Up high, Down low

Transfers!! Sister B is home. Hermana F
is here!! My new companion is so awesome. She's 4'11'' with 6 feet of energy for missionary work!! Sorry, that's lame. But she is really cool. She just came from the Spanish branch and so we've decided to try to start a small English class at the Gardendale building. It's such a relief to have someone else that can speak in Spanish to people. 

I want to share something that our mission president wrote to us this week :

"As a young boy, I would often go fishing with my brothers and friends. One of the primary principles of fishing is that when you hook a fish, you must keep the line taut (tight) or the fish will get away. If you reel in the fish too quickly, the line will break. If you reel it in too slowly, the fish will swim toward you, create slack in the line, and escape. It is an art to keep the line taut, not reeling in too quickly but quickly enough.

As fishers of men, the principle is similar. When you get a great investigator, daily contact is how you keep the line taut. If you go too long between contacts, they will lose interest, forget what the spirit felt like when they were taught, listen to their friends without you around to support them, and you will generally lose them to the world."

He was of course talking about investigators, but I think this is so applicable to any sort of missionary work! The Lord wants to make us fishers of men, and I know if we follow that principle we will see success in our lives :)

I'm really not too sure about the fascination with 

animal head masks... Naunie

I love you all! Have a great week!

Hermana Adams

Preach Your Heart

Hello all! 

This has been a very exciting week in the ABM. On Tuesday we had a snow day (Yesterday it was a toasty 70 degrees. I'm not complaining) and on Saturday we all gathered at Birmingham to hear from Elder Anderson, Elder Costa, and Elder Alba. When they came in we all got to shake their hands, it was awesome! Right when I shook Elder Anderson's hand, I felt like I was zapped with this warm electric feeling. Definitely never experienced that before, but I definitely felt the power in that man :)

I'm going to just copy some of the notes I took from the conference, so here they are:

I'm happy because I know the plan of happiness!- Elder Costa

Do your best and you will be blessed forever. -Hermana Costa

Get a perspective of life on your mission- it's great, but it does end! Your life will go on. -Elder Anderson

Enduring to the end starts NOW. -Elder Anderson

Don't be too hard on yourself! You're only in a race with yourself. The only person you should compare yourself to is who you were yesterday. -Elder Anderson

It was a great conference. Elder Anderson said lots of things that touched my soul, and it was just a overall great experience. He challenged all of us to find 10 scriptures from the New Testament and 10 from the Book of Mormon that we really believed and loved, and memorize them. He promised us that as we memorized those scriptures and put them deep into our soul, they would not leave us when times get hard. He also challenged us to look at how strong our faith was in Jesus Christ, because when it comes down to it, that is all that matters. Our mission was truly blessed to have an apostle of the Lord come and speak to us!!

We have transfers this week. Lovely Sister Beck has finished her mission, so I will be getting a new companion on Wednesday here in Gardendale :) ]

I LOVE YOU ALL

Hermana Adams

Snow Day?

So if you're wondering why I'm emailing so early, just go check on the weather for Alabama today ;) Apparently, with the warnings we're getting, everyone is reminded of a similar situation that happened in 2014 where it snowed but the ground was still warm. The snow melted, but with the temperatures below freezing it basically turned Birmingham into a giant ice rink. So that's what everyone is expecting today. Wooo!

I almost forgot!! Alabama was greatly blessed last week. They won the game :) We as missionaries are grateful because if they had lost, the whole state would have fallen into a deep depression. Sorry, Georgia. 

In other exciting news, Elder Neil L Anderson is coming to speak to our entire mission this week!! We are all so excited to have an Apostle of the Lord come and address us. It's pretty rare that everyone in the mission is together at one time, so it will be an awesome experience. 

We had a stake conference on Sunday, with a special broadcast from Salt Lake City to the South Eastern parts of the United States. Sister Neill F. Marriott spoke to us; and she started out by saying how us in the south would understand her if she said she had grits for breakfast, or if she said 'I'm fixin' to give y'all a talk'. She is so precious! I love her southern belle accent. We also heard from Elder David A. Bednar, and everyone loved his talk. He spoke about the relationship between faith in Jesus Christ and Repentance. Lot's of times it's easy to forget that the repentance process isn't just a checklist, but we need to include the Savior every step of the way. It was an awesome talk and I wish I had my notes so that I could share more. But it was great :)

I love you all!! Have a fantastic week!

Hermana Adams

Please enjoy these photos from our Alabama photoshoot.

?

So I was going to write a clever title but I ran out of ideas. So y'all can just pretend there's a clever title there. 

This week was so long. It's been burst-your-pipes cold all week so no one is outside, and we're missionaries so no one let's us in. That's okay! We have a Papa Murphys in our area, so we can just drown our sorrows in pizza. (I'm only a little kidding)

On Saturday we traveled to the distant town of Warrior, AL to follow up with some potential investigators. No one was home! So we knocked on a few doors and were kindly rejected by a few baptists. We planned for a good 5 to 6 hours in Warrior, and here we were 1 1/2 hours in and we had already tried everything we planned. So we found a playground, swung on the swings a little, and ate our sandwiches at the top. 

From then on, the day turned around! We decided to see some members that hadn't answered before, and we had success. One woman even gave us awesome advice for finding people that we will definitely be using. THEN we went to another awesome members house, and just as we got there, their non-member daughter and grandkids showed up. So we chatted with them for a while, and they decided to feed us dinner. We had amazing conversations with that family and hopefully made a good impression on them for Church Members, and they even invited us to come to their house whenever we were in the area. 

The tender mercies of the Lord were surely upon us that day. It touched my heart to see that after such a dreary looking afternoon, our evening turned the opposite direction. I know that the trials we have in life are for our benefit, and the true difference between a trial and a blessing is our teach-ability throughout the experience! 

I love being a missionary! Sometimes it is hard but I almost always see a silver lining :)  I love you all and thank you for your love and support! 

Hermana Adams

(Please enjoy this picture of me that we took at Walmart this week) 

Thank you all for your prayers. Alabama won last night. 

Can you believe that it's 2018?!? This year is going to be so great!! So many new things are going to happen! Which also makes it very scary. 

We met a couple of awesome people this last week. We met a woman who told us she wasn't interested at first, but then we ended up standing on her doorstep for 40 minutes talking about the plan of salvation. (it was about 32 degrees outside). Then we got a Bible referral from HQ from this family who lives way out in the sticks! They are so amazing and they are willing to hear the lessons from us. So 2018 for us here in Gardendale has started off great :)

Some of the damage to the church- caused by
a broken pipe.

Fun story of the week-  So we are in the middle of emailing at the church, and all of the sudden the fire alarm goes off. We go outside and there's water GUSH-ING from the ceiling of the YM/YW room. The fire department came and now there's a bunch of water everywhere. So that was an adventure :) don't know where we're going to have church this Sunday.

Thank you all for the Christmas cards!! It was awesome to see something in the mailbox :) 

Everybody be safe and warm!! I LOVE YOU ALL

Hermana Adams