Balance to the Force 12.8.14

Dear Family,

It is always so good to get on the computer and see emails from all of you wonderful people. You're the best. I hope you know that. 

I am SO GRATEFUL for Sister Carter! She is an angel!! We really needed her haha. Sister Carter is from Boise, Idaho. She's the youngest of three and has been on her mission two transfers longer than I have. She is super awesome and I am so grateful to be in a tri-panionship. Honestly I was kind of dreading being in a tri-panionship again but it's actually working out great! We've been doing splits with the members and that has been great. :) She brings much balance to the force. ;)  

Sis. Fehlman, Sis. Jensen and Sis. Carter

Fun fact: Since I've been at WMU, I have dropped 15+ investigators. I tallied it up as we did our weekly planning last week and it made me super depressed. I  turned through each of the teaching records and just couldn't help but feel loss as I looked at them. I remember how I met each one of them and how excited I was to teach them. Such wonderful people who had that light in their eyes but somehow lost it. It was eye opening to see how Satan works, he is good at his craft. We have dropped all of our investigators except for Bin (he's still on date to be baptized January 17th!) which has been rough. But it's given me the opportunity to pray and plead for God's Will, something I don't do as much as I should. Sister Fehlman, Sister Carter and I put our nose to the grind stone and contacted all day, every day this past week. By the end of the week, we had four times the amount of contacts we usually have at the end of a week! We are doing everything we can think of to find those people that God has prepared. We got about 200 "He is the Gift" cards and that has been a great way to start talking to people. We've also been carrying around a whiteboard with a sentence on it that says, "My gift to Christ is...." and we ask student to finish it and then we post it on Facebook and add them as our friends so we can tag them Then start talking to them..... I know we're creepy.... We've been doing a lot more door knocking and we're making some sweet plans to contact more members/LARCs to help us find people to teach. It's rough but I have a lot more faith now that Heavenly Father is preparing people than I did 11 months ago when I started my mission. 

When President Hess was here he told us a story from his mission. He served in the Northeast States Mission (or something like that) with President Packer as his mission president. Pres. Hess told us that he called President Packer one week to ask him about the lack of success they were having. President Packer said, "Are you studying every morning?" President Hess said, "Yes." "Are you praying several times a day?" "Yes." "Are you going out and working every day?" "Yes." President Packer asked more questions and then finally said, "Elder, you are doing all the right things, you just haven't been doing them long enough." I've contemplated the story a lot on my mission. When I feel like I'm not seeing any success I have to remind myself that I will not always have instantaneous results. Sometimes things require sustained action (sound like something called "faith"?) before the blessings come. I am CONFIDENT that there is someone here who will receive the Gospel, I just need to do all I can a little bit longer. :)

Today was fun! We got cleared by President Jacobsen to go ice skating! The Brethren are noticing that P-Day is really stressful for missionaries and not really helping missionaries unwind. So President Jacobsen has been highly encouraging us to do fun things, one of them being ice skating! We got a couple of girls from the branch to come with us and for $2, we got skates and time on the ice. Right as I was putting on my skates I remembered that I have a broken foot.... haha It was a BLAST! It was so nice to be doing something out of the normal routine. I will admit, the really embarrassing part about it all was getting lapped by 70 year old men skating backwards. I mean, I'm not BAD at skating, definitely not the best, but really? Really?? I have to remind myself constantly that hockey is a big deal out here (or as they say in Michigan "hackey") so it shouldn't shock me that 70 year old couples need their time on the skating rink. I would love to see a retired couple in the West do that.... After skating we went to "Shwarma King" where I got a shawafel. SO. GOOD. Getting the international experience in Michigan! ;)

Well that about sums up me! This is the last week of school so it will be interesting to see what happens for the next four weeks after this week. As I've learned from reading the Nativity Story about a hundred times, Heavenly Father gets a lot of pleasure in blowing our minds and doing great things with less than ideal circumstances or producing miracles in the most surprising places (Micah 5:2). I know that some cool things can happen this transfer. :)

Have a wonderful week!! Love you all so much!

Love, Sister Jensen :)