Merry CHRISTmas!

Dear friends and family,

Merry Christmas!! I hope everyone had as wonderful of a day yesterday as we did! We had a great sacrament meeting, so much fun skyping home, celebrating with the PRS missionaries, dinner at a member's home, lots and lots of good food, and of course taking time to remember our Savior's birth. Being a missionary at Christmas really is the best, and I'm so glad I've gotten two of them because they will be Christmases I'll always remember.

At the Mission Conference

We started our week with our annual tri-zone Christmas Conference in Nazareth, PA. It was a great day being with a lot of missionaries and of course, President and Sister Randall. We talked about Light the World, had a little bit of training on contacting referrals we receive over the holidays, watched a movie together, and had a delicious lunch. But one of my favorite things was something President Randall had us do all throughout the day. Every so often he would invite as many missionaries who felt inclined to do so, to come before the group and share a scripture about Jesus Christ, and a one sentence testimony of Him. It was so simple, but so powerful and the Spirit was there. Later in the week we did this same thing with a less active family in our branch, which was really neat to hear from each of them. President Randall also read us a favorite Christmas story of his that he and Sister Randall have read every Christmas Eve since they've been married, so their family tradition lived on with their mission family. I've included that, and it's definitely worth the read even  

though Christmas is over:)  https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/TheBirthdayCake

Facebook has been a huge blessing because we can have lessons over FB messenger or video chat. We were planning to meet with Mae, but things came up and we weren't able to go to her house to see her, so instead we had our lesson over Facebook video chat. We taught her the Plan of Salvation, which she was already fairly familiar with and loved. But as we came to the end of our lesson, Mae asked if she could say the prayer. Since I've taught Mae she has never been comfortable with praying aloud, so she never would in our lessons with her. But she volunteered and said the most sincere prayer, and it was so sweet to hear her actually speaking to her Heavenly Father and knowing he was there. 

The next day we were able to meet with Mae and her husband, Dalton... this time in the local McDonald's (so Sister Young is getting some really fun missionary experiences). The amazing thing is that even though there were people around us and lots of things going on, once we had prayed and began to have our lesson, the spirit could be felt. Sister Young invited Dalton to be baptized, and he said he needed some time to know if this was the church for him, but still wants to meet with us. Mae now wants to be baptized when he does, so her date for January is off, but we are praying that they will both be able to have confirmation that what we share is true and requires faith and action on their part. 

One of our prayers was definitely answered this week! As we were planning we prayed to know who to reach out to and invite to church since Christmas is a time when people want to go to church. We felt like we needed to call Mary even though she had told us many times before that she wouldn't come to church until January, so we weren't sure we would even ask. But we called to see how she was doing and what she had planned for the weekend, and felt prompted to invite her to church. It was quiet for a minute and then, to our surprise, Mary said our church service is exactly where she felt she need to be Christmas morning and that we could plan to see her there!... and she came, and absolutely loved it! After sacrament meeting she said that she felt it was "God-led," and not just a meeting run by man. We are looking forward to seeing Mary at church again and meeting with her. 

Christmas morning

Christmas dinner at Sis. Edwards' home (we ate like royalty!)

Sis. Edwards got us pajamas for Christmas!  And yes, my shirt
is a fuzzy cat complete with whiskers and fuzzy ears haha!  I love them!

I'm grateful for this Christmas season which helps us refocus our thoughts on Christ. One of my favorite parts of the Light the World initiative is the advent calendar which gave ideas of how we could emulate the Savior each day. But what I love on the last day of that calendar is, "Jesus' disciples followed him and so can we" -- to make New Year's resolutions to be more like the Savior. Hopefully in thinking about how we can follow Christ's example, we can make every day a little more like Christmas and a little more Christ centered. Have a Happy New Year!

Love,

Sister Larsen

Silver and GOLD

Sister Young and me

Dear friends and family,

My mind keeps going back to a little song I remember from the 1 year I spent in Girl Scouts years ago, "Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other gold."

Dinner the night before picking up the new sisters

I've made the best of friends with sisters and senior couples who have just left, but I'm also so lucky to be making friends with a fresh new bunch of sisters coming in to be trained. And my golden, Sister Young, is seriously the cutest!! We have already had a wonderful first week together!

The returning VC sisters and our goldens!

It's been kind of a crazy week with all the traveling and changes, but we've had some awesome experiences. It's so fun to see everything through a fresh set of eyes as I've been able to show Sister Young around, have her meet our investigators, take her on a tour, etc. I'd forgotten how exciting, and sometimes a little scary, it is to be a new missionary. But she is so optimistic and ready to work and loves the site almost as much as I do :) We get along great and will definitely see success this transfer!

Sister Young officially joined the Mae fan club with me! This weekend we had our branch Christmas party, and Mae and Dalton came... And LOVED it! It was a great chance for them to meet the members and just have a good time. They will fit right in to our sweet, little branch. We were talking to Dalton and asked what plans he and Mae had for Christmas. He told us they didn't have any, so we were sure to invite them to church. Later in the evening someone asked Dalton what he was doing for Christmas and he told them he was coming to the church service on Sunday morning. It was so cute, and they are both so open and ready to learn... the trick is just having consistent lessons and church attendance!

We also visited Crystal (Mae's mom), and at the exact time we were knocking on Brother Powers' door where she was, Carl came out of his door across the hall also on his way to Brother Powers'.... so naturally we invited him to join us for our discussion. We got to know more about Crystal and Carl which was great, and as we talked Crystal asked us if we would start coming over to study with her which we agreed to in a heartbeat! During the lesson a friend of hers called and as they were on the phone she told them that she was talking with us and that she was a Mormon, so now it's just a matter of making her a Mormon. We also asked Carl about his Book of Mormon reading and he was a quarter of the way through Alma!!!! 😮 He is full of surprises. 

Dressed for cold nights!

In the past week I've been extra aware of just how much we need the Savior in our lives. None of us are perfect, but with the Savior's grace we can become more like Him. We've all been given agency, room to grow and people and experiences to learn from, and without Jesus Christ we wouldn't be able to learn or change. This Christmas season I am particularly grateful for the gift of grace-- that divine help and strength that our Savior offers us. "Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God." The invitation is there, His gift is waiting, all we have to do is reach out, open it and use it! 

I'm grateful for the birth of our Savior, an event which changed the world forever. I know He lives and loves us. He truly is, "Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." May we keep him in our hearts this week and always! Have a very Merry Christmas everyone!

Love,

Sister Larsen

It's Christmastime!

Dear friends and family,

We had a great week here in Great Bend and at the Priesthood Restoration Site! Lessons, service, baptisms, concerts.... all good things helping us come closer to Christ. 

We had another lesson with Mary this week and we taught her the Plan of Salvation at the Priesthood Restoration Site. She tells us she loves the way it feels there, that there is just a peace when you come to the grounds. So with the Spirit already prevalent, we had a great lesson! As we started, we talked about how as spirits we lived with God before we came to earth and here is where our spirit and body come together, which was something she'd never thought about before. She loved that in the spirit world everyone will have the opportunity to learn about the gospel because God loves all of his children. All throughout our lesson she had little light bulbs going off, and told us at the end that the plan seemed like everything she already believed, but it was the first time someone had taught it to her. So cool!

I also heard about my very first baptism that started with online teaching! Back in September I took a request for a missionary visit from a woman named Molly. In our very brief conversation as I confirmed her address, I knew she was GOLDEN. So I wrote a small note to the sisters in her area, pleaded that they would contact her as soon as they possibly could, and clicked send. About two weeks later I texted her to see that the missionaries had come and she said that the sisters had come to visit and were going to meet her family at church on Sunday. I was so excited for her! But after that, no other updates and her referral status was marked as just "teaching." This past week when Sister Martinez was going through her contacts, trying people one last time before leaving or transferring them to me, she found something exciting... Molly's referral status had been changed to "baptized!!" I was so excited!!! After accepting well over 1,000 referral confirmations there was finally 1 person who had been baptized. Sometimes online teaching is hard because we sit at a computer and confirm address after address, very rarely seeing the results of our efforts, but every once in a while we do and it makes it all worth it! Even if Molly had been 1 in a million referrals I'd contacted, it would still be worth it because there is no price or work too great for the worth of souls! 

This week we were also busy preparing for our Christmas concert, our last concert with six of the sisters who fly home tomorrow.  

The girls!

 And it was such a fun last concert! We decorated and dressed up, the Walkers bought everyone corsages and we had a wonderful last night performing and sharing testimony together. We had a good turn out too! President and Sister Randall were able to come to the concert which was neat! And every week Sister Martinez and I serve at a local food pantry and several of the people we work with there came too. The theme, of course, was "Light the World," tying into this year's Christmas initiative. At the beginning of the concert we showed the initiative video available here https://www.mormon.org/  and then kept the lights dimmed and walked in the side doors holding small candles as we sang a song called, "Born is the Light of the World." In the initiative daily videos there is a constant theme of "Jesus (blanked), and So Can You," so the entire evening we talked about the example and life of Christ, but also how we can follow Him and be of service to others. We did some of my favorites, "O Holy Night" and Sister Walker and I did the Piano Guys duet of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," but one of the best parts of the program was the last song, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," which the congregation joined in on. The piano was playing and the organ and everyone stood and was smiling and singing practically at the top of their lungs! I love how Christ makes people better, happier people. It has been such a blessing on my mission to draw people closer to Christ through music.

With our awesome senior couples -
Clockwise, from top left:  the Walkers, VanOrdens, Richardsons, and Biesingers

This week marks the end of a chapter in my mission and the start of a new one. I watched six of my best friends drive away this morning to fly home, but two new sisters will be coming to join the PRS family and Sister Anderson and I are so excited to pick them up and bring them to their new home! New adventures to come!

Love,

Sister Larsen

Farewell to Sis. Martinez:  A last supper at the local
Italian place.  Treated by the Neubergers who we took on tour
a few weeks ago, and who sent us a gift card in the mail.  So sweet! 

Our darling senior couples!

Little Christmas Miracles

Dear friends and family,

Happy December!! And happy official start to this year's Christmas initiative!! 

Happy December, and Merry Christmas
from the Great Bend sisters!!

We had a great start with the worldwide day of service on the 1st, and have had some wonderful experiences in the past week that have really helped us focus on Jesus Christ this beautiful time of year. 

LIGHT the WORLD Day 1:  Worldwide day of Service. Ours began
with a chilly & fun morning at the Windsor Fire Department
to help distribute goods from the Mobile Food Pantry to 40 families who came in. 

LIGHT the WORLD Day 1: Worldwide day of Service.
Ours ended with caroling at the apartment Brother Powers lives in.
Crystal was kind enough to join and take us to all his friends in the building.

When we visited Brother Lane this past week after he had come to church he was still so excited about having come to church! We had given him a copy of the Gospel Principles manual to keep and between Sunday and Wednesday he had read and studied the first six chapters! He just kept talking about how he was also looking forward to the next Sunday. Brother Lane is back and here to stay! 

On Saturday we had a great Relief Society activity that Mary came to! She had been out of town for Thanksgiving and not feeling too well, so we hadn't seen her, but we invited her to the activity and she came! We had a great time having lunch, making chocolate dipped pretzels, snowmen ornaments and hot cocoa kits. She really enjoyed being around a good group of positive, Christian women. She also came to see the art exhibit and the second we walked in the door she gave a small gasp and a couple of tears slipped out. She walked around the room looking at, and relooking at all of the paintings, silently crying. She definitely felt the Spirit and told us she was not expecting to be so emotional, but that it (the Spirit) was overwhelming. She loved how the paintings really brought Christ to life for her and it was the most beautiful start to her day. We will be meeting with her again this upcoming week!

Mae was sick earlier this week so we weren't able to meet with her until yesterday, but it was well worth the wait! She is on fire!! About two years ago she had met with elders and so she has a pretty good understanding of a lot of church basics, so we went over the restoration with her using Jenga blocks (Sister Martinez's genius idea).  She loved it and a lot was coming back to her so she was answering and asking questions, which was awesome! We asked her how her Book of Mormon reading was going and she went on and on about how she loves it and she knows it's true. Although we also believe the Bible to be the word of God, she said of all the different things she's read, and all the different versions of Bibles she's looked at, especially since she and her husband are church-hunting right now, this is the only book that really "speaks" to her. We weren't able to see her husband, Dalton, because he was at work, but Mae said that once in the middle of the night she woke up because the lights in their room were on and Dalton was up reading the Book of Mormon. Mae said she thinks the Book of Mormon has spoken to Dalton too. :) So we are really excited to see Dalton too! 

We officially asked Mae if she would be baptized and she said yes, so we asked her to pick a date. We had been thinking of January 15th as a day she would be ready to be baptized on but didn't say anything. Mae sat there for a minute and thought, said she didn't want it to be too soon or too far out, and then, "How about January 15th?" I think our jaws hit the floor haha. It was a huge spiritual confirmation for Sister Martinez and I that Mae is so prepared and will be ready to be baptized on that day!

We also had a wonderful Stake Conference with Elder Paul H. Sinclair. He talked a little bit about creating "righteous routines." We read in Alma 5 and I particularly liked verse 7 which says, "Behold, he changed their hearts; yea, he awakened them out of a deep sleep, and they awoke unto God. Behold, they were in the midst of darkness; nevertheless, their souls were illuminated by the light of the everlasting word..." When we "awake unto God" and make small commitments like to go to church, to pray, and to read scriptures our souls will be illuminated and we will be able to see the light the Savior brings into our lives. 

May we always think of Christ this Christmas season! #LIGHTtheWORLD

Love,

Sister Larsen

It's Christmastime at the Priesthood Restoration Site!