12/24/19 - "I rip off the wrapping and tear through the box till I end up with 45 new pairs of socks."

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVE!

I hope y'all have been having the best Christmas and enjoy all the wonderful time with family! I may not be with my family, but I've been enjoying my time with my missionary family 😊 

I hope you all remember how special your families are and are grateful for the time you get to spend with them, even if holidays can be kind of crazy. My companion and I have talked a lot recently about how easy it can be to get caught up in family drama or crazy holiday schedules. Now, all we'd like is to just be able to be with our families for Christmas because that's the part that really matters. However, I'm so grateful to be here on a mission and this has been one of the best Christmas seasons of my life. ❤

This week's subject line is from the song "Peppermint Winter" by Owl City and refers to the fact that I got SO MANY SOCKS this year. So shoutout to all the wonderful people who gave me socks! Also shoutout to all the wonderful people who gave me anything at all 💚 Also, shoutout to all the wonderful people who just exist because I love you all tons!

Sister Hines and I had an odd week of sleeping a lot because we spent much of the week sick with stomach viruses (Sister Hines) and infected ears (Sister Bliss aka me). But we're mostly all better and I can almost hear normally again! 

I love you all and will give an update of how my Christmas went when I email next week! Remember that Christ is the reason for the season 💚🎄💚

Love,

Sister Bliss 

PICTURES:

*Me and some of the Sisters in our district when we got together to make a bunch of cookies to give to people we're teaching

*Me with one of the many pairs of socks I recieved this week!

*Then two pictures from Christmas Conference that I didn't include last week. One is us with most of our district minus one set of sisters. The other is a big group of us who came out of the MTC together because a lot of us were at the same christmas conference and coordinated to all wear green because we started spreading the word about a month in advance 😂

12/16/19 - Sister Bliss' embarrassing moments of the week 😂

First of all I'm dying because I've been making jokes all day about some embarrassing things I did yesterday and then I looked and saw that the last two weeks I made some very big mistakes in my emails, so here's of list of mistakes I've made recently in case any of you ever feel bad about about yourselves and need to laugh at someone else!

1. Two weeks ago I shared in my pictures a story about how we ate lasagna out of pot lids with serving spoons. The picture I included was one of me. Just me sitting on stairs. I did not mean to send that picture because it was definitely not a picture of us eating lasagna out if pot kids 😂 So below is the actual picture I meant to include!

2. Last week my email was named "This week". That's the name I always name my emails while they're sitting in my drafts. But I forgot to fix the name of it. So y'all just got an email named "This week".

And the two I was laughing at myself for doing yesterday at an event were:

3. I said hi to one of my Zone Leaders, Elder Gunnell, and shook his hand. Then I realized I'd just said like a couple of minutes ago so I said "Oh, I just said hi to you. Sorry!" To which he replied "It's okay. It feels good to know that I'm noticed." And then I continued to say "Don't worry, I always notice you!... wait, that sounded a lot less weird in my head before it came out of my mouth." And then he proceeded to poke fun at me for it. 

4. There's another elder, Elder Taylor, who I only met at our Christmas Conference last Wednesday when half our mission got together and basically had a day of fun. So first of all, the only reason I met him was because I was given a bunch of birthday treats for my recent birthday and needed to give some away. So I turned to the nearest elder (who happened to be him) and offered them to him.  He was happy to have them, but it was also a slightly odd way to meet someone. So the next time I met him was yesterday. I was helping clean up some trays of cookies after an interfaith event and I felt my bag slipping off my shoulder and knew it wouldn't be good if it fell onto my arm. So I turned to Elder Taylor and asked "Will you do me a huge favor and hold this tray for me for one second?" And just then my bag fell AND COOKIES WENT EVERYWHERE! And his reaction was "Who's companion is this?!" ABOUT ME. 😂

So those are my stories of the week that prove that missionaries are far from perfect, even when we're serving the Lord!

I was low on time this week and don't have time to share the spiritual aspects of my week (probably should have written those first, oops) but I'll include them next week! I hope you all have a great week and don't have too many embarrassing interactions with people 😊

Love, 

Sister Bliss

Invitation of the week:

If any of you have done something embarrassing recently, feel free to share the story with me! I'd love to hear someone else's embarrassing stories 😂 Also shoutout to my friend Michael who shared a few of his recent embarrassing stories to make me feel better about myself. I have great friends. 

PICTURES!

*The pictures mentioned at the beginning of my email

*Sister Hines and I at Christmas Conference

12/9/19 - This week

Hello!

This week has been such a good week!

So we had a lesson with Vern (our cute old neighbor) at Wendy's and he ended up seeing a friend of his there and invited her to come to our ward Christmas Party! And then when they got there the next day, we had to go do something for a minute and we found him giving her a tour of the chapel and inviting her to church! He hasn't even really been taught much because he's hard to teach, but he's been awesome at being a missionary!

A few days later we went to visit a young man who I'd met a few months ago and who seemed interested but was always busy. When we stopped by we tried to actually talk to his mom since she always answers the door and we've never had a conversation with her. As soon as we asked how she was and what her name was she invited us inside and told us her whole life story. By the time we left we'd given her a Book of Mormon, set up a new lesson, and invited her to church! She was absolutely amazing!

On Saturday we decided to go to a couple of events we'd found on Facebook, in hopes we'd be able to talk to a lot of people at them. We went to a craft bizarre that morning and met so many neat people! We didn't find anyone new, but we had some really neat conversations and one woman gave us free christmas decorations that she was selling because she has ancestors who were members and she has great respect for missionaries. 

Later that same day, we went to a pet adoption (because animals + people to talk to = the best plan ever). We ended up meeting a woman who was super nice and didn't live in the area but said we could send Missionaries her way. By the end of the next day they were officially teaching her. 😊

Apart from all the crazy cool people we met this week, the coolest thing that happened came in the form of a nice tender mercy that happened today. And I actually want to invite you all to look for little tender mercies in your life this week, because this is one that I didn't recognize as one until I was specifically thinking of things that have happened to me this week:

I've been kinda down recently wondering if I've really made any impact as a missionary. I just haven't had tons of success in the form of people I've taught, but I also know there's been other things that the Lord has needed from me as a missionary, so I haven't been too hard on myself. But today I got an email from my cousin who told me that he's been friends with one of my past zone leaders for an entire semester without realizing that they both knew me. I'd only known this elder for 6 weeks and I got to seem him a decent amount but we never got to really be friends or anything, though he made a big impact on my mission as one of my leaders. But dispite only knowing me briefly, he had a bunch of nice things to say to my cousin about me. Even though it was such a small thing, it was a great testimony builder to me of the fact that God really knows us and can reassure us when we need it. Even if it's in the weird form of getting an email from your cousin about a missionary you briefly knew who had something nice to say about you.

I hope you all have an amazing week and are enjoying all the holiday cheer! We have no snow here in Ohio at the moment, but there are Christmas lights everywhere and our apartment looks like Christmas threw up in it because we keep being given decorations 💚

Love you all!

-Sister Bliss 

PICTURES!

*Sister Hines won a penguin in one of those crane machines in one go. Then she turned to me and asked if I wanted her to win one for me. I hesitated for a second, so she turned to the machine and won a second one in a row! So it was the craziest thing ever. 

*The Bishop's kids came to us yesterday in church and gave us pictures they drew of us! The craziest part was that the girl, Jane, even drew my blue dress and put glasses on me! And I don't even normally wear my glasses! (So of course I had to match the drawing for the picture)

*The last two pictures are from today. We are putting together a skit for Christmas Conference with our mission, so we went shopping at a thrift store and got the cool Hawaiian shirts for it

12/2/19 - Face to face with Death at Thanksgiving

HAPPY DECEMBER, IT'S OFFICIALLY CHRISTMAS TIME, HO HO HO!

But I guess I should probably back up to Thanksgiving this week...

The most popular question I've been getting is "how many dinners did you have?" So to answer that, we were invited to four, but two of them were members, so we didn't go to theirs so we could focus on going to the two others with people we're teaching. (Also because we'd have died if we had four dinners)

One of the dinners we went to was with a man we're teaching. His family puts together a Thanksgiving Feast for a bunch of family and friends and anyone in the community who needs a place to eat. We went early to help set up and when people started showing up we passed a man who said "Hi Sisters". Sister Hines and I did a double take because we didn't recognize him but pretty much only members know to call us sisters.

And here's where us being face to face with Death comes into play...

So we introduce ourselves and ask what his name is and he responds with:

"Death."

That was it.

His last name was legitimately Death. 

Apparently he used to be a member but fell away years ago. We had a really neat conversation with him and near the end he asked us what our favorite scriptures were and he shared his favorite with us. As he shared his favorite verse from The Book of Mormon the spirit was so strong and I knew that it was also an answer to our prayers for another person we've been teaching. After he finished I asked if he'd be willing to ever meet with missionaries again and he said he and his wife had been talking recently about getting back into religion! Sadly, he's in another mission area, but we have some Elders heading his way! 

We put our friend Jen on date this week! She was the one I mentioned last week wanting to be baptized! We've been working with her and her daughter for awhile now and they're both the cutest 💖 

This week we started teaching the daughter of a member in the ward who has been looking for religion recently and who's family is a whole mix of religions but none of them really know what they believe. So she asked us to come over to answer her son's question, "what happens after we die". When we went over she told us her son was at his dad's house but she felt back rescheduling so we taught just her. But the lesson we had with her was one of the best lessons of my mission! We taught her The Plan of Salvation and the whole time she just kept saying "This makes sense" and asking questions to learn more. When we talked about the premortal life she said "So we were all together up in heaven. We were all friends!". And in the middle of the lesson she turned to her mom and excitedly said "I think I just got my answers!". It was amazing to see someone so prepared to hear about God's plan for her that all we had to do was lay it out and explain it. 💖

I hope you are all having a wonderful week and an amazing first few days of the Christmas month! Since all of my misisonary friends have been talking about it, I felt I should also invite you all to check out https://www.comeuntochrist.org/light-the-world whether or not you're a member and check out how you can light the world this christmas season 🌲💚

Love you!

Sister Bliss

PICTURES!

*We got to decorate a couple Christmas trees with some members and help someone put up her 50 or so nativity sets, so we're really in the Christmas spirit! 

*Today we went to the church to eat lasagna with our district. But there were no plates and only two spoons, so we ate with trays, pan lids, and serving sporks!