5/18/20 - "Well, looks like we have time for Facebook!"

Okay, so my subject line sounds kinda funny out of context, but I promise there's a reason behind it, and it doesn't include just scrolling through Facebook. 

I'd also like to start including a TL;DR (Too long; didn't read) at the beginning of each of my emails. For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing, or would like a sneak peek into knowing if my email is even worth reading, here you go!

TL;DR - We had transfers. We keep finding new people so we have time to work on Facebook like we're asked. We put a friend on date for less than a month away. Quarantine missionary work is amazing!

We had transfers this week, so everything got changed around. Our new district leader is Elder Larsen, who was our old District Leader's companion. We also got the Sister Training Leader's in our district for this transfer, and because we lost so many Missionaries and haven't gotten any new ones yet, the Dayton Elders are no longer a thing! We'll officially be having transfers every two weeks now for the rest of the summer due to a large influx of missionaries coming in who were reassigned.

So, we as a mission have been working a lot to use Facebook for finding. However, Sister Coleman HATES Facebook and has been trying to find every reason to avoid it. The way she tell it is: "Sister Bliss and I like to butt heads because she says we need to actually use Facebook and I say we should just call people on Area book". This isn't even the first miracle we saw, in fact we got two member referrals this week, but we had one specific time this week when we saw a musical in which Sister Coleman tried getting us to make some calls instead of Facebook because we had a goal to find one new person that day and Facebook is more long term than making calls. Then suddenly a member from another ward called us and told us that he met someone who wants to meet with us and is super ready to hear the gospel. I turned to Sister Coleman and smiled and said "Well, looks like we have time for Facebook!"  She keeps joking that this is God's way of telling her she needs to learn to use Facebook. We have a plan now and are going to use it more like we've been asked to!

We got permission to teach this cute 13 year old girl named Maddy who's a member referral, and we had our first two lessons with her this week! In addition, we felt strongly prompted to put her on date for baptism...for June 13th! Sister Coleman felt very strongly about that date and I was a bit weary of it because of how close it is. However, as we prayed to know what date we should extend, June 13th felt like the perfect day. It wasn't until after we put her on date that we suddenly realized just how many lessons we have to teach her, how little she knows currently, how strong the members want her testimony to be before she gets baptized, and how many problems we have to resolve considering we found out she lives in another ward. As we think of all these things that have to happen, we can't figure out why we even thought June 13th was plausible in this situation, other than it was the date that the Lord wanted us to extent. We've decided to put our faith in the Lord and make this happen!

Come Follow Me is so wonderful, in case any of you didn't know that! We had two seperate people this week who had strong beliefs that Jesus Christ and God are the same person. We happened to open Come Follow Me the other day to check on the sunday school lesson plans (I say "happened to" because we don't normal do Come Follow Me as Missionaries because we don't have the time as we focus on studying for people we teach). In the lesson from last week we happened to see a section titled "How is Jesus Christ both the Father and the Son?" and it so perfectly answered the questions one of our friends had! 

Overall, things have been amazing! I'm loving being a missionary during this time. I feel so blessed with how comforted I've been through all of this. I remember the start of quarantine being rough and I soon worried if I'd be quarantined for the remainder of my mission. Now, even if I were to work like this for the rest of my mission I'd be accepting of that because the Lord's work doesn't stop, and right now may very well be the busiest time of my mission so far! I spent a lot of my mission trying to figure out why I was called where I was or when I was and it's been very special for me to feel just how much this is the time that I was meant to serve my mission. I love serving the Lord and helping his children here in Ohio, even from inside. I hope each of you are doing well and staying safe. I'll be praying for you! If any of you need any specific prayers, please let me know 

Have a great week!

Hasta luego!

Sister Bliss

PICTURES!

*We made a large breakfast for dinner this week but then realized all our dishes were in the dishwasher, so we ate our food from plastic containers and lids. (Throwback to the time when my district ate on pot lids around Christmas time)

*The sunset with Dayton in the background!

*It's spring again. Your know what that means? TIME TO GET DRENCHED IN THE RAIN WHILE WALKING

*I took a picture of this pretty flower in a cemetary. Sister Coleman only made the picture better.

5/16/20 - Facebook Post - Anson Call

This is my 4th great-grandfather, Anson Call, who worked closely with the Prophet Joseph Smith. I loved reading his testimony of how he came to know that the Book of Mormon is true!

Comment below a fun story about one of your ancestors!

5/15/20 - Facebook Post - Peace and Joy

Leave me a comment to say what brings YOU peace and joy in your life!

https://www.facebook.com/ChurchofJesusChristinDaytonOhio/photos/a.113862603622123/125258725815844/

5/11/20 - HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

Happy Mother's Day yesterday to all the moms out there, all the women who have basically been like moms to me when I've been away from home (I have a few friends and roommates especially who can claim this), and especially to my own wonderful mother! I don't know what I would do without her because she's the best person mom I could ever have hoped for! I hope you all had a wonderful Mother's Day and got to do something special.

Update on a few of the people we're teaching:

MADDY - Maddy is a member referral who we've been in touch with for quite some time but had to get permission from her guardians to officially teach because she's under 18. But, we finally got that permission this week and have set up a lesson with her! That may not sound like much, but it's a miracle to us for sure. She's super sweet and joined a scripture study this last Saturday with the Young Women that we run and had a great time.

CARRIE - I think I've mentioned Carrie in the past, but in case I haven't, she's a cute older lady who we've been teaching for some time but who hasn't progressed much recently. But this week we prayed about what to do and decided to give her a call and see how interested she really is. By the end of the call we'd discussed doing frequent scripture studies with her and teaching her Family History! We had our first introduction to Family History a few days ago and we wanted so badly to help her find an ancestor to get her excited to learn more, but no matter who we looked up or how much information we had, we couldn't find anyone. We looked up three of her ancestors, with no luck, before she finally pulled from her personal folder a paper of information about a specific ancestor her dad would always tell her about, but whom she didn't know anything about. To our surprise, when we looked her up we found TONS of information about her and her family, including a picture! Carrie had never seen that ancestor before and she was so happy she began to cry. It was so special to see how powerfully Family History can impact someone 

EMILY - Emily, the girl from tumblr, came to our young women scripture study which was focused on prayer. When we asked how anyone had seen answers to prayers she shared her experience of how she was praying for help meeting missionaries and then ran across my post on tumblr and now she's meeting with missionaries! However, we did have to pass her over to the Elders in her own state this week, which was a sad moment, but the Elders who are teaching her seemed great, so she'll be well taken care of and I'll definitely stay in touch!

We got to call into a Spanish Branch zoom meeting for Sister Coleman and it was a neat experience because I couldn't understand anything that was said but it still felt like I was part of any English ward becasue it's the same church and the same spirit that was there.

Spiritual thought of the week:

Sister Coleman shared this talk with me and I listened to it and was blown away. It's called "What Is the Blueprint of Christ's Church?" and it's from a worldwide devotional. I'll include a link below. But it's really neat because it dives into the Bible and studies what Christ's original church was like and compares it to his church today. It covers a number of topics such as Christ and Heavenly Father being two sepetate beings, baptisms for the dead, priesthood and patriarchs, and so much more! And everything has Biblical references to back it up. It's such a great testimony builder that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ's church today. Definitely go give it a read!

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/broadcasts/article/ces-devotionals/2014/01/what-is-the-blueprint-of-christs-church?lang=eng 

Have a fantastic week!

Sister Bliss

PICTURES!

*Sister Coleman is known for turning to me and saying "will you take a picture of me?" So I have a thousand random pictures of her on my phone. This week I started doing the same thing, so here are a few of my random pictures with manholes and signs! 

*Also, please enjoy this wonderful picture of Sister Coleman's salad and me eating a sandwhich

*The picture of us with the tall tower in the background is Carillon Bells. It's a bell tower with 57 bells and it's located about a mile away from us. On mother's day we walked to it for our exercise time and it seemed to be playing music all day in celebration 

*We got mission shirts that say "Spreading the Gospel and nothing else" with our mission logo and "COVID-19 Pandemic" on the back. They're the best.

*There's a cool place called the "Miamisburg Mound" and it's one of the neatest ancient sites around, so we visited it today and it was really tall and neat. I'd include more info but I'm short on time so just go look it up!

5/4/20 - Why do bad things happen to good people?

Quarantine update: I hit day 50 of quarantine this week and Ohio doesn't open up until the end of May at the earliest. We're expecting a large amount of new missionaries pretty soon as well, but we don't know when they'll be here. As strange as all these changes have been, it's been super exciting to be here to witness them.

Y'all remember the girl I talked about last week, Emily, who found me through Tumblr? Well, we put her on date for baptism last night! Our lesson with her last week went super well and one of her first questions for us was when she could be baptized. We set up another lesson with her for yesterday and stayed in touch with her every day last week as we shared chapters from the Book of Mormon with her and she shared her thoughts and testimony with us. Yesterday we started with the first official missionary lesson, The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and by the end we invited her to work towards the goal of being baptized on July 11 (shoutout to my siblings Julaine and Jaren who's birthday is that day!), so which she excitedly agreed! Of course, I won't even get to go to her baptism because Texas is a little far away, but I'm super excited to help her towards that goal until we can get her passed over to the missionaries in her area.

In addition to putting Emily on date, we prayed really hard to find someone new to teach yesterday and we were blessed to find someone who was interested in hearing more THREE MINUTES BEFORE OUR DAY ENDED. We called a bunch of people who used to be taught by missionaries and didn't get any answers until 8:57 pm when we called a wrong number and ended up talking to another woman who asked us to call her tonight!

We also got some training on Facebook finding this week through our new Facebook pages for our mission and we have officially taken a step in a completely different way as missionaries. In addition to our usual missionary duties, we now get to send in posts and videos for the Facebook page. In a mission in New Jersey (if I'm remembering correctly) they've found that 1 two sentence post with a picture can bring in as many as 40 referrals, and in 8 months they had 20 baptisms from referrals through Facebook. While numbers are not something we focus on as missionaries, these numbers are neat because they show that, while we can't be outside contacting during COVID-19, we still have the opportunity to share the gospel just as well as before.

I was studying the word "Conversion" this week in the Bible Dictionary and I ran across a sentence I really liked: "Complete conversion comes after many trials and much testing."

Along with it was a scripture from Doctrine and Covenants that I really liked:

D&C 11:13 "And after their temptations, and much tribulation, behold, I, the Lord, will feel after them, and if they harden not their hearts, and stiffen not their necks against me, they shall be converted, and I will heal them."

This really struck me because I've seen my testimony grow more than ever as I've relied on my Heavenly Father through the times that have been the hardest on me. Many people ask "why do bad things happen to good people" but forget to realize that those hard things can really be a blessing. Now, I'd like to be very clear in saying that I don't think God micromanages our trials. He loves us and he wants to see us happy. So when I say that trials can be a blessing to us I don't mean that our Heavenly Father is watching over us, throwing things our way saying "Oh, let's see how she'll handle that" or "I wonder if he can get through this.". What I do mean is that we all go through trials - being stuck inside for quarantine, losing a loved one, dealing with an addiction, struggling with mental health, and so much more - but we don't have to only see them as trials. Trials give us the opportunity to turn to the Lord and say "I can't do this on my own. But with your help I can do anything." Trials help us grow because we learn what we can handle with the help of our Savior, Jesus Christ. I've seen my conversion grow through trials because those are the times when I've prayed the hardest and studied my scriptures the most. I hope you all can look at this COVID-19 trial as more than just a trial, but also a time to prove to yourself what you can handle and a time to grow in ways that you wouldn't otherwise have grown.

Quote of the week:

"He looks like he belongs in the dump. But in a good way" -A random guy telling us about his dog as we talked past his house during exercise.

Have a great week!

Love, 

Sister Bliss

5/3/20 - Facebook Post - "Abide With Me" Mission social distancing hymn

https://www.facebook.com/emmasaunders12961/videos/2525396414456700

5/1/20 Facebook Post - Spray paint Art Gospel Message

Wow, check out this talented elder in my mission! And if you have any questions about anything he talked about feel free to shoot a message to me or the missionaries in your area!

https://www.facebook.com/100007307284210/videos/pcb.2541277862792432/2541275609459324/