Feb. 13, 2012

Hello Everyone,

guess what... I GOT A SUNBURN THIS WEEK! yes it is that hot here already and I'm freaking out because it's too early to be hot!

Sister Doll and I are working hard to get to know the new area and to keep in contact with the people that the elders were already working with, and then find new people as well. We don't live in our area anymore so we've been biking like crazy.  since they just cut out 150 of our miles,  we have been averaging 25 miles per day which is great. The new area is great and we have already seen miracles.

on wed we were biking to and from different peoples houses and we ran into this guy named Joel. He is our age and so we talked to him and his friend and set up a return appt.  A few days later we confirmed the appt but he was a no show. Our fellowship left and we called him and left a message not thinking that he would call us back, BUT he sure did about 10 min later and he apologized and said that he was at his friends house on the next street over, so we headed over there. we ended up meeting him and his 2 other friends on the street and teaching them all about the Restoration of the gospel on the street at 8 at night HA HA! but it was seriously the best lesson!!! The spirit was so strong and 2 of them really related to Joseph Smith's story about  being confused on which church was true when all of them are so contradictory. in the end we left them with copies of the Book of Mormon and they were excited to read and pray about the things which they read and then we are meeting them again on wed.

Lessons like these are my favorite because there was no time to prepare, all you have to go off of is pure testimony! In my patriarchal blessing it talks about how i will help to bring others to the gospel by just being myself and in these situations I can see that exactly! This week we have met so many people and it's just exciting. We met with our new bishops and they are excited about the change as well. In church on Sunday sister Doll and I got up and bore our testimonies which was great, so that everyone could know who we were. We also asked the bishop if he could commit the ward members to pray for both of us by name daily with their families! Prayer brings MIRACLES!!!!
Guess what....?
We had a missionary fireside and SHERRY DEW came and spoke to all of the missionaries! Ohhh man was it powerful!
"This life is not about this life, its about the next" This life is a time to Prepare to meet God and so what are we doing to be prepared?

She told us this story of how one day she spent all day planting 40 plants in her front yard. she finished for the day and then woke up the next morning to find all of her plants GONE! long story short her 6 year old neighbor came over to pick a pretty flower and as she picked it she noticed that all of the flowers came out all together since the roots had not yet rooted into the ground yet and so she pulled all of her plants out so that her yard could be pretty too! the related this to our testimonies. How deep are our testimonies rooted? anyone, even a 6 year old, could come and challenge our testimonies and how could we withstand that? she talked some more about how interesting it is that the most important part of the plant was not the pretty flower, but the roots that help the plants to the ground and that is the part that Isn't Seen!!!

this lesson is EXACTLY what i needed to hear and to help me be able to find those that are being prepared for the gospel at this time IN THIS AREA because obviously, sister doll and I need to be here together!
I love this gospel and I know that its true and THIS IS THE LORDS WORK!
hope you all have a great week!
love sister martin

Feb. 6, 2012

Hello,

This Morning was CRAZY! so I'm staying in Queen Creek for another 6 weeks making it 9 Months in total here!!! HALF OF MY MISSION!  I'm totally fine with that BUT they threw in a curve ball this morning and took away 2 of my favorite wards and so now we are white washing into two new wards....I wanted to cry! its crazy how attached you get to people and areas here when you are with them ALL the time and when you are just so focused on helping them! I am excited for the new adventure to white wash into a new area and that is what i have always wanted, but I'm still very sad!

I have a Testimony of receiving answers to prayer.   This morning was rough and so after the heartbreaking news I knew that there was nothing that i could do but to pray and receive a confirmation for myself that this was a change that Heavenly Father needed Sister Doll and I to do- OH ya I forgot to tell you that Doll and I are staying together too! My baby and I will be together for 6 months! CRAZY- During that prayer the biggest sense of peace came over me and i KNEW that even though i didn't like that change,  it was inspired and that we need to be there! What a great blessing that Heavenly Father has given us, that we can pray to him and receive comfort and peace.

 "Council with the Lord in ALL thy doings and he will direct you for good." Alma 37:37

This is going to be a weird change because pretty much everyone we were teaching was in the San Tan Park ward but i know the elders and they are great so it will be good for the area.

This week was GREAT! we got in  doors of those we haven't seen for a Very long time! We have a lesson with that 9 year old's parents Thursday,  which is great,  BUT now we wont be there haha. well, we might be to introduce them to the elders but that's it.

one things for sure... ITS TIME TO WORK. . .and i am excited for that! I fee like we've been transferred but we really haven't. This week has been a Very humbling week and Heavenly Father has been by my side the whole time.

 I love this work, its not easy, but it is the best work that I have ever done. I am a child of God and so are each and every one of YOU!

I love you all so very much!
love sister martin

MOM! thanks so much for the awesome gift! i love the earings sooo much :)  you are the very very best :)

AUNT CAROLYN! thank you so much for the AWESOME letter
I will be writing you this week :) love you

January 30, 2012

CAFE RIO!!! first time on my mission

 Sisters Day at the Temple: roommates
 

Sister adams and I

What we do while were waiting for the rest of the missionaries

 DONNY!

 Sister Orton and Warner came to Annette's baptism :)

HELLO HELLO!
This was a great week.

WANTED: New People To Teach!
We are in dire need but we have seen some crazy miracles this week. I'll share a really cool one with you. The Hermanas were biking and they stopped and talked to this 16 and  9 year old boy and told them a little bit about the church and they gave them their number. So when they got home and told us about the referral, Needless to say i wasn't super excited because they were kids and there was a slight chance anything would come of it! - I need more faith, obviously!  A couple of days later we called their number and  talked to the 9 year old and told him a little bit about church and about scouts and he was SO excited!  Then he gave the phone to his mom and we talked to her and she was fine with him coming to church and scouts but wasn't super interested in it herself!  Well so.. she dropped him off at church yesterday and he met with his new cub scout leader and just absolutely loved church. when his mom came to pick him up after church we talked with her for a bit and now we are going to teach her family next week!!!! CRAZY!

Annette and Donny got baptized this week and it was just great! The Atonement is REAL and i am so grateful for it! Heavenly Father loves us SO much and it doesn't matter who we are or what our circumstances are... He wants ALL of us to return to live with him and his Son,  SO He sent his Son so that would be possible. If that's not love then i don't know what else is. As we take advantage of His atonement we qualify ourselves for that great blessing!

Guess what!!! okay so this week they announced that 3 wards in our stake are splitting to make a brand new ward and that means either us or the elders will cover 5 WARDS! crazy huh! But it sounds fun (the more work the better :)  I think it will most likely be us that gets the 5 wards because 2 of our wards are splitting and only 1 of the elders is.  Ha ha,  i used to not know that  missionaries were allowed to cover more then 1 ward, and now we might have 5. NUTS!
Next week is transfers so i might of might not be here. I have been in this area for 7 1/2  months,  but i don't feel like I'm going anywhere.  Only time will tell I guess.

Welp I love you and and I'm grateful for all of your prayers.  Keep going to Church, Praying, and Reading the scriptures. "CPR" will save your life :)

Love,
Sister Martin

January 23, 2012

Sister's Day at the Mesa Temple

Donny can get baptised!

Hello Hello!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH :) love you and miss you SarBear!

 GREAT GREAT GREAT WEEK!  I absolutely love to write home each week because it is the only time that i get to really reflect and think about all the blessings that I have received this past week. Missionary life is go go go, and then when we're done with whatever, we just crash, so there literally is no time to reflect. so I am very grateful for p-days!

So this week on Wed we had Interviews with President Howes and that is always awesome. His focus topic was on Faith, Obedience, and Works! Then in my interview he talked with me alot about that, which was awesome, because it directly applied to one of our investigators this week. One of the people that we are teaching is waiting for the 100% Joseph Smith answer, which is to know that everything that we have been teaching him is 100% true. We are promised that if we pray with a sincere heart, with real intent having faith in Christ, THEN we can know that truth of all things (Moroni 10:3-5),  but how to we get from that faith to knowing? That is where DOING something comes in. we can't just pray pray pray, we have to do something as well. I can look at a yummy strawberry all I want and people can tell me about how good it tastes, and that it will be healthy for me,  but i wont ever KNOW until I eat it. the power of Faith, Obedience and works are completely connected! It would be too easy if they weren't. 

then on Thurs we had a SISTER DAY! it was awesome. so all the sisters were meeting at the temple at 12 noon, so we decided to go to eat at the temple - not use if you want to edit this before posting it- right before. so right when i was paying for my food I looked over and i saw TONI!!! Toni got baptized on now 29 and when I saw her, her hair was all wet from just doing baptisms for the first time! this was a miracle! We had no idea that we were all going to be there at the same time but the sight of seeing a recent convert in the temple was just about the best experience that I have ever had on my mission!!! Then i got to spend the rest of the day with all the sisters and sister Howes. Sister Howes made all the sisters t-shirts that say MANY ARE CALLED, FEW ARE ATM SISTERS!Love it!

wow lots more to say with not a lot of time to write.Brief- Annette got a letter back from the first Presidency this week that said that she is approved for baptism so another miracle from Heavenly Father!

Chastity got baptized on Sat and it was just great. She is the strongest 15 year old i know! So we had plans to teach her right after school on Friday and so we pulled up right when she got off the bus and she was crying. some to find out that her best friends saw that she had The Book of Mormon in the backpack and they all made fun of her. She bore her testimony to them but they didn't get it. she was very upset but we calmed her down and at the end of our lesson she was in tears again talking about how happy she is and that she knows that this is what Heavenly Fathers wants her to do. Heavenly Father LOVES us! he was the best for us. All he asks of us is the Keep His Commandments! We are all so very blessed with the knowledge that we have. How Great the Importance of letting people- all of our brothers and sisters- know about how they can be the happiest in this life! 2 Nephi 2:6-8

I love you all soooo much :)

Chastity's baptism

love sister martin

January 16, 2012

HELLO!
Happy martin Luther King day! ha ha

Shout our to CHIRSTA STREBLE! SHE IS ENGAGED! I just Love you Christa and i couldn't be more happy for you.

Well once again because its a holiday we are at a members house really early and i don't even remember what happened this week... whoops!.

Well so Donny is doing just great just so you know! he has changed SOOO much since i first began to teach him in Sept so its great to be able to see that change in him!

okay so cool story...  it all starts in Aug last year. sister Orton, Johanson, and i are all together but this one day Johanson was away training at zone conference.  So it was just Orton and I and we were trying to see a whole bunch of people that haven't been coming to church for a long time and passing out the ward time- change fliers.  we knock on 100000 doors and no one was home or they just didn't open the door,  until we got to Penny's door. so she opened up and she was super nice but sister Orton and I didn't know what to say because we were both way new. it's always kinda awkward at these door approaches because you don't want to just say "Hey! why haven't you been to church in FOREVER?" ha ha, but so we just chatted and then than asked her if we could come back and read through the Book of Mormon with her. she agreed and so we started to come back week after week and soon she began to show signs of a very slow progression but that's still progression. well to make this story short, yesterday she came to church and stayed all three hours and was even participating in class and then afterwards she came up to me and gave me the biggest hug and told me, "Thank you for reactivating me!" BEST THING EVER!  From Aug til now she has made some huge progress and she is just the greatest and she has even gotten her husband to along with her too :)

Missionary work is the very best work ever! Sorry this is so short but its time to go.

love you all,
sister martin

Jan 9, 2012

 YEP thats a QT donut :)

 we hiked the san tans this morning as a zone! I LOVE Queen Creek :)
 adams, me, doll, and kerr

OF COURSE WE BROUGHT OUR BOOK OF MORMONS

HELLO HELLO

ohh man... another great week :)

Well as a mission we are completely changing the way that we "find'. Dad used to knock doors, we used to OYM or street contact, but now we're mostly just working with members. We have had 2 trainings this week about it and I'm not FULLY understanding everything that we need to do but i do know that in order to meet our huge goal, we have to do things different then we did last year! We are meeting with ward members to train and role play with them on how they can do their own missionary work! WEIRD but i understand the need. this next 9 months of my mission is going to be completely different then the first part and that is for the better. We seriously have the BEST wards ever and they are all committed to help us in our missionary work by starting the Ward Council Process, which we have known about for over a year, but has not been been implemented in the wards.  BUT yesterday we set it up with two of our wards with ALL of our auxiliary leaders with us and next Sunday we will train the other two wards! ohh man i am so excited for this next year and we started off on the right foot!

MIRACLE!!  So Donny... well he had been really struggling with quiting smoking since he had been doing it for 17 years and so you can see the kind of addiction he was struggling with. Well we have been meeting with him daily to try and help him out the best that we could and Doll and I even made these "Temptation Killers" for him which is really just a bag full of awesome scriptures and good motivational quotes for him to pull out and read to try and get his mind distracted when he is tempted to smoke. He was getting frustrated with himself because he just wanted to quit so bad and so before he went to work (which is the main source of temptation for him) he knelt down and prayed that he could quit. well he went to work and the guy that he smokes with came up to him and told him that he woke up that morning and felt like he needed to quit!!! so he told Donny that and Donny almost had a heart attack I think! ha ha well long story short, today is his 7th day without smoking :) WOW what a miracle. we have still been seeing or calling him everyday but he says that he doesn't even feel the need to smoke anymore! Heavenly Father answers our prayers!!!!

Also... everyone knows that I LOVE Quick Trip maple long johns and so we were talking to josh (Recent Convert) about donuts and i told him that they were my favorite and so that night he called us and told us to come out.... oh ya he bought 9 MAPLE LONG JOHNS!!!! thank goodness there are 4 of us, but they still aren't gone! ha ha he was so nice to do that and he had to drive a bit to be able to find the closest QT!
haha those donuts are def NOT in my diet but how can I resist! this is why i can't lose weight!

So this week sister Doll and I set up an "MTC night" with the youth in one of our wards. pretty much all the youth come for their combined actvity and we set up a mock MTC! they all entered and we split them up into companionships and then districts and rotated them in several rooms! one was a p-day room where there was TONS of cold cereal to eat and they wrote letters (we had them write to the missionaries serving from their own ward), then there was a Language room where they were taught Cantanese, a First Discussion room where we taught them the first discrussion and then there were Tracting rooms where the companionships knocked on a whole bunch of doors and each door was a differnt senario! it was WAY FUN and the youth brought friends and it was just great and very successful!

- i found a quote in the the new Relief Society manuel from President George Albert Smith that says " The best evidence of gratitude at this time is to do all we can to bring happiness to this sad world, for we are all our Father's children, and we are all under the obligation of making this world a happier place for our having lived in it." EVERY MEMBER A MISSIONARY!

I love you all very much!
Love, love,
Sister Martin

...

January 2, 2012

Hello Familia!
HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY TOMMY AND HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY BRIAN!

Okay, all the libraries are closed and so we are at our neighbors and usually i think of things that i want to write about but we had to come over here earlier then usual so i have nothing prepared.  i hope i don't forget  a lot of good stuff about what happened this week!

It really is true what they say about mission life that a day feels like a year and a year feels like a day! Literally, it seems like Christmas was forever ago, when really it was just a week ago. There is no time to think about the past because all I have to work with is "the right now" and what can I do right now to be able to follow the Spirit and see Miracles!  It's awesome!

Guess WHAT!! Paul don't miss this.... WE RAN A 5K ON SAT! :)  Believe it or not Sister Doll and I really do run 2 miles almost every morning so I am in good shape!  If I could just stop eating as much as I do then you would be able to tell!  So our San Tan Ward had a Fun Run on Sat. and we could either run 1, 2,or 3.89 miles (random i know) so we ran 3.89.  I thought i might die at the end,  but i never stopped and i finished in the top 10,  which I was VERY excited about. I know what you're thinking and YES we got it approved from our mission president, which we were surprised about :)  crazy huh?

On Saturday Sacha and Josh got baptized together (because they are in the same ward) and it was just awesome! This was a first for me having more then one baptism at once, which was Very Cool!  The more the merrier :)  Both of these people live with family that aren't very active so we are keeping a close eye on them, but we really don't think it's a problem because they are just so great! I don't know if you have ever heard of Clyde Bauden -if not google or YouTube him pronto- but he he is an AWESOME PIANIST and Josh's family knows him and they got him to come and to play at the baptism and it was just amazing. He gave us his CD and signed it which was cool. ha ha its not everyday when you get a celeb at a baptism.

ohhh guess what,  I turned 9 Months on Dec 30!  WEIRD - half way done and that's not okay. it's awesome that my 9 months was right at the New Year because it was a great time to set some good goals on how to make the next 9 months even better then the first. 

the mission has set a REALLY high goal for baptisms for the year of 2012. We had 1040ish for 2011 which is nuts,  and now they have asked all the stakes to pray about goals,  and all their goals added up to be 2010 so we just made it 2012! I am so grateful that i get to stay in the area for another transfer because there is so much that needs to be done. Church is the best ever because everyone that attends is promised personal revelation if you will just be listening for it and yesterday i was all ears. I can just picture Heavenly Father just waiting for us to just listen to Him. I know that he tries to help me out all the time but I'm just too focused on figuring everything out by myself that i don't give Him a chance to talk to me. This year Big things are happening and i am SUPER EXCITED!

Yesterday was kinda a rough one with people not being at church and just other things falling through but once i got into a better state of mind and left everything in Heavenly Fathers hands knowing that we did everything that we could, it all got better! The best thing that i have learned on my mission is that Heavenly Father loves ME and you and you and you! We are ALL His children and because of that he WANTS to talk to us. Sister Doll and I gave a talk in one of our wards yesterday about the Book of Mormon and at first i didn't want to do it AT ALL because church is already stressful enough, but in the end it was def. for the better. I have such a testimony about if we ask something with REAL INTENT then we will get answers. Now we can't just ask an academic question and expect an answer... He doesn't answer those ones, but if YOU want to know if the Book of Mormon is True, if there is a God, whether or not you need to get married to whoever, and you HAVE REAL INTENT-  meaning that no matter what the answer is that you are going to do it- then he WILL answer you! Ask questions everyday because there is no limit and figure out how You personally receive answers from the Holy Ghost , because everyone is different, and then little by little it will get easier to recognize those answers.

Sorry this email is so scattered but i just LOVE the gospel and i KNOW that it is true and i challenge each of you to find out if it is true or not! Either it is or it isn't, so wouldn't you like to know? Pray, ask, GO AND DO!!!

I love you all so very much! HAPPY 2012
love,
Sister Martin

Happy 9 months!

MARTIN-ellies

New Year's party?!

Sascha's baptism

Josh's baptism

We had no electricity, so we made a fort.

Sister Norton left me :( last time at Costa Vita

Twinners with Sister Doll

Merry Christmas to ME!

Yey for Christmas Eve presents :) Thanks to Momma and Sister Alger

Dominey! Ha Ha, this is one of my FAVORITE elders and he got Sister Norton and I a Christmas present. Long story why he got us those gifts, but SUPER funny!

Half the AZ Tempe Mission, at the Christmas party