General Conference

April 8, 2013

Dear Family,

Wasn't General Conference wonderful! I watched three of the sessions at the church to keep a woman in our ward company and because our investigator who just got baptized came to one of the sessions. Sister Pearce and another family invited us to watch conference with them at their house. I really wanted to. Especially since I don't feel like we get to spend a lot of time with Sister Pearce. Only in the morning before she goes to work, and at night before we go to bed. But we had been invited to come to lunch between sessions by a neighborhood of families in our ward. (There are four of them in one neighborhood! ...that probably sounds funny since our whole neighborhood is in our ward. ha ha But it isn't like that out here. :) And we offered to watch the last session with a less active woman in our ward who has health problems. We tried calling her on Saturday, and decided to just stop by before the session on Sunday. She told us that she wasn't having a good day and wasn't feeling well, but when we reminded her of General Conference she invited us right in. She is so sweet! I just love her! She told us that we aren't allowed to leave without telling her where we are going. :) She is usually super talkative. But her attention was completely fixed on the screen as we listened to each of the speakers.

It was neat to hear as President Monson talked about all the missionaries. We are a part of that 65,000 and Spencer is part of the 20,000! Oh boy! It's so exciting!

Will you tell Grandma Great that I love her all the way from Jacksonville, Florida?! :)
p.s. A girl in our ward said, Why did the chicken cross the road? ...to get to the Missionaries on the other side. :)

I think the highlight of my week this week was when we were out SMACTing. (I never ever ever thought I would ever say that in my whole entire mission... or life.) We received a couple media referrals a few months ago. We have tried contacting them, but haven't had much success. Okay... one of them was an older couple and they were fantastic! They seemed super interested and we thought for sure they were going to be baptized. But for some reason they haven't been returning our calls or answering the door. We are encouraged to tract (or in nicer terms SMACT) around the house of media referrals. We were sent there for a reason. Even if it might not be them. Sp we knocked on all of the doors in this circle. We were getting to the last few houses and none of them had been interested. I felt like maybe this was God's punishment since I hadn't talked to someone earlier that day. So maybe he had taken away the Spirit and my ability to connect with people. I thought maybe we should come back another time when God trusted me more. Instead we decided to endure to the end and finish the circle. The next house we went to was a nice family that we ended up talking to for half an hour. We hope to visit them again in the near future. It was just a tender mercy that we found someone who was nice and willing to talk to us. God loves us even when we make mistakes. :)

The other one we tried multiple times and ended up leaving a note on their door and said to give us a call. The mom called and told us that her 10 year old son accidentally requested us on mormon.org. (I would still like to know how he got there.) She asked us not to come by. To make a long story short...er, when we reported that we had contacted this family to the referral center it didn't register. So we got many notices from our mission leaders that we hadn't contacted them. We decided that this must mean that we needed to go back. Maybe their hearts had changed. We went to their house a couple nights ago. As we started walking to their driveway, the thought came to my head that maybe we were sent here for someone else. Then I thought, No. We already knocked on all of these doors. Then a house caught my eye, and the thought came again. I had an inner battle for a few minutes. I'm sure Sister Chappell was thinking that I was going crazy. We decided to knock on the door of that house. No one came to the door. Slightly confused and discouraged we started walking away. And a car pulled up. A man came got out of the car with a little girl. He was on the phone, but asked what he could help us with. We told him that we had a message for families and asked if there was a better time that we could come back. He said, "Come back tomorrow around the same time. I was a door to door salesman for 4 years. I'll listen to whatever you have to say." :) :) :) Oh me of little faith. And yet God still blesses me and allows me to see his tender mercies. We went back the next day. We didn't have much time to talk to him, but he said that someone from our church had talked to him about families before and family was really important to him. He already had two copies of the Book of Mormon! We plan on going back again this week! :) This family is going to be eternal! That is my goal! :)

I love you, eternal family! Thank you so much for your love and support! I hope you have a fantastic week!

I love you!!

Love,
Sister Scott