Kristen in Kentucky: Winchester 3/6/17

Hey!

I learned so much this week! Aside from I can't beat a Samoan in a pillow fight...;)

This email will be mainly about our investigator, Sandy. We've been meeting with her for several months. A month before I got to Winchester, the sisters contacted her outside her house. She wasn't very interested, but numbers where exchanged and here wasn't any contact for several weeks.

Then she texted the missionaries out of the blue, "I don't know if you remember me..." They met with her once and had a really good first lesson. Then she dropped off the face of the planet due to work etc.

Sister Israelsen and I kept feeling like we should keep trying her. One day she was home and we stopped by and caught up with everything that was happening in her life. We started teaching the lessons again.

Something that was such a powerful realization to her is that God is our actual Father who is perfect, loving, all-knowing. It's been amazing to see Sandy go from pushing God away, to lighting up every time we talk about that Father-daughter relationship. The past few weeks, she's stagnated a little bit and we were trying to figure out her concern. Friday night, we met with her and brought a member. The sister that we brought did most of the teaching and testified so powerfully of Christ's and Heavenly Father's love. The spirit was so thick and Sandy was touched, something clicked.

Now she's asking us about when she can get baptized, and doing her own studies on different topics she's learning at church. She's coming to our ward temple trip next Saturday as well!

Something that clicked for me this week is how the healing, cleansing, enabling, guiding, refining powers of the Atonement are unlocked and unleashed in our lives through the Spirit. When God promises us we can always have His Spirit to be with us, He is promising us we can access the powers of the Atonement. No wonder the spirit is so important in conversion!

Have a wonderful week,

Sister Kristen Johns