So, you want a Book of Mormon eh?

Hello Family and Friends! (who may as well be family too)

This past week was a little different. It seemed as though our whole week fell through. I was very grateful for it though oddly enough. When we went over out lessons and numbers and everything last night I didn't feel bad about our week even though our numbers were terrible compared to all of the other weeks we have had. I learned a lot this week about how to contact people and how to prepare better for when things go wrong and how to love people despite what they say. We had a lot of people commit to coming to church and they didn't come, a lot of lessons with members where either our appointment got cancelled or the member could not come, and we had a lot of unanswered phone calls. But I have recommitted myself to being more. In our weekly planning we always make goals for the next week and this week I plan to BE MORE everything. I can fill in the blank with whatever really. Sister Hedemark and I talked about it for quite some time and we made mini goals to help us to not only be more but to become more.

We got to meet with Lianne last week for a brief time because all of our other appointments flogged us. But it was so great to be able to see her because she told us that she had prayed and she felt different she felt that it was true. She said she couldn't explain it to us because its one of those things that you need to expereince for yourself. She compared it to being pregnant. She said that she could tell us that having a child was painful but until we experenced it for ourself she couldn't really explain it and have that explanation do it justice. It was so great! She knows its true! She feels it! We were so happy that our day turned out that we could go see her because they ended up having to flog our appointment with them later in the week because they had relatives come in.

I have been reading a lot in PMG chapter 10 about teaching skills and it is such a great chapter. There is so much in there and even though there are different headings the overall theme of the chapter is to teach by and with the spirit. We should always be a companionship of 3!!! There is this really great scripture in D&C 68:2-4 that talks about this. When we teach with the spirit everything that we say is the word, will, mind and voice of the Lord. That's pretty intense when you think about it. That's a little more motivation there to make sure you have the spirit with you. And teaching line upon line is so important! We have messed up with that a few times because we just want to tell them everything that we know! But that's not a good idea. Its like a glass under a faucet if you turn the faucet on full blast the water will shoot down into the cup and most of it will splash back out. But if you slowly turn it on then all of the water will stay in the glass. You can also help that water stay in the glass by bearing testimony and letting the spirit teach. One of our focuses this next few months is to care enough to let spirit teach spirit. it's ok to sit in silence for a minute or two if the spirit is there because the spirit is teaching them things that will only benefit them later.

Well that's all I have for this week but keep the letters comin' I love them all just as much as I love you!

Love, Hugs, and Fist Bumps

Sister Benson

Transfers....no way jose!

Heya! You all right?

I hear that so many times a day! That's how a lot of people say hello. Kind of funny but Americans say funny things too I guess, and everyone loves to point them out to me. :) Let's see this week has been good. It is getting much colder and I am still looking for a good coat in the Charity shops. However, we don't have a whole lot of time to look just an hour maybe on P-day. I haven't found a good cheap one yet but I will keep looking so don't worry. Everyone in the ward is so sweet they are freaking out that I don't have one. A couple of people said that they wnated to buy me one but I told them not to and that I would get one soon. Hopefully today!!!

We have met with a lot of people this past week. This area is just on fire! We hardly have time to do much finding which is not the best idea. Because although its good that we have tons of appointments if we don't do any finding then in a few months we will have no one to teach! We are working on that this week. We had a really great ward activity on Friday and we had more people there than we do at church! I think there were like 75 people there! We had 8 investigators and 6 less actives come and they all loved it! Because of that activity we had more investigators and less actives at church on Sunday. Its amazing how a small simple activity can do so much good for people. Because we had so many investigators and less actives there and there are only 2 of us it was so nice to see how the active ward members fellowshipped them. It was a quiz and talent night and the quiz was ridiculously hard! There was only one question that was about Americans and I didn't know the answer! My quiz team was giving me a hard time about that. But I knew some other ones so they couldn't be too upset! :) AND one of our investigators spilled the beans on my super secret special talent of weedwacking to the 1st counselor in the bishopbric so now he is going to make me perform it at the Christmas party......uh no.

We have been spending a lot of time in Cirencester and have seen many great tender mercies of the Lord this week. One of them being a cancelled dinner appointment. Hard to think that that could be a tender mercy but it was. We had scheduled a dinner with some investigators out in Cirencester and we drove all the way out there and they didn't want us to come in because they were sick. We were bummed about that because they could have called but then again we could have called too. So we were hungry and out in Cirencester and didn't want to waste our trip so we decided to do some finding and go see some less actives. On our way to a less actives house we met this young man named Carl on the street. He was so great! He was just on his way home from work and we told him a little about the church and asked if he would like to learn more and he said, "yes, yes I would!" GOLD! we set up a time to come see him agian and we gave him Alma 32 to read in the Book of Mormon and asked if he would read it before we met him agian. He said that he would go home and read it that night! GOLD again!! Oh he was great. We did meet him again and he asked us who the prophet today was and we told him that it was Thomas S Monson and guess what he said?? nothing...just kidding he said that somehow he knew that and that he couldn't tell us why or how he knew that but he jsut did.

Caroline is getting more and more excited for her baptism and we gave her a baptism calenday with scriptures for each day so that she could get and extra boost each day to help her prepare for baptism. She was so greatful for that and that we put so much effort into it (it only took us like 30 minutes but she was convinced that it took ages) She is very special and I am so so so exctied for her baptism!

We survived transfers! Elder Tonga is leaving though so our new Zone Leader is Elder Taylor and he just came from Wales so this should be a great transfer! I am so happy to be here and sometimes when we are driving around I just can't believe that I am in England! But I AM!!!!

Love you all so much!

Love Hugs and Fist bumps,

Sister Benson

If ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work!

Well hello there!

This week has been absolutely brilliant. I have had a few trying moments but it was in those moments that I grew stronger! We had Zone Conference last week which seems forever ago now that I think about it...anyway, it was so great! We talked a lot about asking inspired questions. You really have to rely on the spirit for that one. It's hard sometimes but like the Apostle Peter sometimes you need to just step out of the boat! We certainly did that this week. President Ogden said in Zone Conference that if the spirit is there in our lessons we should invite them to be baptized......eek! It's true though. People will never get baptized unless we ask. So we asked 2 more investigators this week if they will follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized. They were both hesitant, Ingrid said that she would but it didn't sound too terribly convincing and Tim said that he feels like he is years away from being ready for something like that! We will keep teaching them and inviting the spirit into our lessons and then it may come sooner than they realize.

We also met with the cutest couple in the world this week! Ok so maybe not the absolute cutest but they are pretty great. We tracted into Lianne one night a few weeks back and she invited us to come back and when we did she wasn't home but her husband was and then he invited us to come back and when we did we had a great time getting to know them and they asked us so many questions! Neither one of them are religious at all but are fairly open minded to the idea of religion. Lianne more so than Greg but they are both just so cool. Greg said that he was excited to have us over again because we are "interesting". haha I guess that's one way of putting it. We went back just on Saturday and their two little girls were awake and, boy are they a handful! We didn't have the most effective lesson because they had to keep disciplining their girls but they set up another time for us to come back one night when the girls are sleeping. AND we are having a ward activity this Friday night. It's a talent and quiz night, which quiz nights are pretty popular here apparently. All of our investigators that we have been inviting to it have been really excited for it, sometimes I think a little too excited ;) Greg especially is looking forward to quiz night. hehe they make me laugh.

We met this lady on the street name Janneke (she is Dutch) on the way home from church yesterday and she straight away told us that religion was not something that she was even remotely into and that she had just "struggled to get away from the muslims" and that she would not be interested in us telling her that she would be cast down if she didn't repent.....all we did was say hello...haha I love people like that. It happens so much with street contacting. People see you and automatically go off on this story about how they have somehow been wronged by religion. But we told her who we were and what we do as missionaries and mentioned the Book of Mormon and you should have seen her face! I have never seen someone get so excited about a book before! I pulled one out of my backpack and before I could hand it to her she was already reaching for it! We gave it to her and she said that she would be very interested to read it but she will read it "with no commitment, mind you!" and she asked us where the church was because she would like to look around "with no commitments, you underrstand". So we invited her to our ward activity on Friday and she is excited to come for that. AND we are going to her house on Thursday to help her unpack her house; yesterday was her first day in Stroud. But again we are going to help her out "with no commitment, mind you". haha what a sweet daughter of God! So we are looking forward to seeing her this week.

We got a new ward mission leader yesterday which will be really great! We are so exctied because when we met with Joe he is so on fire and ready to do whatever he needs to do to get missionary work going in the ward. He is an RM of 2 years and still has such a great passion for missionary work, especially member missionary work. So I feel great things will come from this!

Oh man, I sure do love it here. Even though I have met some people who have it so engrained in their brains that God could not possibly exist, and that we have been horribly misguided and mislead and that our whole state of being is a fraud and hypocritical, my heart aches for them. I pray that one day their hearts will be softened and that they will see just how much God loves them. I take great comfort in knowing that they will get another chance to hear about the gospel...I sure hope they take it. Being a missionary is the greatest. I love the light in people's eyes when they talk about it. I have grown to love more and more the scriptures. My hour of personal scripture study in the morning just isn't long enough some days! It goes by so fast. Last week was just a blur and I cannot believe that transfers are next week already! AHHH I have so much to do before then! Remember that the church is true!

Love you all!!!

Love, hugs, and fist bumps,

Sister Benson

PS- Enos rocks! ;) seriously, go study it....

Football 

We are here to serve our King!

Hello Family...and anyone else who may recieve this letter...I love all of you and very much appreciate all of the letters and prayers of support on my behalf and on behalf of all the missionaries wherever they are serving. We truly are fighting a spiritual battle and need lots of support. I'll just take a second to summarize really quick what happened last week since I didn't really get a chance to write a proper email.

Conference was absolutely amazing! I felt so privileged to be able to hear from the prophet and the general authorities. I love love President Monson! He is so amazing when he got up to speak the first time to announce temples and whatnot and he said, "Hello! I am trying to decide who to call upon to substitute for me." I may or may not have burst out laughing. oops..Sister Hedemark didn't find it as funny as I did. She thought there was something wrong with him. I told her that he is just a very happy man. I hear though that he has been having a lot of health problems lately. All the more reason to love his ever positive attitude. We didn't have any investigators come to conference because transport is a problem for a lot of people and we were watching conference at the stake center in Cheltenham which is 30 ish minutes away. Elder Ardern was fun to listen to. One of our zone leaders is from New Zealand and I asked him if he knows him and he said that he has met him a few times. I asked him if he knew Sister Horsford too he said that he might but he would have to see her to know for sure. So I will bring a picture to zone conference on Wednesday.

Mission Football was great! We played out in Cardiff. I had no idea that I would go to Wales so often! But I don't mind. Maybe I will actually serve there one day. haha. I can't really remember at the moment anything else about that week of conference so I will just move on to last week.

We exceeded standard of excellence last week! Which just means that we met the mission goals for lessons taught each week, new investigators, investigators at church, and other things like that. The only thing we didn't meet was investigators at church. We would ideally like 3 investigators and 3 less actives. We had 3 less actives but only had 1 investigator. SO CLOSE!! Elder Stoddard was so impressed by the week that we had. Elder Jenkins, our other ZL, also called us last week to find out our secret. We said that we couldn't tell him because then it would no longer be a secret. lol. But far more important than the numbers was the quality of the work that we did.

I really felt like we made some headway with Tim. I stinkin love that man! He is so great! He was our one investigator that came to church. He didn't like the singing because it made him think about when he was forced to go to church when he was younger. But he really enjoyed everyone's testimonies. I was somewhat worried about testimony meeting because you never really know what people will say. And since we had Tim there I was hoping that it wouldn't be anything weird. It was great though! We were able to see Tim last night to talk about church and the sacrament because he didn't understand that really. We found out, through one of his random tangents, that he was thinking about getting a tattoo a few months ago but he couldn't decide what to get, it wanted it to hurt but not too much. He feels like he needs to for some reason. But then he told us that since he has met us he is not sure if its a good idea anymore. We told him that it wasn't. haha. I really like him. We just need to find some really sweet single middle aged sister in the ward to set him up with and it will be heaven.

I asked someone to be baptized this week! I was so scared but I needed to do it. The spirit was just making my heart pound and when I did it all just came out....a lot bolder than I had intended and Chris was taken aback. You should have seen the look on his face! But he said YES!! That was our first lesson with him. The spirit is wonderrful and can work many mighty miracles through the faith and actions of people. Make room for the spirit and you will see it too!!

We also met this lovely South African lady and her two sons who are not very religious but some of the things that we discussed were just absolutely amazing. The spirit was so strong and their understanding of how the spirit works is surprisingly a lot for people who don't go to church and things. One of the boys, Daniel, is 11 and he is soooo smart! Some of the things they were saying about what happens to us after this life were so true! he says that he always knows if something is true because he feels a tickle in his throat and it makes him want to cough. We both bore our testimonies about the Book of Mormon and Moroni's promise to know if its true and Daniel coughed. We didn't notice it but he pointed it out to us after. he was so cute he said, "When you spoke there at the end, I don't know if you noticed but I coughed. It's true what you said." :) :) :) I am excited to go back and see them again!

We had a brunch with the Pinkerton's this morning and it was great. I love them. I just love being a missionary!!!!!!!

Love, Hugs, and Fist Bumps, and Chest Bumps (just for you Kelly),

Sister Benson

OK! MISSION FOOTBALL CRAZINESS!!!

Ok so I have like two seconds because we got back from mission football late. so here is a super quick run down and then I will wrtie more next week. sorry....

I am alive. stop

I am working hard. stop

I am in a perpetual state of hunger...physically and spiritually. stop

I LOVED CONFERENCE!!! stop

I liked Elder Callisters talk a lot! and President Uctdorf. stop

This is how we watched it. Saturday from 3-4:30 we watched RS broadcast recording. We watchedSaturday mornign session live at 5. Then we watched saturday afternnon session sunday afternoon at 1-3 then we watched sunday morning live at 5 also. we missed out on sunday afternoon but we have permission to watch elder holland's talk.....sometime. we will have to wait until the ensign to find out what happened in the afternoon.

WE WON MISSION FOOTBALL!!! stop stop stop

LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH!

"Remember, it is better to look up!"

Sister Benson