asked what grocery stores were close to her so she could send gift cards.  

We spent the rest of the day baking cookies for people and visited a friend of Sister Olson's. She's 95 years old! And let me tell you she knows a lot. It was great listening to her stories.

Dinner was super good. I made funeral potatoes and Sister Harrison made some super good sweet potatoes and we had a ham and bought a lemon meringue pie. We also had rolls and a salad. Sister Harrison is quite the baker and I've enjoyed it a lot.

No to the New Years Eve kit. I didn't see any at Target. :( But it’s fine. Our room is so full of Christmas stuff that we don't even have room for anything else.  

Editor's note:  Mikayla's mom had wanted to send Mik and her companion a New Year's kit but couldn't send boppers and other items through the mail.  She had told Mik to pick up a kit at Target.

Oh and I got a Christmas card from Riley and it was super precious. It was a like a Sam’s club one that you print out with a bunch of pictures of Jesus.  The caption said "Peace on Earth." It kind of made my life.

A cool story from the week happened on Sunday...we had ward council at 11:45 am, which ended at 12:30 pm but church didn't start until 1:30pm. We were trying to be efficient with our time and decided to go contact a potential. I am trying hard to like contacting potentials. I've never had success with it, but Sister Harrison had a baptism out of it, so I've been trying to like it more. Well we decided to walk and ended up talking to someone on the street and taking a wrong turn, so we didn't end up visiting the our potential. We went to church (had two investigators there) and had a really good meeting. 

Afterwards, we were driving home and I just thought we should try the potential again, so we stopped by. He lives in a gated apartment, which usually we don't have any luck with, but we rang his apartment. A few minutes later he came down and we just had a super great conversation with him. His name is Eric and he's from Africa!!! He is so sweet. I was just blown away that contacting a potential had actually worked and he was home! Well we are hoping to meet up with him again soon. He wouldn't set a return appointment, but he said he would check out church so we shall see!! In the conversation he talked about how earlier that morning he had been playing soccer and hadn't been home. I was just super touched about how the Lord really puts us in situations at the right time. If we had gone earlier like planned, we probably wouldn't have found him and wouldn't have gone back that day. The Lord is really hastening the work and prompting us to be in the places to find the elect! So if ya'll could just pray for Eric this week and pray that we can meet with him that would be great!! We really could use some new investigators. Our super solid investigator is getting baptized on Saturday! I can't wait. I'll have pictures for next week!

We'll happy New Years! Make some good goals!! 

I love you all!!! 

Keep the faith!

Sister Mik Pillar