Miracles!

Dearest Family,

It has been a good and crazy week. CRAZY!

So last Thursday was transfer day. We weren't transferred, but I still had to do a lot personally to prepare the center for it. Little scheduling details to get everyone where they needed to go. It was a bit stressful, but it all worked out.

Then last Friday we gave a Friday morning training on women in the scriptures. We talked about 8 women from the scriptures and their gifts and had the sisters pick which they most related to, and talked about how they saw some of those qualities in the other sisters. It went well. The goal was to have the sisters think about their own gifts and what they have to offer in the center. They said I was most like Mother Eve. haha, maybe because I am the mom of the center (the old sister that runs the place. Or something). It was good, if a bit thrown together because of everything else going on in a matter of a few days.

So I mentioned to you last week that President Keyes closed a VC area so we are down to 14 sisters in the center. Well, Sister Hansen and I came up with a solution we thought would work. On Friday we sat down to actually make the schedule and see if it would work in action. We worked on that schedule for FIVE HOURS. It fried my brain. It was slow progress. Part of the problem is that we try to make everything fair so everyone has the same number of mornings and evenings in the center. It is a lot tricker when you are working with a prime number of sisters=7companionships. Pretty soon I was pulling out my problem solving skills I had learned in Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. I am not even kidding. It wasn't a problem I would have ever seen in that class, but we were trying to come up with a formula that would be the best fit to the fairness graph using a matrix. Wrap your brain around that. Add that to Sister Hansen's background in accounting--her skills on Excell and her drive for perfection--and we were a dynamic duo. I know that the Lord put us there together for this time at the center. No other sisters had the background for that kind of problem solving, and no one else would have the drive to do it. Anyone else would have given up and written in random names with no care for fairness. But fairness is important because it affects 7 proselyting areas. We want to optimize the production of every area involved. Anyway, there is your nerd out moment for the day.

And we didn't really get anywhere on the actual schedule on Friday. We did get the formula worked out (kind of), but nothing else.

Then on Saturday, the Independence Stake asked Sister Hansen and I to do a class on missionary work at the Stake Young Women's Conference. They had a series of classes they went to, and ours was one of them. In light of the fact that we had been working on transfers, doing exchanges, preparing for our Friday Morning Training, and working on the schedule, we hadn't had a ton of time to work on what we would say. But the Lord took what we had, and he magnified it. It was a miracle. We were able to have a good time and a good experience. We asked how many of them were planning on serving missions and it was well over half. Crazy times!

Then we got back and had 3 hours to finish the schedule and a long list of to-do's. I told Sister Hansen it would take a miracle to get the schedule done in 3 hours. We knelt and prayed and asked for a miracle, and we got it done in 45 minutes. Wow. God expands our time and quickens our minds sometimes. It was a miracle.

Also, I can't even tell you about all of the other miracles that have happened recently. Over the last 4 days we have found 6 new investigators, which is more than I have ever found (I'm sure Willie has, but we are working on 3 hours a day here). One of them is a couple named Steve and Danielle. Our map is bad so it took us forever to find our way there, but it was meant to be. We brought Alaina with us--a 18 year old that joined the church a month ago. She is planning on going on a mission in a year. She is amazing. She knew Danielle, and we were able to teach an awesome short lesson on prayer and got Steve to kneel and pray for the first time ever. It was amazing. We woke him up the next day to take him on a church tour, which was another miracle. He is really interested and really nice, and so in Danielle. We hope to teach her tomorrow.

We also got a text referral for a woman who wanted a bible. We only got half of the text, so we didn't know she wanted a bible (and we didn't have one with us) but we were right in her neighborhood when we got it, so we were there 5 minutes later. She was excited when we told her there are 12 apostles today, and she took a Book of Mormon while she is waiting for us to get her her bible in a couple of days. Awesome! We have so many people we have invited to church! I am so excited!

So, I'm sorry that this is the abreviate version, but life is good. Miracles are happening. Things are turning out. God knows how much I have on my plate, and He is making impossible things possible. I don't know how else I handled everything that happened last weekend. Life is good.

I love you!

 

Love,

Sister Atkin

 

Kansas City, MO LDS Temple