June 24, 2013

Here's the latest from Sydnie! 6.24.13

There have been A TON of thunderstorms, but it is so cool! It surprises me how fast they come in and how hard they can be. We are actually having a pretty bad one right now but they are so cool! I have been told that our area of Nebraska doesn't really get tornadoes, which is reassuring! The humidity has steadily gotten worse, but I have been told a lot that it is nothing yet (the people are usually laughing at me too because they know its killing me!).

Sister Harris has been out for 7 months and I am the 3rd sister she has trained. I don't remember where she is from, but I know that it's just a few minutes outside of Denver and that she went to Columbine High School.

I think both my mom and dad have my current address, but I don't know it. Sorry! 

The Bucksbee's house is great! They have a good exercise room for us. Brother Bucksbee is in his 70's and Sister Bucksbee is in her 50's. They were both married before, but I think both their spouses died about 20 years ago. We do sometimes have dinner with them, but it's just if we can't have it with anyone else. But they buy some food for us, which is so nice!

As of right now, I don't  think I need anything. If you do want to pray for anything, pray that the members of our ward will have missionary experiences! This is the first time they have had full time missionaries in years, so they don't really know how to help us and they aren't really sure what to do and how much help we really need. But our investigators are doing pretty well! We do have 2 new investigators that I hope will be able to stay for the long run. One of them we met tracting. She is from Africa and came here to go to school. She is religious (everyone is in Nebraska) and she just goes to a Christian church, but she sounded really interested in the church. She did think that Joseph Smith's story was a little crazy, but most people do. The other one is someone the sisters have been in contact with, but last week we went to her house and she asked a lot of deep questions about death and where we go after this life and about the veil which was awesome! We didn't get to go into it a lot but we are going back this week

The down part of this week was a meeting we had with a new investigator. My first day here we met a couple. The husband had investigated the church in the 70's, prayed about the church, and  felt the ‘burning in the bosom’ as described in the Book of Mormon. He was about to be baptized when a former pastor sent him a lot of anti material. He didn't get baptized, but went to bible school instead. His big challenge to us was to come back. We told him we would but were very anxious all week. Monday night we met with him and it was one of the best and worst experiences of my life. He started off just trying to explain his belief, that you just need to believe in God to go to heaven. We sat and listened but he would not listen to us at all. He asked us multiple times to leave the church. He told us that Joseph Smith was a false prophet and that we would go to hell for following his teachings and the church. We sat there and just bore our testimonies. Sister Harris warned him that he knew the church was true and the reason the missionaries didn't come back is that all the missionaries knew that he knew it is true. He really started to try and Bible Bash with us but we left. As we were leaving, he said that he hoped he gave us something to think about at least with our church and that he hoped we at least questioned some things now. I tried not to laugh as I told him that he actually just strengthened my testimony of the church and he was really mad; but we tried to leave on the best terms as possible. We left him with our phone number and said if they had more questions to call and we would set up a meeting with the bishop for him.

We felt horrible after, just because after that experience the Spirit wasn't with us at all, so we called our ward mission leader and he gave us blessings. It was amazing just walking into their house we could feel the Spirit. Our ward mission leader and his family are so great! His wife is just as much into his calling as he is and she has told us that she wants to be a missionary so bad! Whenever we don’t have a dinner set up he just says "Then you're coming to our house for dinner", and his wife is totally fine with it! Their kids are hilarious! They couldn't understand my name so they called me Sister Hush and yesterday when we were over they came up with Sister Hush and Sister Harry as our nicknames!

Sister Sydnie Huss