Elder Kopischke

Hi family!
The Lord is protecting me and blessing me with so much!
This week has been so good! We had a Great Zone Conference on Wednesday with Elder Kopischke and he had a lot of new teaching tools for us, and a lot of new ways to find people and seek referrals from members! He told us to think of 3 or 4 questions we wanted answered, and promised us that we would have our answers by the end of the meeting. I wrote down 5, and the spirit answered one of them right away. I was overcome with this amazing feeling of peace, and I started to cry. I looked around, and saw that I was in a room full of missionaries. All these wonderful people were feeling the same thing as me, and a lot of them were crying too. Not a word was said that brought it on, it was just the feeling of the spirit testifying to our hearts. I loved it :) Sometimes, it was hard to understand him because German is his first language, but we all got a lot out of it. :) 

We had an awesome lesson this week with our investigator B*****, we were teaching her the Plan of Salvation, and it was the first time I actually got to sit down and be in a lesson with her. She has A LOT of questions about everything, but she is getting it so fast! During the lesson, baptism got brought up a lot, in my mind at least, and we touched on it a couple of times. Her biggest thing is that she wants to find out if this church is for her. If it is right. I love that, because she isn't worried about all the little details, she said she just wants to see how the spirit feels in the church. We invited her to come this Sunday and she accepted, and we told her we would find her a ride. At the end of our lesson, I felt like God wouldn't have let me move from my seat until I asked her, so I listened to the prompting, and invited her to be baptized if she got her answer that this was the true church. She got so excited and said yes. :) I am so thrilled for her!!! She came to church yesterday, and it was such a good experience. We had a man in our ward, Brother A, go get her, and he got to know her really well. She felt totally comfortable walking in now that she had a friend. She then came and sat with us, and was really scared that 1) people would look down on her since she is a young single mother, and 2) that her baby would be disruptive. I am so glad that people in our church are so friendly. No one looked down on her, and I think she was really surprised by that because she had had a bad experience at another church when she first had baby C*****. Also, her baby was a tiny bit loud at times, mostly blowing raspberries, and being adorable, but for once, I am so thankful that there are very badly behaved little kids who scream and cry and have to be taken into the hallway, because it helped make her feel welcome. :) So maybe that's why I was how I was as a baby! I was just a blessing for someone else!! ;) haha

Elder O. and I taught the Gospel Principals class about the Holy Ghost, and it was the biggest class since I have been in the ward. Figures it would be the one time we teach. It went really well though, because B***** had questions, and everyone weighed in and helped her understand. By the end of church, she was talking like she had been a member for years, and she kept saying how excited she was to be baptized and keep coming back!!! :) 

Oh, another thing, Sister Parker and Sister LeFever are leaving our district and are going to go serve in Hopkins! Super awesome because they are both great missionaries and I know they'll take good care of the Clows' and Ciprianos' and all the other people I love down there :) So, Elder O. and I get the rest of their area, plus what we already have. So now our already big for biking area has just tripled in size!!!! Hopefully they give us a car :P We mostly eat at home, I have been making a lot of fruit smoothies and ham and cheese sandwiches! We do get fed every couple of days though. With the sisters gone, we might get fed more now though!!!Great week! Excited to see what the Lord has in store for the next one! 

Have a great week!
-Elder Joel, Sunshine, Odie, Barker.

I got to see Lincoln and Elder Farnsworth, Hawkes, Roetkur, and SPECK!!!!

 I got to see Lincoln!!! :)

All of the sudden, it is spring.
These are called Bradford Pears, and they are everywhere.

Look this opossum is pretending to be asleep ;)
I wanted to cut off the tail and send it home! but I didn't :) 

The "Champion" shirts.
 ~The little things above Elder Olmstead's head are NOT gum, they are glow in the dark stars.
I asked. ~ Cyndi