Dear Family,
The overall experience of this week has been crazy! I had my exchange, went to Stake Conference, gave a sweet referral to the elders, found a new investigator, and almost made a man tear his house down!!
So, my exchange was great! We met up with Sister Williams in Owego and then brought her back to Vestal. It felt like the good old times of being in a trio again. We had a really great lesson on tithing with our Chinese friends. They are the investigators who just walked in the church one day. We taught both of them which is unusual. The wife is usually too busy for a lesson with schooling, but today she made time. I love sharing a visual for this lesson using Hershey's Kisses. I give them 10 pieces and then I take one away. I explain that this one piece represents the tithe that they would pay and they see that they still have 9 Hershey's Kisses. Which still makes them happy. I then pull out the entire bag of the rest of the Kisses and ask them to hold out their hands. When I pour them into their hands they overflow and fall all over the place! That is supposed to happen because it goes along great with this scripture: "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it" Malachi 3:10. They can then see that by just giving one of their Hershey's Kisses to the Lord, He will bless them with so much more than their hands can hold. Blessings poured out from Heaven are a promise given to us as we pay our tithing. After this lesson, they both opened up and said that they feel the spirit and want to come to church as much as they can! They are so awesome!
At Stake Conference we gave Sister Williams back to her companion and then we were back to normal. The conference was great! We learned a lot about making our church meetings a more spiritual experience. One of President Wirthlin's counselors was there to speak which was pretty cool. He asked all of the full time missionaries to stand up so that the whole congregation could see us all. There were a ton of us!
Last Sunday, I believe it was, we were running pretty low on gas. We had really no choice but to go to the gas station. We were just thinking "great... we as representatives of the church are getting gas on the Sabbath... We felt pretty bad about it so we needed to make up for it somehow. As we were parked, we heard a man driving by yelling at this woman walking by with huge bags of groceries. We hurried and parked our car closer to her and then got out to ask if we could help her carry her groceries the rest of the way to her house. As it turns out, we stopped her right in front of her house... What luck.. BUT! We knew where she lived now, and so we wrote down her address and gave the information to the elders because we were in their area. They stopped by a couple days later and she wants them to come back!!!
Our ward is doing a blood drive this weekend and we have been asked to hand out flyers to let people know about it. We are also planning on giving a church tour to those who come. Well last night, we were walking to the church and along the way we were putting some flyers on doors. We came up to one house and were trying to be quiet so the dog wouldn't come chasing after us, but the man inside heard us! He ran up to his door and started banging it and broke his curtains! We were just scared stiff and didn't run away because we knew that we weren't meaning any harm. He slowly opened the door and we kindly said we are from the church across the street handing out blood drive info. He noticed we meant no harm and everything was good. But still, that was pretty scary! I felt so bad that we scared him even more! Sometime, we are going to stop by and apologize again. This time so that he can see our faces. It was really dark that night and he couldn't really see who we were.
Yesterday, we decided to go do some tracting. It was a beautiful day and wasn't as cold as it has been so we took advantage of it. We were also inside an apartment building so that made it even better. We decided to start with the very back building and work our way from top to bottom. The first door we came to was cute on the outside. The one across from it looked a little scary. We tried the cute one first and no answer. So then we tried the scary looking one. On the inside we could hear the movie Toy Story, and we knew there were kids home. A young mother answered the door and we introduced ourselves and taught her the restoration right outside her door. She said she had been looking for religion because her husband has been wanting to join the military. She felt that church would be a great thing to have. We were so happy that the Lord led us to her, and she was too! She even said so! We are seeing her again on Wednesday. I hope everything works out.
"When you feel like you are drowning in life, don't worry, your life guard walks on water"
I love you guys!! The church is true!
Love, Sister Keller
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