April 28, 2014

Hola my familia y amigos! 

Alright, this week = INCREDIBLE. Get ready to be blown away.

First off, our mission president asked us to send this to our families so here ya go:

Mission Fast:  You will remember we held a special Mission Fast on the first Sunday of March to petition the Lord to bless our Mission with more baptisms based upon our faith, obedience and hard work.  As we are now beginning to see the fruits of that fast I would like to invite all of you to dedicate part of your fast this coming Fast Sunday to thank our Heavenly Father for answering our prayers and ask Him to continue to bless us as we thrust in our sickles with our might all the day long as we labor in the Lord’s vineyard.  Helaman 3: 35 says “Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their humility and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their yielding their hearts unto God.”    As the California Sacramento Mission we desire to become stronger in our humility, firmer in our faith and to yield our hearts to our God.  We desire to bring many souls unto Him.  Will you please join in this fast?  In addition will  you  invite your families at home to join us in fasting this coming Sunday May 4, a regular Fast Sunday, in thanking our Heavenly Father and asking Him to continue to bless us?  Will you please copy this Mission Fast section from this email and paste it into your weekly email to your family and add a personal note asking your family to join us in this fast? 

Alright now that that's over, it's miracle time! 

The man with the tumor (Ramone) Has not been baptized yet, but he's very close! He says that he wants to be perfect before he gets baptized... and he's working on not swearing right now. We're trying to explain to him that it's perfectly fine if you get baptized and you swear, because we have the atonement where we can repent. But, he just wants to make sure that he's ready so, we're helping him along with that. 

So one really cool story from this week, a few weeks ago my comp and I knocked on a door (thinking it was a door of a spanish family that we had talked with before) but to our surprise a white guy named Alex answered the door. He ended up talking to us for an hour or so about the gospel. He was just asking questions every which way! We gave him 2 pamphlets one on the restoration and one on the plan of salvation (normally we only give out one at a time but he was asking all these questions and the pamphlets answer them perfectly.) Because he was english speaking, we had to refer him to the english sisters. On Saturday the sisters told us that they had added Alex as an investigator! They said that he told them that when we knocked on his door, he was at a really low point. So he started to praying to God and was just asking for a sign, anything that could help him. And at that moment, my comp and I accidentally knocked on the wrong door, which happened to be his. He's a very cynical man and said he was never really open to religion. But he feels obligated to listen to the missionaries because he feels that God answered his prayer by sending us. I felt so amazing when I heard that!  I never thought something like this would happen to me on my mission. It makes me think how many other times that happened and we just don't know about it. We would have never known if the other sisters hadn't gone and talked with him. How neat is that? It just proves that God works in mysterious ways and that every little thing we do as missionaries, even though it may not seem worth it, is worth something.Sometimes I get really discouraged with doing missionary work because I feel like I'm not doing anything worthwhile just knocking on doors. But, sometimes, things work out I guess :) 

Alright mama and pa, 2 more weeks until I get to see your lovely faces on skype! The member that we live with has a son in law that lives close by and we're going to use his computer to skype! What time would you like to skype? My comp and I were thinking later in the evening like, 8 or so because she has a big family and that's when everyone is home for her. So, that's what we might do but if another time works better for you we can try to change it... emphasis on the try it's really tricky to switch up our schedual. 

I got so much mail this week it was amazing!!!!!! Friday I got a really nice package from Alec, I'll send you pics of the thing he sent me. It's so nice :) And I got 2 letters from Cherry Woman and Kenzi Lombardi sent me such a sweet letter!!! It was like Christmas getting so much mail! It was great! Keep the snail mail coming!!! 

Will you please send me some of my piano sheet music if you get a chance? Specifically 'A river flows in you' if you can find it. Our member that we live with has a piano and I miss playing my music.

I've been having crazy bad back problems ever since I got to Cali... I've been trying to figure it out with the nurse here but she says that the best thing to do would be surgery... which makes no sense because it just doesn't because I haven't seen a doc or anything. Anyways, she told me to load up on IB Profen... which hasn't been helping and she gave me some back exercises to do... which also hasn't really helped. I don't know what to do about it :( It's my lower back that's seizing up again and also the pain is spreading upward. It's all on my right side... my comp tried to rub it out but, it didn't really help. I try to take really hot showers to ease the pain and ice my back but none of those is really helping. Do you have suggestions? I just don' t know what to do anymore and it's really hurting :( 

I always count my blessings that I'm serving in a very civilized area in America. I love it here, it's safe for the most part and the members are starting to feed us more! I'm really liking Mexican food! probably because it's real food made by Mexicans. But I get to try lots of different kinds of food like from Ecuador and El Salvador and Venuzela. The people here are amazing. 

Alrighty, I better wrap things up. Thank you so much for the letters, the packages and the prayers. I love you so much and I'm so grateful that you support me in my decision to serve a mission. I'm so glad for the love that you show me and how you raised me. I think that it's for the best that I was raised with sarcasm because it turned me into kind of a sassy person! I've been marked as the 'sassiest missionary that ever lived' in my district xD haha But, being sassy has helped me get along with the spanish people because they are the queen of sass! It's fun to be able to joke with them. Anyways, my nick name now is Hermana Sassy... haha nice. 

I hope you all have an amazing week! I love you all so much! Take care, keep up the great missionary work. Adios!

Love Hermana Poulsen

May 5, 2014

Hi mom and dad! 

Happy cinco de mayo!

Okay mom, hold your horses, everything will work out for mother's day don't worry. Like I said before, I will be skyping you. I will probably call you on sunday just to make sure I have the skype name and everything. I don't know if we're skyping at the same time or not but just know that I only have 40 minutes to do the skype call soooo.... make sure you have everything that you want to say to me! Because it's not a lot of time! We'll probably skype around 4ish, which is 5 your time I think. I hope that works out! If not, we'll figure something out but, it won't be exactly at 4, so if I'm not calling you by then, don't freak out! We'll eventually get to chat :) I'm super excited!!! 

My back has been so much better this week! I readjusted the car seat to I sit further back now and I think that's relieved a lot of stress on my back. I've been trying to sit and sleep differently too so hopefully it will continue on not hurting! 

Yes, I can still get pics, Yes I still love getting them, keep them coming! I also love all of the hand written letters I am getting, please keep them coming!

I love getting conference talks. It gives me something a little more to study in personal study or just some thing to read at lunch time. I think as a missionary, because I don't really have anything to do while I eat except well... eat, I read the nutrition facts on what I'm eating... I know so many random facts about how many grams of sodium are in a bowl of cereal and what not... yeah, real interesting so please, send letters, talks, quotes, stories, anything! I love them all! 

I see my mission president maybe 2 or 3 times a month. It's pretty rare though. We actually get a new one at the end of July I think. 

So this week, the dad who had the brain surgery accepted baptism for the 17th or may!!!! He is an incredible person. Yesterday, he was taking his family to church when he remembered that he forgot to take his nausea medicine (because the radiation he's doing makes him really sick) So he went home to get his medicine, threw up, and still came to church with his whole family. That's dedication right there. And the even cooler part is that his 8 year old son, Kevin, came up to me after the 2 hour of church and said 'so when can I get baptized? I'm 8, I wanna get baptized.' It made my heart so happy!!! But, because we just had an incredible miracle happen.. I have a feeling that these next 2 weeks are going to be extremely difficult. The adversary really likes to make all the worst things happen right before someone gets baptized... and that effects the missionaries too.. aye. 

Earlier this week when we were on our bikes, we rode by a man on the side of the rode and I stopped and simply said 'Hi how are you? How's your day going?' in a very normal manner. It looked like he didn't hear me and so I said again 'How's it going?' and the guy got in my face and said 'Are you retarded?! Because the way that you're talking to strangers is just retarded.' To be honest, it made me cry a little bit. I didn't realize how sensitive I was. I thought I had gotten over it, but I guess not. I knew that it wasn't my fault that he was probably having a bad day or something but, whatever, I hope that guy has a better day. I'm just not used to being yelled at like that. 

I mean, my companion and I, we're pretty cute girls! Even if people reject us, they do it in a really nice way. Anyways, I'm just going to have to get a tougher skin I guess. I wanted to say something to that man but after he yelled at me I just couldn't speak. I literally just stood there with my mouth hanging open. I wanted to say something but I just couldn't. Maybe that was for the better, maybe if I would have said something more the situation would have escalated into something nasty. But let me tell you, serving a mission is great but it really takes a toll on you, both physically and mentally.

My companion and I also pretty much committed another one of our investigators, Paola, to baptism on may 31. IT was our 3rd time asking her to be baptized and she said 'yes, but let me think about the date' So she's really opening up! We took a member over to her house for a lesson and he gave her a priesthood blessing because she's really struggling right now with life in general. And he said in the blessing 'know that God will not abandon you' and she said that right when he said that, she was thinking 'God don't abandon me' She said that happened twice in her prayer where the guy said exactly what she was thinking. The Spirit is such a powerful thing. So, she's going to get baptized soon too!!! 

It got up to almost 100 degrees this week.... I about died. Thankfully the temp went down a bit but man, I'm going to die in the summer.... I'm trying to train myself to like the heat because I'm going to have to deal with it for 2 summers here... hurray. 

Alrighty, I better peace out, it's time to go shopping for groceries! Hurray! I hope you have a wonderful week! And remember, the next time that we talk, it will be on skype! Woooo!!!! So excited! Alrighty, take care, love you so much and adios! 

Love Hermana Poulsen