9/7/15 letter

This week flew by. Let's just say that time goes a lot faster in the mission field than in the MTC. Being a missionary is so much fun. I'll explain my daily schedule a little bit. My companion and I wake up at

6:30 and go running for about 20 minutes, then do abs for a couple minutes. Our mission president is working with Salt Lake to see if we can get an hour for exercise time instead of 30 minutes, so I hope that gets approved. We then have an hour to eat breakfast (usually eggs and fruit), shower, and get ready for the day. I don't need an hour to do all of those things, so I usually will just chill and mess around on the guitar in our apartment. (It's a really crappy guitar and sounds really bad, but it's fun to play around with) I then do an hour of personal study, hour of companion study (plan for that day's lessons and share what we learned during personal study), and hour of language study. Then we do an hour of training, which I will be doing every day for my first 12 weeks as a missionary. During training hour, my companion and I go through how to make lesson plans, how to teach effectively, how to transition conversations to the gospel, etc. After training, it's lunch time, which we get an hour for. I usually will have a sandwich or quesadilla. At 1:00 we're out and about teaching lessons, finding people to teach, or doing service. On Wednesdays, we volunteer at an animal shelter for a couple of hours. We play with the animals to give them human interaction and personality. I like playing with the cats a lot more than the dogs. On Tuesdays, we have zone/district meeting for a couple hours. Anyway, so we do stuff until around 5:00 when we have dinner at a member's house. We are in the Casa Grande 4th branch and they keep us pretty well fed. Our dinner calendar is always full. We get lots of really good Mexican food, which I am loving. After dinner, we teach more lessons and find more people to teach.

I finished reading the Book of Mormon this morning. I started it in the MTC, which means I finished it in less than 7 weeks. I invited 3 people to be baptized this week. They all said that they would like to, but aren't ready yet. But it's really cool to invite people to be baptized. (¿Seguirá el ejemplo de Jesucristo al ser bautizado por alguien que posea la autoridad del sacerdocio de Dios.) Two of our investigators, Jose Luis and Kassandra (grandpa and granddaughter) prayed about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and received answers and know that it's true. We are going to ask them tonight if they'll be baptized on October 3. We hope that goes well.

My zone is super awesome. On pday, we play basketball together and it's super fun. There are 4 Hermanas and 10 Elders. My companion is the sister training leader, so she meets with the Zone Leaders a lot.

They're all super awesome.

Hermana Sedgwick is super awesome and is a super good missionary. We have a lot in common and get along really well. We share our apartment with the two other hermanas who are really cool too. There are 2 bedrooms, each with a bunk bed, a nice living room with comfy couches, and a decent sized kitchen.

Anyway, I'm out of time today and I'll send some pictures. I hope you're all doing well without my sparkling personality around.

Love,

Hermana Gubler