The Life of Treasure and Pumpkin 7/22/13

( Sorry for the odd formatting of this post, can't seem to find the problem) Hola familia!!  I am doing great this week. This letter is titled " The Life of Treasure and Pumpkin" because those are our new  nicknames. A really cute girl in the Spanish Group named Eleni gave us those names, haha her nickname is Beauty! Some amazing news, ADAM IS GETTING BAPTIZED!  We are sooooooo excited for him! Adam is Mckayla's step dad and he is amazing. We knew that he was going to be baptized, it was just a matter of when! We have been praying for him and his family like crazy. Anyways, so we are just so excited for them and can't wait for his baptism. This week I also got to go to Bowling Green Kentucky on exchanges with Sister Tauoa. Bowling Green is a really cute town full of very nice people. I learned a lot from Sister T, she is very outgoing and nice to everyone she meets. She is the type of missionary who really does talk to everybody. We were driving through the poor side of town and 3 black guys come up to our car and I get a little nervous because I didn't know what they were doing. Then Sis T rolls down her window and starts chatting with them and she had taught them all before and she was good friends with them, haha. She is friends with all the people in the "Hood." She has all their numbers and they told her to call them if anyone slams a door in her face! Our Spanish work is going really well in Lebanon and we are seeing good progression! Maria and her son came to church this Sunday and she seemed to really like it! Maria takes everything we say very seriously and is someone that is true to her word. So if she says she is going to read or pray about something, she does it! Although, getting her to church this week was no easy task... When we finished our lesson with her on Saturday night we asked her if she would come to church. She said that she has to ask her husband for his permission and then she said that she would call us later to tell us what he said. Well, when we left we knew that it wasn't going to be enough because she has told us that before. Hna. K and I decided that were going to search for her husband ( a little back story, Maria's husband is known as the local drunk, and he does not care to have God in his life when we have talked with him, we also think that he might be a little abusive with Maria)  We know that Maria is a little afraid of her husband so we knew that she would not ask. So we go searching, we pass by a house that we sometimes see him drinking at, and he was not there, but some other guys were outside drinking on the front porch so we drive on to search trailers that he could be at. We can"t find him at this point, but I have the strongest impression that we need to go back to that first house we drove by, so we pull the car over and pray that we can find her husband so we can ask if Maria is allowed to attend church. We then switched places for some reason that I can't remember, so now I am driving and Hna K is in the passenger seat. I pull back to the house with the men drinking outside and ask them if Armando, Maria's husband, is there. One of them walks inside and then comes back out a minute later. He says that Armando is not there. We don't believe the guy so we ask him if he could tell Armando that we want Maria to go to church with us. We talk with the men a little longer and they are persistent that Armando is not there. Then Armando comes strolling out of the house totally high.  Hermana Knecht gets out of the car and asks him if Maria could come to church, she also invited him as well. Armando said that he would not come, but that Maria has permission to go to Church. We ran back to Maria's trailer and told her that her husband said she could come to church. She was shocked but very happy! She did show up to church the next morning. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be a missionary and I love being in the service of my God. I have learned so much about myself these last few months and I have learned new limits I can push myself to that I never thought I could do! God really does love us all and know us individually!  Have a great week family! OH and HAPPY HAPPY Birthday to my AMAZING little Bro Alex! He is an amazing guy and has so much love for the people around him, I know that he is going to be an amazing missionary in 3 years and do great things with his life. I wish I could be in Argentina to tell him Happy Birthday in Person! Love  Hermana Ayre

Meeting with the new President and Wife

Hola Familia! 

I have had a great week. This week was full of fun events. We had Zone Conference, baby shower for Blanca, Zumba, Peter Salazar's baptism, and a lot of really good lessons. 

The Zone Conference was great, we got to meet our new mission President and his wife. They are very nice and we are really excited to have them as mission presidents. President Andersen is a very nice energetic guy with a lot of experience working with people our age. Sister Andersen has a great sense of humor and is very loving and kind. We had some really good trainings on commitments, prayer, and on the God Head. I love my Zone, we have amazing Sisters and Elders. We all have so much fun when we are with each other and we learn a lot about different ways of teaching when we are together. Our Zone is the Madison Zone, or the Madizone, haha.

This week we also had a Baby Shower for one of our investigators, Blanca who is due in 2 weeks. The group members were very helpful and put the event on for Blanca. We had about 15-20 non-members in attendance, we ended up getting 2 new investigators because of the baby shower and 4 ladies that we teach were there as well. ( they are all Hispanic) 

We had a really good lesson with Reina this week and we read the talk, "Faith of our Father" from general conference with her and she really liked it. She says that she listens to the Spanish primary songs we gave her when she is driving in the car, and that she loves listening to them. We love singing hymns with her as well, it really invites the spirit into the lesson and her kids like singing with us too. 

Hermana Knecht and I are still having a great time with each other and we continue to learn from each other every day. Hermana Nnah emailed me this week and she is doing great in California! Sister Allred is also doing great in Indonesia and is loving her mission! I am so excited to be reunited with these girls, so we can all tell our crazy mission stories with each other back at BYU!! 

Love y"all,

Hermana Ayre

A Wet 4th in Lebanon

How are y'all??? 

Man I can't even remember what has happened this week. Oh this week was the 4th of July (mine and Alydia's favorite holiday along with Halloween, shout out to Lid and her hubby) The 4th here was really, really, really rainy! We had flash flood warnings all day and all the next day! It was still good though, in the morning we had a pancake breakfast with the ward and it was really fun! That night we had an activity for the Spanish group, only 1 investigator showed up, probably because it was raining so hard, haha. 

Then on Friday we had a great visit with the Daily Family and boy is Adam Daily ready for baptism. He is an amazing man and I feel like I learn more from him then he does from me, haha! We also had a ground breaking lesson with Rosa this week and she is showing great progress. It is really fun trying to describe the Apostasy in deep detail with very poor Spanish, haha, but the Lord provided and she got the message and it was a spiritual experience! We still have a good group of about 10 or so serious people that we are teaching!  We are being patient with each of their learning levels and helping them come unto Christ! 

We are also busy with less actives and part member families in this ward! We have some really amazing people that we get to visit and we love them ALL. It is interesting trying to work out who gets to visit and teach who, when having 3 sets of missionaries in the same ward! It is also interesting trying to figure out what Spanish people we get to teach also, haha.  My Spanish is still a work in progress, but it is still getting slowly better and better! 

Hermana Knecht and I are still having a blast with each other and we are both learning so much together! It is amazing how you continue to change and grow every day and every week as a missionary. I am finally starting to really feel like a missionary and to really be able to find myself as a missionary. It is a really interesting process trying to forget yourself and become the servant of the Lord that you need to be. Each week you find something new to work on. At the beginning of my mission it was overwhelming trying to figure out what I needed to working on, because I had so many things to change! I have learned how to choose and take one thing at a time and really work on that specific thing and then the next week pick a few new things to work on. IN the moment it seems that you progress slowly, but now looking back it is amazing to see how much I have changed and learned! I continue to try and grow through setting and keeping goals. It is awesome how much setting goals and keeping track of your progress can really help you learn and understand what you need to be working on! 

I love y'all so much and I pray for you every day! I pray for you to be safe and to have good missionary moments in your lives as well!! I am excited to go home and be a good member missionary because it is funny to learn that you can be a more efficient missionary when you are home because you know the people at home and know who is ready to hear the message. So, I hope at home you are praying for opportunities to share the gospel as well and to help others come unto Christ!! 

Love

Herman Kenedi Ayre!!

3rd Transfer, Happy to Be in Lebanon

Hello

This week is the start of my 3rd transfer out in the field. On Saturday night I found out that Hermana Knecht and I will both be staying in Lebanon for another transfer!!  We were really happy to hear that news! Listening to transfer calls is really intense, haha. We are losing Elder Alarcon, he is a good guy and he is being transferred. We are getting Elder Miller, who is a visa waiter for Argentina, but he has already been in TN for 6 months. We are excited to get to know him!

This last Thursday we had a great Zone Conference with our mission president and we got to listen to them for the last time :( They truly are amazing people and a great example to us all). The dedication their family has to the Lord is amazing and the fact that they stayed out here through Sister McKee's heath trials is incredible. They actually just released a story about her in Mormon times or something like that. President McKee gave some really good thoughts before he left. One of the things he talked about was that the only gift we can give to God is our heart and our will. God owns everything we have from our money to our talents our homes and cars. He can take away those things from us in a minute, but he does not own our will. In life we will be blessed if we are ready to go do what the Lord commands us. The McKee family is a great example of going and doing what the Lord wants them to do.

As I reflect back to before my mission, it sometimes amazes me how much I didn't understand about the church. Being on a mission has made me so aware of the things this life really holds for us and has helped me understand what things are important. Every day I am out here I grow more and more grateful for the life I have been blessed to have.

This next transfer Hermana Knecht and I really want to work on doing the best we can with the things we can control and then forget about the things we can't control. On a mission sometimes you wish that you could take people's agency away and make good choices for them, haha.  You know the blessings that the Gospel will bring them, but they sometimes just can't see it. As missionaries, all we can do is be a good example to others and help them to see the blessings God has in store for them and then let them do what they want with the knowledge they receive. I can imagine this is a little taste of what being a parent will be like, haha.

I can tell that so many things I am learning here is going to bless my future family. This mission is really molding me into the woman that God wants me to be and the wife that he wants me to be. I have really been learning the skill of having patience with myself, my companion, and the Lord. I hope that I can take these skills I am learning and keep them with me the rest of my life. I know that I still have a lot more to learn in this next year of my mission and I hope that I can continue to learn how to match my actions with the Lord's will!

I am so grateful for the blessing I have to be on a mission, I would not trade the world for this experience. Even though I have been missing things at home, I would not have been able to have grown so much if I would have been home. I would hope that everyone who has the opportunity to serve a mission takes it because I can testify of the amazing experience it is.

Love

Hermana Ayre

Lebanon

Hola!!

Family I hope you are all doing great! 

From your letters and emails it sounds like a lot has changed! I am excited to hear from you about Argentina in a week!! As of right now, I think that I am going to actually go to school Fall 2014, I just have a strong impression that I need to be in Utah and at school that Fall instead of being in Argentina for four months. Even though being with y'all in Argentina sounds a lot more enticing, haha. So I will be flying to Argentina next July 1st. So I have about a year left in my mission. CRAZY. The time is precious and I am not taking it for granted. 

Hermana Knecht and I have been working our little bums off, haha not really, I think all the food is starting to catch up with me :/  One of our investigators Monsserat taught us how to make tamales!!! They were great, and we have also been taught how to make a lot salsas, tortillas, and our very favorite papusa. Hermana Knecht and I want to open a Tamale Truck when we get back to BYU! The ladies that show us how to make all these things tell us that our future husbands will have to thank them for teaching us how to make such great food, haha.

This week we taught Reina, whom we Love so much, the restoration and we watched the Restoration movie! It went really well and we had Linda Studd with us who is a member in our Spanish group. Reina is a funny story, we first knocked on her door and she only cracked it open a little bit to talk with us and she didn't invite us in.  As we continued to go back and go back, she would open the door more and more until she finally let us in. Patience  is the key to this work and just knowing that Heavenly Father has his own time with everyone. My testimony just continues to grow every week of the Restoration of this Gospel!!  A book that has helped my testimony grow this week is, " Our search for Happiness" by Elder Ballard, especially pages 23-32.

I can truly say with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the only true Gospel on this earth today and only through this gospel can we return to live with God and our families forever.

I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to share this gospel with others even though a lot of people will not accept it. I am so grateful for all my family and friends who have been an amazing example to me in my life and made it easy for me to be a member of this gospel. I hope that everyone will take responsibility upon themselves to share this gospel with others because it is through our friendship and examples to others that others will be able to know the truthfulness of the restored gospel. In the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

Love

Hermana Kenedi Ayre