Monday, October 26, 2015
10/26/15 letter
Hola,
Another great week here in Arizona! The weather has
cooled down and it's a perfect 75-80 degrees everyday with a refreshing breeze.
A lot of times, Hermana Sedgwick and I will stop walking in the church parking
lot and just enjoy the weather for a couple of seconds.
This week we taught 22 lessons and found 3 new
investigators. It was awesome! We try to get members to go with us to as many
lessons as possible because their testimonies and personal experiences help out
a lot (not to mention they speak Spanish a lot better than we do). On Saturday
night, we invited a member to come out with us to couple of lessons. We met at
6:05 at the first house. No one was home, so we tried a second, but the people
were just on their way out the door. At 6:20, as I was opening my mouth to tell
our member where the third house was, she said "pues, cuidense,"
(well, take
care) got in her car, and left (my mouth still gaping
open). Hermana Sedgwick and I could not get over how funny it was that we had a
member come out with us for literally 15 minutes!
We gave lots of service this week. The relief society
president in our branch is in the hospital in Phoenix. She gave birth 5 weeks
early (the baby will be fine, he doesn't have to be in an incubator anymore),
she has a really serious blood disease, and has 10 other kids at home ages 17
and under, plus a foster kid. As you can tell, her life is a "bit"
hectic right now, so the four of us sister missionaries went and cleaned her
house along with some other sisters from our branch. The sisters in the branch
have been providing meals for the family and been taking turns watching the
kids. It was fall break this week, so none of the kids were in school. So we
did our best to help their family this week and went over to their house twice
to help out. We also volunteer at a dog pound every week. We help out with
anything they need: landscaping, cleaning, laundry, or giving the dogs human
interaction. It's always really fun and we get to know our zone super well.
There are 13 of us in our zone (the smallest one in the
mission) and we're all super close. (4 sisters, 9 elders) There's usually 2
districts and 14 of us, but our district leader was in the hospital last week
with a weird rash all over his body. He's fine now, but he got temporarily
transferred to Chandler zone so he could be closer to the hospital for return
appointments.
So right now, we are a kinda district and a zone. The
other district leader is in charge of all of us and gives trainings to the
whole zone for district meetings. aka we basically have zone meeting every week
instead of district meeting.
This week we had a lot of good food. A member gave us a
giant bag of pomegranates, so we've been enjoying one of those every day for
lunch and breakfast. (they're not as good as dads pomegranates though) After a
lesson one night around 8:00 the investigator offered us dinner. We told him we
had already eaten, so he sent us home with plates for us to eat for lunch the
next day. He used to work at a Mariscos restaurant, so the fish tacos he gave
us were super bomb. A recent convert, Miguel, and his wife who's getting
baptized in a couple of weeks make super good Mexican food and had us over on
Saturday. We're always super excited to eat at their house. We had posole and
it was soooo good! I think my tongue is adjusting to spicy food which is a good
thing. Hermana Allred thought the posole was super spicy, but I didn't think it
was spicy at all. I even put hot sauce on it (I hated hot sauce before my
mission).
We get to go to the temple on Saturday! Our mission
president doesn't want us out teaching on Halloween night, so the whole mission
is going to a temple. Some are going to Gilbert, some Mesa, and some Phoenix.
The Yuma missionaries might even go to the San Diego Temple. I think we'll be going
to Gilbert so I'm super excited.
Happy Halloween,
Love, Hermana Gubler
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
10/19/15 letter
Hi,
This week involved a lot of driving. Two trips to Tempe,
two trips to Coolidge, and a trip to Maricopa.
On Friday afternoon after weekly planning, Hermana
Sedgwick and I took the 50 minute drive to Tempe for the 6 and 12 week training
meeting.
President and Sister Toone talked to the missionaries
about how their [missionary] training has gone and what we've learned and if we
have any suggestions for improvement of the training program. I'll go to the
same type of thing in another 6 weeks, once I'm all done with my training.
On Sunday, we went to the Mission President's Devotional
(MPD) in Tempe. It's every third Sunday at the institute building on ASU
campus. It got cancelled last month, so I was excited to get to go to my first
one. People who have recently been baptized speak about their experience and
the difference they have seen in their lives. It was really cool. We invite our
investigators and recent converts to come and it's a super good opportunity for
them to feel the spirit. We had weather similar to what Visalia has been having
during the car ride to and from Tempe. It was pouring rain and there was lots
of crazy lightning. I'm glad to hear that Visalia is finally getting some rain.
Coolidge is a city about 25 minutes away is part of our
area. There are 2 English wards in Coolidge, but since our Spanish branch
covers the whole stake, we cover Coolidge as well. We usually go to Coolidge
once a week, but this week, we went twice because we had a lot of people to
teach. It was really cool, we finally found a family that we've been looking
for forever. On my first day in Casa Grande, we found the husband, Hermán, who
was living at one of our investigator's houses and working for a couple of
months before his family crossed the border from Mexico. We taught him for a
couple weeks until his family arrived in the US, and he and his family moved to
a house in Coolidge. He didn't know what his new address would be, but he gave
us his phone number. Every week, the night before we go to Coolidge, we call
him and ask him for his address. He'd say "I'm not home right now, so I
can't look on the side of my house to know my address. When I get home, I'll
text it to you." (in Spanish) ...and then he would forget to text us. This
happened for about 4 weeks straight. We went to Coolidge on Tuesday and we
called his phone before we went. Hermán forgot his phone at home that day, and
his wife answered. She gave us the address and we were able to go by. When we
got there, their whole family (Hermán, his wife, Rosaria, and 2 kids) were
home! We taught them about how their family could be together forever. Every
time we said that families are eternal, Rosaria got a big smile on her face.
It was awesome!
Today was our trip to Maricopa (about 40 minute drive).
We found out last night that we would be going. President Toone spoke to our
zone and the Maricopa zone about some online proselyting information and some
other announcements. That's why my email is so late today.
On Friday night, we got a text from a member of our
branch presidency that Hermana Sedgwick and I would be speaking in church on
Sunday and we got the text with what our topic would be on Saturday morning.
His wife is in the hospital and he has a large family at home to take care of,
so he was a little preoccupied and didn't have time to find a speaker more in
advance. With the lack of notice and the lack of time to prepare, (mind you we
still had a full day of proselyting on Saturday, so we pretty much only had an
hour on Sunday to prepare and a little time before bed on Saturday) I decided
that the Spanish of the guy who translates general conference talks is a lot
better than mine. So for my talk, I pretty much just read the highlights of
President Uchtdorf's talk from the general women's session "un Verano con
la tía abuela Rosa". I spoke about hope and how we need to follow the
example of great aunt rose in our life in order to find happiness. Pretty
simple talk. It wasn't too fancy. [See
link at end of e-mail for his really interesting talk on hope and happiness
called "A Summer with Great Aunt Rose".] Our mission did an emphasis
on doing an hour of knocking doors everyday about a month ago, but it's not
really a thing anymore. Since Hermana Sedgwick and I have 2 more hours of
studies than most missionaries (1 hour of Spanish, 1 hour of training) it was
hard to find time for tracting any way. Every Wednesday, we do service at the
valley humane society, playing with dogs, we have a lot of set lessons, and if
there's not any set lessons, we have lots of investigators who we stop by. If
we have like 15 minutes between lessons, we'll knock doors or walk down the
street looking for people outside we can talk to. We have dinner with a church
member every night, but we're on our own for lunch and breakfast. I eat lots of
sandwiches, eggs, and fruit. Also, there's a place here that sells thrifty ice
cream. We went last week and it brought back fun memories of going all the time
growing up.
Another great week here in Arizona!
Love,
Hermana Gubler
Monday, October 12, 2015
10/12/15 letter
Hola,
This week was great! Transfers were on Thursday, so for
our last district meeting (ended up being more like a zone meeting since we
were all there), we had Al Fox Caraway as a guest speaker. You might know her
as the Tattooed Mormon (but she says she hates that name).
She lives in Coolidge, which is part of our area. She
told her conversion story and told us her motto of "set goals, say
prayers, work hard," which also applies perfectly to missionary work. She
shared Alma 56:46 which says "Father, behold our God is with us, and he
will not suffer that we should fall; then let us go forth." She said that
this scripture helped her through all of her hard times. I don't know how much
you know about her. She joined the church when she was 20 (6 years ago) and the
church has used her story to show that it doesn't matter who you were, it any
matters who you can become with Heavenly Father's help. If you google her, or
look at her Facebook (on which there is a picture of us), or blog, you can
learn more about her. She was super awesome and fun and was such an amazing
speaker.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
10/5/15 Letter
This week was awesome! On Wednesday we got to go to the
temple in Mesa. (We get to go every 3 months) They were already starting to put
up Christmas lights. I can't wait to see the lights at Christmas time; I've
heard that the Mesa Temple grounds look better than Temple Square. The temple
was super pretty and the spirit was really strong and it was really nice to be
able to have some time to sit and ponder.
On the way to the temple, we were following the Zone
Leaders in the their car. They took the freeway exit at the last second and we
didn't have time to follow them. We got super lost and ended up driving way
outside the boundaries of our mission into downtown Phoenix. So that was an
adventure.
On Tuesday, after district meeting, our zone went to get
hot wings.
The restaurant has a ghost pepper wing that is super,
super, super hot. We were all stupid and decided to each try one. There were
lots of tears shed and it was really funny to see everyone's reaction. I only
took one bite and swallowed it super fast, so it wasn't horribly terrible. I
drank like 3 cups of water and lots of ice and put on lots of chapstick, but I
was good after about 10 minutes. I felt bad for the missionaries that ate a
whole wing or got some of the sauce on their face.
On Friday, we went on exchanges and I was companions with
Hermana Allred for the day. Hermana Allred is a greenie like me, so we had some
"fun" teaching lessons in our broken Spanish. They didn't end up
super terrible though and we got the point across pretty well.
Saturday, Lorenzo got baptized!!! He's been ready to be
baptized for 5 weeks now, but he needed to attend church one more time before
he could. He's been in and out of the hospital (pretty much always on
Sundays) so hasn't been able to go to church. We found
out that if they watch general conference, it counts as church attendance, so
he watched the Saturday afternoon session, then got baptized at 3:30. It was
awesome. His sister and niece watched conference with us at the church and then
attended his baptism. They really liked it and we're hoping to be able to teach
them in the future. The baptismal service was really nice. A recent convert
spoke on baptism, then the branch president spoke about receiving the Holy
Ghost. Then the Hermanas sang Divina Luz (Lead Kindly Light). Lorenzo was super
happy. He'll be confirmed next Sunday in church.
General Conference was awesome! We watched all of the
sessions at the stake center. I loved Elder Renlund, Bednar, and Stanfill's
talks, as well as President Monson's. Lorenzo watched Saturday afternoon with
us and one of our investigators watched the Sunday sessions at her friends
house.
Now I'll explain the reason that "dead cow" is
in the subject line. On Tuesday, we had a set lesson with our investigators
Jose Luis and Kassandra. (Grandpa and granddaughter) That morning Jose Luis
decided to kill one of his cows and cut it up. He spent all day draining the
blood, skinning it, etc. When we walked up, him and some friends were all
standing around a table in front of their house, covered in cow blood. They
were cutting the last of the meat off of the bones. They were filling a giant
bin full of beef (which was also covered in flies). I wasn't quite sure what
type of animal it was until I saw the hooves. (I'll attach pictures) After an
minor freak out, and fake whimpering, I told them about Big Mac and how we
hired someone to take care of him. As you can guess, we didn't really get much
of a lesson in, but it was an interesting experience.
Transfers are this Thrusday. I can't believe I've been in
Casa Grande for 6 weeks already. I'll most likely be staying. Also, this
Saturday is the 6 month mark of when I opened my mission call. We had 5 member
present lessons this week, which is more than we've had in a week since I've
been here. We set a goal this week to try to get as many as we could (our goal
was 4). We would have had more, but some of them fell through.
All in all, awesome week. Can't wait for next week and
more missionary work.
Love,
Hermana Gubler
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