Baptism in Manchester

This week was AWESOME!!!

We had a baptisms on Saturday!!! Crystal and Ray were baptized. Their son Tyler and Tyler's friend Dakota want to be baptized as well in the near future.

I am so proud of Crystal and Ray, they have both come such a long way from where they were at when we be began teaching them. We are now starting to help them get prepared to go to the temple in a year!!

Hermana Schmit and I have a lot of really solid families that we are teaching. Manchester is white and ready to be harvested!!! We have been really working hard with our members in getting them involved with the work!

We have been using a lot of the ideas that are in the book called "The power of Every day Missionaries".   If you haven't read this book, I would highly suggest it. Actually I would insist that everyone reads it, it is a must read!  One of the principles it talks about in the book is having proselyting families. That is something we are implementing in our area as of now and it has been a great success!

Family I am so grateful for all the support and love you send me. I have been so blessed in my life to live and be friends with all of you. Each of you have individually blessed my life, more than words can explain!  I have missed y'all a lot this Holiday season and I have kept your families in my prayers at night. I hope that you have a great Thanksgiving!!!

LOVE

Hermana Ayre

P.S. I challenge y'all to show your gratitude for Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ this season by inviting a loved one of yours to hear the message of the restored gospel!!!

Trabajar Inteligentemente!

Well this week has gone by pretty fast. 

Yesterday we were on lock down because of all the Tornados across TN. BUT I am safe no worries.

Today we are going to go play volleyball again for P Day and I love it. Last week Hermana Schmit and I played 6 elders and we beat them bad, haha, 2 on 6. Hermana Schmit is pretty good so we have a great time playing!!

Last Tuesday we had our Gospel Study Group better known as the TWIG because we are too small to be a branch, haha. We had 75 people in attendance!!! A lot of them were less actives and non members!! This was a big success for us!! We are hoping to have a branch sometime soon :)

This last week we had a zone conference with Elder Pino, one of the Seventies, and it was really good. Elder Pino talked to us about goals and working intelligently.  I really loved his point on working intelligently because far too often do missionaries go out and knock doors all day and they don't get anything done. It takes a lot of planning and working with members to be able to see not just quantity, but also quality in your investigators. So we are really trying to implement working intelligently in our work. 

Trabajar inteligentemente!

I am doing well.  I don't really have anything that is holding me back right now, so we are pushing forward while things are running smoothly. I feel as if I just cursed myself by writing that, haha. As a companionship we are focusing on showing gratitude as much as we can, so God knows that we are grateful for the area and companionship we have. Till further notice.

Love Hermanita Ayre

Patience with Myself

Hello Family and Friends!!! 

I hope y'all are doing great!!,This week has been pretty good.

Lately I have been trying really hard to push myself on my mission, it makes me sad, happy, scared and a whole bunch of other emotions to think that I only have 8 months left of my mission. I want to give myself to the Lord so badly out here and sometimes I just get frustrated because I know I can do more. But, I know it takes time to change and align yourself with the Lord's will.

It is a lot like going to the gym, in my head I feel like I can weight lift 250 pounds ( in missionary work), but I can't. I have to take it step by step adding 5 pounds at a time. I know I need to be patient with myself. When I read the scriptures I get so pumped and I want to go out into the field like Nephi or Alma testifying so boldly and having so much faith. I want to have an experience with all the Mormon haters in the south like Jacob with Sherem! haha   Ok, I am getting a little extreme.  The point is, I want to be a great missionary so I can show my love for my Heavenly Father and show my gratitude for all the blessings I have in my life.

Well, that is my life struggle right now, haha.  All in all I am doing really well, I love my companion and the area is pretty good, even though we are only doing 10% Spanish work. We are working hard to find all the Hispanics in this town.  It is pretty funny because we will be driving and see a Hispanic driving next to us and we may or may not follow them so we can see where they live. Then the next day we will go back and knock on their door.

Well have a great week, LOVE Y'ALL

Hermana Ayre

Staying in Manchester!

Transfers are upon us again, and I am staying in Manchester for another 6 weeks with Hermana Schmit!! Boy the time is flying by, although.... some days are pretty dang slow.  Exciting news from last week: 

1.) President and Sister Andersen came to our lesson Friday night with the Hoods... 

2.) We started teaching another really good family that shows great potential 

3.) Today the AP's called us and said that we will be getting a fulltime CAR. Welcome back to those 10 pounds I lost, haha I hope not. 

4.) We went to the Spanish branch in McMinnville instead of the English ward 

5.) I gave the closing prayer in the Branch and everyone complemented me on my amazing Spanish. They all told me that I have a great accent and good grammar. I just smiled and said Muchas Gracias, but in real life my Spanish is not that good, my prayers are good because I have said at least 8 Spanish prayers a day for the last 8 months, haha.  Once I am required to have a long conversation with someone I start feeling real lost haha #whitegirlproblems 

6.) Daylight savings was yesterday and I am now well rested. We also got to run this morning in the light instead of pitch black! 

I am doing really well. Tonight we have a lesson with the Hoods, a couple that goes to the Church of Christ, they are awesome!!! When this man gets baptized he will be a bishop or stake president or something because he is amazing. He and his wife are some of the most Christ like people I have ever met. 

Anyways, I will let ya'll know next week how tonight's lesson goes!!! 

LOVE

SiStEr Ayre

 

Sacrifice

So this week has been AWESOME!! 

This week I have learned a lot about the Law of Sacrifice. As you may have read in my last letter things were beginning to become a little mundane and the work was at a stand still for us. Hermana Schmit and I were tying to figure out,, "why are we not seeing success in our work."  We are being obedient, we have a great companionship, we are following the council of our mission leaders and Preach my Gospel.  So what is the deal?  When we felt as if we had hit a pretty emotional low after being rejected time and time again and all of our appointments fell through for the whole week, yikes right, we felt as if there was absolutely nothing for us to do but ride our bikes aimlessly in the cold dark night.  Well we decided to regroup and make a new plan.

That night we sat down and decided that we needed to recommit ourselves to the Lord, even though we were doing what had been asked of us by the white handbook, Preach my Gospel, and the mission president. We made a list of things that we could do to show Heavenly Father that we are 100% committed to his work. We set some goals and committed to giving up some things that we felt would push us to a new level, even though we knew it would be very hard. We also fasted to ask Heavenly Father for him to help us accomplish the new goals we had set.

The next day was a Preparation Day and we had a lesson set that afternoon with a family that can't meet with us except for Monday afternoons. In that lesson we committed this family to live the Word of Wisdom and it went fantastic!! We left the lesson with their coffee machine and all the tea they had in their house!! They were not even hesitant!! The father of the family went cold turkey off his coffee from drinking 3 pots of coffee a day to none.

Then later that night we had a lesson with a family that are members of the Church of Christ. Oh man that lesson was awesome, but pretty hard too. We had some deep questions coming our way and a lot of bible action happening. Good thing I've been studying up on my stuff in the Bible. The lesson got pretty intense too, the couple said,  "so are we or are we not saved?" After a little re-explaining of priesthood authority and 3 degrees of Heaven, we answered their question. At the end the wife said, "well I just want to do whatever it takes to get to the Celestial kingdom, because I am living with God when I die." The people of the South are amazing, they are some of the most Christian people you will ever meet and they go to church every Sunday, Bible study every Wednesday and they study and read their bible like crazy. It takes getting past the harsh rumors and stereotypes of Mormonism that are so strong in the South, and once that happens our message rings true to them and the holy ghost does the rest!!

The rest of the week went really well and we had investigators come to church and some more people commit to baptism!!!

All in all, I learned that Heavenly Father will bless you as you give him your all.  As we give God our all, without fail, he will never let us down!!

Love ya'll, and have a great week.

Love

Hermana Ayre!!!

Hello this week has been good.  Hermana Schmit and I had the car this week so that rocked, although I do really love riding my bike just not when we have appointments that are 20 plus miles away.  I've done that and it was no fun.

 

This week we had some good lessons and we continue to contact all the fair referrals! We knock into some really interesting situations when contacting everyone. We have had referrals to meth labs, (fun fact Tennessee has the highest use of meth in the whole country) crazy ladies, creeper men, and all walks of life" we are all children of God"... The last few weeks have been interesting, but out of the 400 referrals we received we have about 150 more to contact. Good news right.

 

We really have seen some amazing miracles come from all the referrals. There really are people who truly are seeking for truth and that desire the comfort and blessings that the gospel brings.  

 

As my schedule has become very repetitive the last few weeks it has been hard  to maintain a burning desire for the work," we have seen a lot of rejection lately."  A talk/story by Joseph B. Wirthlin 1982 really helped my perspective change.

 

 

"There is a story about a young builder who had just gone into business for himself. A wealthy friend of his father came to him and said: “To get you started right, I am going to have you build a ranch house for me. Here are the plans. Don’t skimp on anything. I want the very finest materials used, and I want flawless workmanship. Forget the cost. Just send me the bills.”

The young builder became obsessed with the desire to enrich himself through this generous and unrestricted offer. Instead of employing top-grade labor and buying the finest materials, he shortchanged his benefactor in every way possible. Finally, the last secondhand nail was driven into the last flimsy wall, and the builder handed over the keys and bills, totaling over a hundred thousand dollars, to his father’s old friend. That gentleman wrote a check in full for the structure and then handed the keys back to the builder. “The home you have just built, my boy,” he said with a pleasant smile, “is my present to you. May you live in it in great happiness!”"

 

At the end of each day, week, month, and by the end of my mission I get to look upon the results and the over all outcome of my mission. This is my mission and I want to know that I put all my efforts and put all diligence into the lords work because at the end of everything this mission experience will be my memory for the rest of my life and I will have to live with the type of work I put into the Nashville TN mission.

 

I hope that we can all love our Heavenly Father enough to do our best work for Him. Then when our work is over and we have build a beautiful mansion for him, he will turn and give us the key to the mansion we built for him.

 

I am so grateful for the blessing I have to be a missionary and to serve the Lord full time.  I hope that everyday, missionary or not, we can go to bed knowing that we made our Father in Haven proud of us that day.

 

Have a great week family and friends, love ya'll.

(Oh and this week I will start being a facebook missionary, so I will add all of yall, but I can not chat with anyone. But the mission encourages our families to like my posts and give comments on my facebook posts so I can have more facebook traffic! )

 

Love,

Hermana Ayre

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