Sister Koenig's Mission Blog!: This has been a week!

So my last email got cut short because we were totally out of time. At the end of last week I got to Skype home on Mother's Day! It was great. This couple in our ward invited us over for dinner and we went over a couple hours earlier and Skyped, and then they fed us one of the most delicious meals I've had on the mission! They were hilarious too, and we just chatted with them for a long time. It felt like I was back home :)

Skyping on Mother's Day!

This past week was a little tougher than some of the others! No one wanted to see us haha. Everywhere we went no one was home, and we would set up appointments and people didn't show. It was sad! We still worked really hard and we were still able to find a lot of new people, but it was rough!

On Tuesday we went tracting and we knocked on this one door and this old lady answered. She was 94!!! She invited us in but she couldn't hear very well so we were like yelling everything at her. At one point Sister O asked her if her faith brought her peace and the lady was like "WHAT?!" and Sister O said "HAS YOUR FAITH BROUGHT YOU PEACE" and the lady said "WHAT???" and Sister O basically screamed "PEACE! HAS IT BROUGHT YOU PEACE?!?!" bahahaha it was great.

This week our solid investigator, R, dropped us :( She got baptized into a different church.....it was so sad. It's hard when we know what will make people the happiest, and they know it too, but they choose the easiest path instead. Doing the easiest thing will not make you the best person you can be! It just won't! I don't want to go on a rant but it is so frustrating to me!!! I understand more when people just don't get it - why would you do the hard thing when you don't believe that it will help you? Or when you don't believe it's true? I totally get that. But when you KNOW, and you still choose another path....ugh. I just see the potential that everyone has, and I can see a glimpse of how much God loves each person, and then to see them choosing the lesser path for themselves is so disheartening.

Anyway....Wednesday night we had a meeting with the other missionaries in our ward and with our Ward Mission Leader. After the meeting we went with one of the ward missionaries, Sister T, to go see an investigator. But the investigator wasn't home. Surprise surprise! Haha we didn't know what to do after that, and Sis T wanted to show us some pictures at her house, so we went over there. When we got there she kind of jokingly said "We could teach my son!" He is not active, and he's really struggling right now, and we were like "Hey why not!" So we went in and she told him that we were going to teach him lol. He's like 20ish and he was just about to head out, but she made him stay for a "5-minute lesson" (it ended up being 10 minutes. Hehe). We taught him a quick version of the first lesson, which talks about the Restoration of Christ's church on the earth - the church that we have today. We asked him a lot of questions to get him thinking, and at the end we asked him something about the Book of Mormon. Sister O said "I don't know if you've ever read the Book of Mormon, or if you've read it recently, but it really is an amazing book that will give you so much guidance and happiness" etc etc. Then he said "Yeah, I really need to start reading it again." And I said "Will you read the first chapter of the Book of Mormon this week?" and he said yes, and you could tell he really meant it. The Spirit was SO strong. Then we asked if we could leave him with a prayer, and Sister O was about to ask if she could say it, but then I turned to him and said "Actually, would you mind saying it?" And he did! And it was an amazing prayer!!!! You could really tell the difference in him from the beginning of that lesson to the end. It was a miracle. I guess he hasn't said or done anything "church-y" in a really really long time. After the prayer he headed off and his mom and Sister O started crying and I was definitely tearing up. It was so cool.

So much fun with Sister O!

I don't have my planner and I don't really remember anything else we did this week....haha. It all blends together! I don't know! I have mission brain. Today was great though. We went up to Red Rock park (I think that's what it's called...?) and took a ton of pictures. One rock looked like Pride Rock from Lion King and I said to Sister O "Look, there's pride rock!" and she said "Really?" and I said "Yeah, that's where they filmed the movie!" and she said "No way, really?!" and I said "No, it's a cartoon...." ahahahhahaha. Good times. It was beautiful though! The weather has been great the last couple of days although I'm really worried that I'm going to get another sunburn! I might have said this in last week's email but again, I have mission brain so I don't know, but I got a sunburn last week on Saturday and the next day, Mother's Day, it snowed like 6 inches....haa. The weather is very weird here. Ok probably none of you care about this at all. But yeah I love Colorado!