Last Week Of 2019!

Hello everyone! 

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and are excited for the new year! My Christmas was really good. It definitely was hard being away from my family, but the members took such good care of us to make sure we still had a nice holiday! So many people brought us over little gifts and treats, and then a couple different families had us over for dinner Christmas Eve night, breakfast Christmas morning, and Christmas dinner. We are seriously fed so good! Other than that, Christmas Eve me and my comp went over to a member's house and she helped us bake cookies that we then went out and delivered to people that we are teaching, and that we knew would be alone on Christmas! We drove around all night on Christmas Eve ding-dong-ditching people with the cookies- it was so fun and helped us focus our Christmas on serving others rather than ourselves. 

This week we had exchanges for the first time, which is when the Sister Training Leaders (same calling I had in the CCM) come and we switch companions for 24 hours. So I went with Hermana Toulier and Hermana Percival went with Hermana Martinez. It's just to help us learn from another missionary and to make sure that our regular companionships are doing good and we are all getting along well. It was so fun to be with Hermana Toulier! She reminds me a lot of a friend from home, so we got along super well! We went out and knocked doors, and we got a return appointment!!! Finally!! We were so excited. The family was so so nice and have seen missionaries before, but never talked with them, so they were very happy to have us back. We will see them next Sunday! Pray that it goes well and we can start teaching the lessons! 

Yesterday was kind of a crazy day. First, at our dinner with a family in the ward, my companion got thrown up on by one of their little girls. My companion is so good though and we just laughed so hard. I felt so bad though. Then our power was out for about 4 hours, which meant no heating or anything in our house so it got really cold in there really fast! Luckily a couple in the ward was nice enough to let us come over and wait with them in their warm house until the power came back on. Also, my mission president and his wife came to McCall!! So we got to have study with them last night, just us 4! It was so awesome. The love he has for the gospel, for his calling, and for the missionaries is seriously inspiring. He is the best, so that was a pretty cool experience. 

A scripture we've been sharing a lot this past week is Alma 37:6, "Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass..." As the new year approaches, I would ask everyone to reflect on your lives and think of the small and simple things that you can do, to better focus your life on the gospel and to keep Christ at the center of your thoughts and actions. Whether it be to read from the Book of Mormon everyday, to work harder at saying personal prayers, to more faithfully study the Come, Follow Me material, to keep the Sabbath Day more holy- all of these small and simple tasks build up our faith, strengthen our testimonies, and increase our desire to follow the example of Christ and become better disciples. Within these small and simple things, great blessings will be brought to pass. 

I love you all! Happy New Year!!!

Hermana Rawlins

808 South Samson Trail

P.O. Box 192

McCall, ID 83638

Pictures: 

1. Making cookies on Christmas Eve!

2. Welcome to the snowy mountains of McCall :)

3. All the cookies we made

4. Me and the Sister Training Leaders 

5. District photo when they all drove up here for Pday last week!

Merry Christmas Eve Eve!!!

Hi everyone! 

This week marks one month that I have been serving here in McCall! Days are slow, but months are fast oh my goodness. I will try to just sum up a few things that happened this past week! 

Tuesday we had Zone Conference so we got to go down to Caldwell and meet together with the Mission President and his wife, and a whole bunch of other missionaries. It was so fun! We had a spiritual message at the beginning, had a super good lunch, and then had a "Christmas Talent Show" All the spanish missionaries (since there is only about 15 of us in total) did a dance to the song Mi Burrito Sabañero and it was a MESS, but super funny. My district also made a video modeled after the show The Office, called "The District Council," and it turned out really funny as well. After that, since we were down in the city, we got to go to chickfila!! I was so stoked. Anyway, Zone Conference was a good time!

We had about 80000 people cancel on us this week, which is disappointing and leaves us with so much time in our schedule that we have to figure out what to do. We ended up tracting a little bit, which is hard because I swear no one answers their doors anymore. Also sometimes the people that do answer can talk so rudely, which is not my favorite thing in the world, but we still keep trying! 

We kept up with lots of service again this week, which is super nice! We went and tried to help at the Food Bank this week, but they ended up having too many volunteers. We were bummed but that's super awesome that so many people are willing to help! We did run into a man there as we were leaving that saw our tags and said "Are you guys the missionaries from Utah?" and we explained that we weren't all from Utah but that we were from that church and he said "Ohhh so you guys are brainwashed then?" HAHA he asked it in a way that was literally like it was just a normal, everyday question it totally caught us off guard. We had a pretty long discussion with him but ultimately he's convinced that everything in our society is a lie (literally EVERYTHING) and that religion is the biggest one of them all! yay! I told him I think it just depends on how you want to look at life, and he told me that perspective doesn't exist, it's a lie. Soooo how do you get anywhere with that? I have no idea, but he got pulled aside and started talking to someone else, so we'll never know! 

I can't believe that Christmas is already here!! One tradition that my family has at home, is that every Christmas Eve night, we read the story of Christ's birth from Luke chapter 2. I've been reading out of it a lot recently, and this year, my focus was really on the Shepherds. An angel appeared unto them, telling them about the birth of the Savior, Jesus Christ. They immediately went to Bethlehem to see for themselves. Verses 17 and 18 then read, "And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds." As soon as they knew for themselves the truthfulness of the birth of the Savior, they went and spread the word to any and all people they could find. They wanted to share that message of great joy with everyone. May we all be like those Shepherds and eagerly share the good news of the gospel with those around us. And may those people that hear our message, marvel at the things that they are told, like those people did who were told by the Shepherds of the birth of a Savior. There is no greater source of joy than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Why should we keep that all to ourselves?? There is a quote from President Gordon B. Hinckley in his talk, "Find the Lambs, Feed the Sheep," and it says, "The gospel is nothing to be ashamed of. It is something to be proud of. 'Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord,' wrote Paul to Timothy (2 Tim. 1:8). Opportunities for sharing the gospel are everywhere." I think back to when I was in high school and the missionaries would challenge us to invite our friends to church, or try and share a gospel message with them, and I would always be so embarrassed or scared to do it. But what was I scared of? What did I have to be embarrassed about? There is no greater message, no better news, than this gospel of Jesus Christ, and you never know who is ready and waiting for the happiness and saving power that comes from it. It was meant to be shared. There is nothing to be ashamed of, only something to be so so proud of. Pray for opportunities to share the gospel!!

I miss and love you all so much. Thank you to everyone who has emailed me, sent me Christmas cards, and kept me in their prayers!! It's made it a good Christmas season. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!!! <3

Hermana Rawlins

808 South Samson Trail

P.O. Box 192

McCall, ID 83638

Pictures:

1. Me outside in the middle of a snow storm, haha! That morning it was -5⁰ CRAZY

2. My comp, Hermana Percival, one of our friends, Hermana Martinez, and I at Zone Conference

3. Pretty drive down to Boise

4. This giant cute christmas tree they have downtown here!!

5. Apparently this diner called "My Father's Place" has the best milkshakes ever so we went and got one...they were seriously the best milkshakes EVER

2 Months Down, 16 To Go!

Holaaaa

Yesterday marked 2 months since I left! It feels like yesterday and 100 years ago all at the same time! This week was pretty relaxed, not much happened, but I do want to share one experience I had earlier this week! 

This was the first week I actually witnessed and recognized the spirit working through me and God using me as one of his tools, and it was seriously the coolest thing ever. So, normally, every Tuesday night we attend addiction recovery. It's taught by a couple in the ward and anyone (member or nonmember) can attend and get help overcoming and recovering from any kind of addiction. It's really similar to AA but the lessons are centered around Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father instead of "some higher power" as it is said in the AA program. Anyway, the last 2 weeks no one has shown up :/ So we figured we would just plan for something else instead that night, so we had planned to meet with Mona, she's a less active member that we visit with pretty often. She has some pretty negative feelings about the church and it's members, and so normally we just go over, talk with her, be her friend, and leave her with a prayer. However, we were finally feeling like it would be the right time to have a gospel lesson and discussion with her. So, we prayed about it and felt like we should talk with her about the first principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ- Faith in Jesus Christ. We prepared a good lesson and had it all planned out. Later that day though, Mona cancelled on us :( We were kinda disappointed but people literally cancel on us every 2 seconds so we just rearranged our schedule and decided that we would go to addiction recovery anyway and hope that people would come. And someone did! Yay! 

We had a really nice lesson with him, and the program was just starting over so we were on lesson 1 which is all about hope. This was the first way I realized the spirit had been guiding and directing me because, every morning we have personal study for an hour to read the scriptures, study from preach my gospel, etc. Before I study, I always pray for the spirit to guide my studies that I might be inspired to read and learn what is needed of me that day. ANYWAY, that morning I had studied all about hope!! Same topic of our lesson that night!! Brother Dylan, who teaches the class, asked in the middle "Sister Rawlins do you have any thoughts about hope?" Heck yeah I did and I was able to share some awesome scriptures I had found about hope and share what I had studied. I was so happy to be able to do that. AND THEN, at the end of the lesson, Brother Dylan had asked the man that had shown up if he had any questions or comments about anything we talked about. He had a question regarding what we had said about hope coming from faith. He asked, "How can I gain faith? How can I know that I have faith?" And me and my companion just looked at each other because that was literally the lesson that we had planned and prepared to teach Mona that night!!! We were so ready to teach him and help answer his question with everything we had studied that morning! 

My companion shares this quote from an Apostle with me all the time, "Planning is everything, plans are nothing" And that really was true for us that day! Our plans for what we thought we would do that day totally fell through, but because of our prayerful planning, we were ready and prepared to share with this other man the message he was needing! It was such an amazing moment for me as a missionary, realizing that everything I do matters and that God is using me where he needs me!

I hope you are all getting excited for Christmas and continuing to participate in the Light The World program this season! I shared this message on Facebook earlier this week, but for those of you who didn't see it, I will share it again :) 

The day Christ was born, the world became a whole lot brighter. It's up to us to keep that light shining. Watch this video (https://youtu.be/yXWoKi5x3lw) and go to LightTheWorld.org to find ways you can be that light in the lives of others!! Just like Christ, may we all "go about doing good" this Christmas season! 

Sending alllllllll my love from Idaho 

Hermana Rawlins

808 South Samson Trail

P.O. Box 192

McCall, ID 83638

Sorry I am the worst and didn't take one single picture this week! I totally failed. I promise next week I will have some for you :)

McCall Week 2

Hi everyone! This past week went a lot faster than the first one, and it went a lot better too! I'm finally feeling more comfortable out here in the field and am coming to have so much love for the area and the people. Something just kinda clicked one night as we were finishing up a lesson and I turned to my companion and said, "I finally feel like a missionary!" Ever since then things have only gotten better!

We were kept pretty busy this week with lots of service opportunities, which was awesome. Every week we go and sing at the Senior Care and Rehabilitation Center here in McCall. It's so cute to have some of them come gather around and sing with us, and they all always give us hugs and tell us how grateful they are to see us there always smiling. They have some of the sweetest people at the care center. We also go there whenever they have different activities or events, and since it's christmas, they have a lot of stuff going on right now. So this week we went and helped them make/decorate christmas cookies and we have some other stuff planned for this month as well. We also signed up to start helping at the local Food Bank, so we will be starting that this upcoming week, every Wednesday. This week though we also went and helped out an older, inactive lady in the ward who just had surgery clean her house and put up some christmas decorations. It was really nice to just talk with her after, she is so sweet. We got talking about different places in town and she told us about this cake shop that makes the BEST cookies and she was so excited for us to try it she gave us money so we could go out and get some for all of us right then! So that was fun, and the cookies were reaaaaally good haha!

Teaching this week was good. We just finished the new member lessons with Don, who was baptized just right before I got here. He is 86 years old and just received the Priesthood this past Sunday! He was so excited, and it was such a cool experience to be there with him for that. He is the best person to teach. With everything we explain, he always just says "well yeah that makes sense." haha! He's the best. We were pretty excited because we were supposed to start teaching a brand new person this week. Her name is actually Morgan and she came to us wanting to start lessons because her boyfriend is a member of the church and they want to get married. We had a lesson planned for sunday night but then she totally went MIA on us and we didn't end up teaching her :( Hopefully she'll be in contact with us again soon!

Some fun little things this week: we had a Ward Christmas Brunch on saturday. There was SO much good food oh my goodness and it was so fun to just get to talk with and get to know the ward members more. They are all so nice to us, we got a lot of appointments for Christmas Eve & Christmas, which is so awesome. We have another brunch with the other ward this coming saturday, so we are looking forward to that! Also, saturday night there was a little city Orchestra/Choir concert that some of the members were participating in so we got to go to that! It was so cool to just kind of take a break and listen to the Christmas music. Everyone was so talented! Soooo many people from just all over the community were there, so that was really cool. McCall is such a cute, friendly town. Another little thing was that one night we didn't have a dinner appointment so we just went to a little diner in town and someone paid for our meal!! That seriously made our day it was so nice. The people take such good care of us here. 

After my first week here feeling homesick and having a hard time adjusting, I prayed a lot to have a change of attitude and to find happiness in being here, and oh my goodness, I found answers everywhere. It seemed like every church lesson and sacrament talk, every visit with a member, every scripture I studied this week, was about joy, and having/finding joy in our lives. I want to share this quote from a talk by President Russel M. Nelson called, "Joy and Spiritual Survival" (if you haven't read it or heard it, I really recommend it!) He says, "We can feel joy regardless of what is happening-or not happening-in our lives. Joy comes from and because of Him. He is the source of all joy. We feel it at Christmastime when we sing 'Joy to the world, the Lord is come,' And we can feel it all year round. For Latter-day Saints, Jesus Christ is joy!" The gospel comes with an eternal and everlasting promise of joy and happiness. There is nothing in this life that can, permanently and completely, take that happiness away from us. I have every reason to have joy in this journey, in this work, in my call to serve, because I have Jesus Christ, and that is all that matters. 

Thank you guys again for all of your prayers, thoughts, and emails! It makes all the difference. Sending soooo much love from Idaho

Hermana Rawlins

My address again for those that have asked for it:

808 South Samson Trail

P.O. Box 192

McCall, ID 83638

Okay this week we failed at taking pictures so here's a few random ones. I will be better at remembering to take pictures this next week!

1. Mirror selfie at the care center

2. So many deer in our backyard earlier this week!! (we have since then received about a million more feet of snow) 

3. My comp refuses to take pictures with me so there's the best one you get of us in the car HAHA

Hola From Idaho!

Hi friends! I'm back in the United States! I hope everyone was able to enjoy their Thanksgiving! It seems like forever since my email, and this one might be a long one just since so much has happened since then. I apologize in advance, if anything just look at the cute pictures I send, haha! 

First, leaving the MTC was HARD. Those 6 weeks seriously flew by and I will always look back on them as some of the best, funnest, and most spiritual weeks of my life! Half of my district left super early Monday morning (Elders Murdock, Hurst, and Williams to Omaha, Nebraska ; Elder Travis to Merida, Mexico) and saying goodbye to them Sunday night was hard. A couple of them wrote each of us little notes and they were the sweetest things I have ever read. I seriously admire those elders so much. 

Monday was so different with half of our district gone! We still had all our regular activities like class and gym. It was actually pretty boring with only 2 elders instead of the regular 6 to keep things chaotic and entertaining! However, just to keep things exciting, some workers at reception came into our classroom Monday morning and told us Hermanas that they needed us packed up and moved out of our dorm in 30 minutes so that they could clean it for some unexpected missionaries that were arriving to the MTC a day early. So we hurried and shoved an entire 6 weeks of living into our suitcases and had to move all the way across the campus into one of the casa's that's supposed to be for the elders. It was actually kind of exciting to be in there for one night because it was way bigger than our dorm and instead of it being 2 girls to a room, all 4 of us were in bunk beds in the same room! Kinda fun to have a sleepover together for our last night! Anyways, the rest of the day went on as normal. Saying goodbye to our teachers was sad, I learned so much from them and they became good friends! Me and the rest of my district were super lucky because we all got to be on the same first flight to our layover in Dallas. We had to be packed up, ready, and to reception waiting to leave at 3:30am tuesday morning! Once we landed in Dallas and got through customs and everything, I had to basically run to my gate- I had no time in between! Out of the 6 left in our district, I was the only one who had to go their separate way :( Elders Yorgason and Sorensen as well as Hermanas Oliveros, Mugleston, and Merrell are all serving in San Diego together! But, so, they all ran to my gate with me to say bye and send me off to Idaho. It was like saying goodbye to my family all over again! Having to leave them all and leave the comforts of the MTC was so, so hard. I'm still been hard- I find myself missing it and being sad about leaving allllll the time. But I'm trying hard to adjust and look back on it happily instead of sadly.

I got to Boise and it was COLD. Boy was I in for a rude awakening though because the next morning I got assigned my first area- McCall, ID! And it's even COLDER! Haha. This week the high was 7 degrees and we got about a foot of snow yesterday, with 5 or 6 more coming. It makes everything so much harder. Everyone up here lives in cabins in the mountains, there's not really a huge city scene with apartments or close housing, so that with the snow makes tracting impossible. So we do a lot of member visits, and working with referrals from members. I am in the farthest north area in my entire mission, about 2 hours away from the mission home in Boise, so we never get to see anyone. We don't get to see any other missionaries for weekly district council or anything because we are too far away, so it's literally just me and my companion. It's been a hard transition going from the MTC where you are constantly around people, to this. I've been feeling pretty lonely lately. Also, it's english speaking :( I am devastated. I'm trying to keep up my own personal language study so I don't forget everything I've been working so hard on in the MTC. 

My companion is Hermana Percival from Indiana. She is really nice, and we are having fun getting to know each other more. She is my trainer, teaching me more about the area, the people, and the daily missionary routine. So, this week has just been a lot of learning and getting into the swing of things. We did have Thanksgiving though, which was really nice! We had 3 Thanksgiving dinners with different families in the ward! It was so nice of them to have us over during the holiday, to feed us, and to get to know us more! And I definitely was in need of a good day. This week has definitely been super hard, I've struggled a lot trying to adjust to everything and missing the MTC. 

Sorry this email was soooo long, and I didn't say everything that I wanted to but I figured you'd heard enough from me in this email, haha! I miss you all so much! For those of you who have asked, my address for at least the next 6 weeks is: 

808 South Samson Trail

P.O. Box 192

McCall, ID 83638

Thank you all for your constant love, support, and prayers! I really need it this week. I will talk to you all again soon! Sending soooo much love

Hermana Rawlins <3 

Pictures (mostly from the last week at the mtc):

1. District photo at the front of the MTC

2. District Hermanas selfie

3. District Hermanas

4. Me & Oliveros <3

5.District photo!! plus 2 random elders on the end because no one will ever let us get a good district picture

6. Me and my comp matching on our last day

7. Our last day of class as a district with one of our teachers, Hermana Delgadillo 

8. Me, Oliveros, Sorensen, and Yorgason at the airport at 4:30 in the morning, waiting for our flight!

Pictures from Idaho!

1. Payette Lake at sunset

2 & 3. Views in the mountains on our drive from Boise to McCall

4. Our cute little house

5. Me and Hermana Percival