Friday, October 31, 2014

October 27, 2014 Eleanor's Baptism

My Dear Family and Friends,

Eleanora is getting her baptism interview today, and she´s getting baptized next Sunday!  Hna Jensen and I love her!. One of the days we went to see her this week we were saying how prepared she was and were asking her why she was so prepared to hear this message. She told us the night before we went to go and contact her, she was making a list of things she wants to get better at. The one that was on the top of her list was to find her faith in God and make it better. And when we came the next day, she knew that this was the answer how. God puts people in our paths!Yesterday at church she asked us if we could recieve gifts as missionaries, and she gave us these cute sandle earrings. We´re going to wear them at her baptism. We also had an FHE at her house last night. Dennis, one of the recent RM´s came with us. It was about the atributes of Christ, and it was a matching scripture with atribute game. We were happy because not only her mom participated, but her siblings too. And her brother told us the day before that he wasn´t interested. But there he was!One attribute that her mom picked was virtue, and she´s like  ...YEAH! I want to be a virtuous women! ...  To me and Hna Jensen tjhat was funnty becasue we were saying earlier that day that eventualy when she gets baptized, she´s gonna be a YW or RS president.

 Saturday/Sunday was a mission farewell. Elder Cansino, who is going to the Florida Fort Lauderdale Mission. Saturday night there were a bunch of his uncles, and his dad who had wise words for him, and some for me too. One of his uncles said that numberwise, it wasn´t successful,but that the things he gained from his mission made it successful for him. He said `hagas tu maximo´´, which is what I want to do. It was nice hearing a bunch of mission stories, because sometimes in the moment I wonder what I´ll think at the end of it. I hope, like all the family of this new missionary, that I will say it was the best 18 months of my life. On Sunday, in a talk it was mentioned that as a missionary, we get the chance to walk with the Lord everyday.  I just thought, Sometimes that means we need to walk with Him when He´s sad, when one of His sons or daughters isn´t following in His footsteps. But we also get to feel His joy, which is something wonderful.

Something awesome that happened. TYhe other day we decided to hike up a huge hill to visit a family that hasn´t been to church in 3 months. During this hike I was saying how I missed real cookies and Hna Jensen missed real milk. When we visited them, we got cinnamon cookies. They´re not home made...but they were really yummy.  Hna Jensen got some milk that´s from a cow. Ask and you shall recieve? Also...the next day they were at church. It made us so happy!

If you could put a girl named Blanca in your prayers. She´s a convert of a few months, and she wants to go to church, but with her family situation right now, she isn´t able to. I feel so sad for her!

Sorry it wasn´t a whole mass of information this week. But these were the highlights for me. And I forgot to take pictures of our house. OOPS!

LOVE
Hermana Jones

Tanivet and Tessa. She is from Ojo de Agua and was in Nogales for a mission farewell

Monday, October 20, 2014

The latest news.....

Hola Todos,

I forgot to tell you last week that we moved again. The other house had polvo falling from the ceiling and our leaders didn´t like that. Our new landlords are friends of the Charly family and they are wonderful.  The landlady calls us her daughters.It´s pretty new, and we have a boiler! So we don´t have to shower with hot water in a bucket, which is really nice!  I haven´t taken pictures of it yet because we weren`t quite done unpacking, so I´ll send some next week.

Hermana Jensen and I are doing fine as companions. We ate tortas and torta tostadas today for our lunch. They were so good! It´s funny, I have a different food thing with each companion. With Hna Orduña it was chileatoles, Hna Garcia was picaditas, and with Hna Jensen it´s tortas. Tortas are sandwiches with the crispy? type of buns with turkey leg or chicken, and mine with raja peppers. Have  I mentioned I like eating spicy things?I know about her friends and family and she knows about you too. She kept her mission call pretty hush like I did. She´s a new aunt! Her older brothers wife had her baby exactly 2 weeks ago and her middle name is Lluvia, which I think is pretty cool. Lluvia means rain. Her younger brother is in the marines right now working on planes.She also loves wearing my clothes. Haha, it´s fine.Companionships aren´t the easiest things. We are both very different people with different personalities, but we learn together, and when we see the fruits of our work it´s really rewarding.

E., .... She is golden!  She was a ´´reference´´. I put that in quotation marks because we thought she was another person that was a reference. We got a ref from an RM of a friend of his named B.  that works in a papeleria. So one day we went there and asked if she was B. She said yes and we set up an appointment with her. This was  two weeks ago.  When we brought members with us she´d introduce herself as E., so we asked her if she liked that better. So now we refer to her as E. She doesn´t know this RM that refered us to B., but what´s funny is she has another friend that just returned home from a mission. This other B. works there on Sundays. E. first took some discussions with missionaries about a year ago, but then she was a lot more busy with school and work so they had to drop her. She has a baptism set for Nov 2 and she´s really excited for it.

Remember when I talked about A. M. a few weeks ago? She actually came to church with us this Sunday! M. came too. He´s wonderful. He really wants to change for the better.

 I want to share something that happened this week.  We had a couple difficult days this week. One morning as I was getting ready I was thinking about how I was in my reading of the Book of Mormon in 2 Nephi 4, and I was excited to read that chapter. When it was time for personal study and I got to my desk, my scriptures were open to Alma 26. People, this is my favourite chapter in the Book of Mormon, so I had to read it. I forgot a lot about it, but as I was reading it, it was so personal for me. Ammon is talking about how there were discouragements when he was a missionary and how there were some days that they just wanted to go back home. But God told them to wait and have a little patience, then that the miracles would come.
Family and Friends, My Heavenly Father assigned that chapter to me. It was open to it on my desk. He knows us personally and what we need the most. I am not the most patient person, but I need to try and be better.

Love you all!

Hermana Jones


Monday, October 13, 2014

Thanksgiving

Hello Everyone!

So I totally forgot that it was Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. And today is part of it. So....some things I'm thankful for:

I´m thankful that through being a missionary, I`ve been able to gain more of a testimony in the simple truths of the gospel.

I`m thankful for my leaders here. Sometimes it can be a little hard to accept all their council ... like me talking with a pen in my mouth when I´m at my house. But they are inspired and they are here to help us.
I´m thankful for the sister training leaders, Hna Terry and Hna Johnson and the things they teach us.. even the things that aren´t gospel related. Like when I was in divisions with Hna Johnson, she taught me how I can keep my hair a little more healthy. She also helped me with not stressing about the small stuff ( I kind of sort of lost the cellphone of me and Hna Jensen during our divisions). But it´s fine, there´s another one sent on it´s way and we´re borrowing one of them from the sister training leaders.

I´m thankful for being able to teach and contact people. I´ll expand on the people we´re teaching next week.
One contact, in divisions with Hna Johnson, we were by the church because we had an appointment with a recent convert, and he lives by the church. Well, this recent convert lives by the church, but no one was at his house.  We were going go to our plan B. The road we were going to go dow... this really drunk man just entered it. I didn't feel good about going down the road.  On the corner was this young guy, and Hna Johnson said...hey let´s go contact him. His name is M. A.  We were talking a bit, learning a bit about him and invited him to come to church. Then we asked...do you want to come see it? It´s just up the road. So that night, it was mutual night for the youth. They all came up to him and introduced themselves, offered him juice and cookies. Really welcoming. Then he told us he had to get back home.  When we walked back, he told us a bit about his family. His little brother is mute, but he´s really intelligent.  I just started feeling like bearing my testimony about the Resurrection and told him that one day his little brother would be able to talk. Hna Johnson took out a Book of Mormon to give to him and marked Alma 40 for him to read, which is a wonderful chapter.  He said ``I can`t take it...it`s yours.`` And we said ...its for you!Yesterday we had a set appointment with him, but we were late because comida was still being cooked when we got to our appointment,  and we wanted to ask Hna Gladys if she could come to the lesson. When we found his house, his dad was there and said ` he left 10 minutes ago. He was looking for you and waiting for you. His dad told us that M. told his family about us and that he´s reading the Book of Mormon. and his dad said that he´d like to hear our message as well but he was busy with something else. I am really excited to actually start teaching Migel.

I´m grateful for testimonies. Yesterday was testimony meeting. There were wonderful testimonies. One thing Elder Ruiz said in his testimony was that when he was young, he thought the church and its teachings were true, later he believed they were true. But now, he knows it´s true. And what we know is our testimony. Yesterday, after a sad lesson of a less active telling us that she didn´t believe in Joseph Smith and how he is a prophet, we went to visit a recent convert of the Elders. G. Her son has been a member for a few years, he bore a beautiful testimony yesterday and she was saying how she wished she had the guts to go up there and bare hers. But she basically bore hers to us. She has such faith, and is such a strong women.

I´m grateful for the hard times. They are not fun, but they shape us and they help us to support our companions.


I´m grateful I had the oppurtunity to write you all today.

Love,
Hermana Tessa Marie Jones


I´m thankful for the support of my family and friends back home. I miss you all dearly.

``If you can´t change it, quit worrying about it. If you can change it, change it, and stop worrying about it.`` -Hna Johnson´s wisdom of why she is so stinkin happy all the time.



Monday, October 6, 2014

Conference week

Hello Everyone!

Well this week.... it was a difficult one.

It´s sad to see someone who could progress so much not have the strong enough desires to make time to listen a little more. Or going to set up appointments and being told that they are too busy and when can we come back again.  When we do they say the same thing. Days of trying to find new souls to save and not having any luck. Or a sad investigator that can't just sacrifice a little time to watch a session of conference that would give her joy. She has depression. We want to help her so much but we can´t help her to progress if she´s not keeping her commitments. That`s probably one of the most frusterating parts of a mission.

This was the first week of a new transfer and Hna Jensen and I have another one together. I have a feeling I´m going be in Nogales for 6 months.

Elder Cortez is now our district leader and training Elder Weatherford who`s from Seattle, Washington. I swear he´s the first Elder I´ve met here that´s not from Utah or Idaho. I don't think I´ve ever said that we share Nogales with the zone leaders. We do. Elder Cortes and Elder Ruiz.

So...even though this week wasn't the best, there were some good things that happened too. Thank goodness for those things!

Ana and Oscar. We had a lesson with them on Friday night which started being about obedience. I read that morning about Nephi and his family on the boat and I wanted to share it. So for that part of it, we used my mini whiteboard to draw images of the boat and everything. Then it turned into talking about the Holy Ghost. We were asking Oscar how he felt at the baptism and he was saying he felt really good and welcome. He was saying once he went to this church with Ana of some other religion and he didn´t feel comfortable at all. That usually when he`s with a lot of people he doesn`t know, he feels nervous, but during the baptism he wasn`t. He was saying that when Hna Jensen was singing English, even though he couldn´t understand it, he felt this wonderful feeling. So we read Galations 5 with him where it talks about the fruits of the spirit and he felt all the words he understood.  In his prayer to close the lesson, he asked that God would help him find a way to make his family an eternal one. OH.... Ana told us that when America is older, she wants to go on a mission.

Last night, after conference, we went to visit a friend of a member, she's a new investigator that because of her work, right now we´ll only be able to visit on Sundays. It was a wonderful lesson and she told us that if she thought we didn`t have anything of worth saying, she wouldnt have let us in.  After that, we went to go search for a less active that we´ve been trying to find for 2 weeks. She wasn`t there...so we were trying to think of who else to see in the area. Not many people live around this member.  Hna Jensen remembered this less active we met 2 or so weeks ago.  This member told us that at the end of our lesson, she needed us to visit her and she just felt like it was a big spiritual hug.

I loved conference! and I´m running out of time so I won´t be able to talk about it a lot.  We were able to watch 3 of the sessions in English. When Elder Holland was speaking, we´re were saying ´`oh there´s hna Terry´s uncle´´Something I gained from it is a little more confidence. My leaders and my companion see this potencial in me that I haven´t quite seemed to unleash and I´ve been trying to figure out how. Here´s the thing.... there´s been this little tiny grain of self doubt in me. This little tiny grain is small, but it´s been big enough to impede me from getting one step better. So...I´m gonna squash it. I´m gonna shred it up and blow it away in the wind.  I would appreciate all your prayers to help me with this. I feel like I´ve been better at it this weekend. Like...I absolutley loved the lessons I had last night.  Hna Jensen was saying she sees my own method of teaching coming more to light. And what it is is that I teach with love.

Here´s to more.

Hermana Jones




Note: Tessa's pictures pretty much come without any explanation, or names of who is in them. She did mention the one day was "Red Sunday". Also, you can see that she and her companion were pretty excited about conference.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

September 29 - Ana's Baptism

Hi Everybody!!!!!

So D&C 18 talks about how full your joy is when you bring one soul to unto God. My joy is pretty full. Ana is a baptized and confirmed member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints.

She had her baptism on Friday. This came in a lot of factors. Because General Conference is next weekend  (which I'm so excited for) and she´s moving the week after that we weren't really sure where she`d get her confirmation. Oscar also wanted to see her baptism Sop with special permission from President, she got baptized after 4 Sundays of assisting. Oscar`s only day off is Friday. It was a wonderful service! America (their daughter and one of my favourite 5 year olds) was really afraid at first. She has a fear of water, and she was scared that Ana wouldn´t come back up after her baptism. But...she put her faith that everything would be alright. And it was. Oscar gave the opening prayer for the service. He asked that he would nbe able to follow the footsteps of his wife and get baptized one day too. The Bishop was like ...`´I can´t believe he is not a member.´´ Oscar´s prayer was a beautiful one. The Family Charly was quite involved. Hna Gladys gave one f the talks and Hno Charly baptized her. America gave the closing prayer. She's only 5 years old, but her prayers are so wonderful. An RM that gave a talk last week was saying that some of the most sincerest prayers are from little children. SO TRUE! In her prayer, she mentioned how at first she was a little scared, but then she knew it was going to be okay. Hna Jensen and I sang at her baptism. We were trying to figure out in the morning what we should sing and we just weren`t coming up with anything we just felt was THE HYMN. So we decided we would sing one to make our minds up. But during the service she opens her hymnbook to How Great Though Art. A hymn that she was planning on saving for something else, and says she feels like we should sing this one. Hna Jensen wanted to solo the first one in English. She has a wonderful voice. And we sang the other verses together in Spanish. 

So for the closing hymn, we sang Eternas Pueden Ser Las Eternas. I write in Spanish because I think it sounds better in Spanish.Haha. I used to dislike that hymn...but now I love it. What a priveldge we have that because there are temples on the earth, we can be families forever.

Temples and Covanents. What it talked about in the womens conference. I miss going to the temple and I decided that when I return home, I´m gonna make time to go each week. I know that what little sacrifice I have for it the Lord will bless me.

Ana`s confirmation of the Gift of Holy Ghost on Sunday. It made me want to cry of happiness. It almost did. Just another confirmation of how much the Lord loves us and knows us. In her blessing, like near the end...it mentioned that one day she and her family would get sealed in the temple. Hna Jensen and I just looked at eachother with the biggest smiles on our faces. It also mentioned that she would have a calling in the Relief Society presidency. What was cool, is that the Patriarch lives in the ward so he gave her confirmation.

These words I wrote...do not justify the happiness I feel. That through me and my companion, the Lord was able to bring another one of his beloved daughters to the truth. It`s been such a blessing to teach Ana!

Much Love,
Hermana Jones