ONE YEAR!

Hello my dearest friends and family! Hope you all had a wonderful
week! This week was SO wonderful and I can't wait to tell you all
about it! It's definitely summer here!! It has been hotter than heck
and the visitors center has been super busy! Missouri in the summer is
the BEST!

We have seen some really cool miracles this week. A couple days ago, a
former investigator, Kimberly, called us and she said that she had
been clean for two weeks and she wants to get baptized!! She has had
some family trials so we haven't been able to see her yet but we are
so excited that she wants to be baptized!

We had some AWESOME lessons with Darlene! On Wednesday we took her to
walk the temple grounds and we had a lesson in the waiting room. It
reminded me that the everything in the gospel points us to the temple.
And it was cool to see Darlene walking around and I was able to
picture her there one day. She said she needed to learn more about
Joseph Smith, so we watched the Restoration movie with her and it was
SO GOOD. She said she is starting to believe that he is a prophet!!

We ate dinner with our Bishop and his family on Sunday and they are an
AWESOME family! Our bishop is amazing and so led by the spirit. I have
already learned so much from Bishop Banks and I am so excited to learn
more from him! This ward is super super small...like 40 people were at
church. But bishop has this vision of missionary work and President
Cato has a vision of 50 percent activity in the stake.

On Friday, I hit my ONE YEAR MARK!!! I can't believe how fast this
past year has gone. I feel like I just left for the MTC yesterday. And
here I am, one year out! I have really learned so much over the past
year and how important the gospel is. I didn't realize what it meant
to live a life centered on Christ, but after this past year, I know
that making Him the center of our lives is so important. Especially if
we want to find happiness and peace! I have never been happier in my
life than now. I also haven't ever been tried as much as I have been
this past year, but I feel that those two things go together -
happiness and trials. Because it's in those hard times that you
exercise faith and see the blessings of the gospel. I know that the
gospel of Jesus Christ is true and it is the way for us to enjoy all
the blessings that Heavenly Father has in store for us.

Love you all, have a wonderful week and happy father day this week! :)

Darlene at the temple

In the works... VC the musical!  :)

Sister Bentley, Sister Maxwell, Sister Soto and I are all serving in the VC together and got to celebrate our one year mark together!  We were all in the MTC together!