These are a few of my favourite things :)

First of all, can I just tell you how COOL it is to be a missionary!? This morning, a woman in our ward was having a hard time. She's going through some trials and needed help from Heavenly Father but just couldn't seem to get any answers. She prayed. And a little while later, guess who showed up unexpectedly? The sister missionaries! We hadn't been expecting to actually get in and teach a lesson, so we weren't very prepared, but while she said the opening prayer I silently asked God what she needed, and the answer came to read Alma 7 together. We did, and it was exactly what she needed to hear. She told us she got her message. 

It is one of my favourite things about missionary work - seeing miracles happen and realizing that they only happened because we were following the Spirit and doing what we needed to be doing.

    Mi distrito! (there's also a senior couple but they were absent that day)

The reason we were out proselyting earlier is because today is not our P-day! Because we're going to the TEMPLE tomorrow!!! (Therefore our P-day is switched, though we still do emails today.) I haven't been to the temple since I was in the MTC 9 months ago! I am SO excited! What's just as exciting is what happens the day after that too. There's going to be a worldwide missionary training broadcast by a number of general authorities. This is the first time this has ever happened and I can't wait! 

So anyways, this week was pretty good. Our investigator with a baptismal date coming up soon is doing super well. He's started saying things like, "our church," "our prophet," etc. I feel like a proud mom. He's even worked it out so that he can bring his 4-year-old son to church every week. A lot of the lessons we have with him are at the end of the day and always make our lives better. 

Funny story of the week: I got a nosebleed in the middle of sacrament meeting yesterday, which wouldn't have been the end of the world, but we were sitting on the stand because I was playing the organ.... So we had to walk out in the middle of the last talk with blood running down my arm for all to see and someone who was visiting our ward had to fill in for the closing hymn. Awkotaco. But! All is well. :)

Hermana Shaver

         A card I made for our investigator's daughter           A picture of me and my trainer from day 1

(she was SUPER excited. She LOVES frozen.)                   She sent it to me. :)

                 Pantoufles (slippers) I made for our district leader. He said he was okay with pink, so.....

Los milagros

This week was a little bit crazy!! Not in a bad way - it's just that a LOT happened, and I feel like last Monday was an eternity ago. Sooooo I obviously can't write about everything, but I'll mention a few things.

We went on exchanges at the beginning of last week. My companion went to the sister training leaders' area and I stayed behind. My temporary companion learned Spanish in high school....but doesn't really know the language at all. So! That was fun. We had a couple of INCREDIBLE lessons together. In one of them, the woman we were teaching explained that she had no intention of ever changing religions (she was pretty adamant) and told us about how she developed faith in Christ, etc. That was the beginning of the lesson. We were able to explain to her why it's important to search for truth and how to do it, and the whole time she was agreeing and going, "oh.. okay... yeah... oh, I guess I didn't have real intent when I prayed last time...... yes...." and the Spirit worked its miracles and by the end of the lesson she had determined to honestly investigate this church and accepted a tentative baptismal date. The Holy Ghost is AMAZING. Not to mention all the help we were given to understand her and speak her language!

(I just took a selfie right now :P) I dyed it darker. I'm trying to be Latina, 

but I'm worried that going darker would wash me out.... so yeah!

This week we also had a couple of interesting dinner appointments, made a blanket fort in our apartment, dyed the hair of one of the other sisters in our apartment (she's Tahitian, so she has a LOT of hair), ate arepas, made and delivered birthday cards, sang old Quebecois songs with elderly people, and had TWO investigators at church. Woo!

the fort I made for our weekly planning session

And then last night was like the icing on the craziness cake. After dinner, our only plan was a lesson with a less-active in our ward. She wasn't home, so instead we decided to deliver more of the birthday cards we had made. We did that, expecting a quiet night without any real lessons, and instead taught an active woman we didn't know very well along with her inactive son and nonmember brother,and taught the less-active 14-year-old son of a family we work with and his nonmember friend in French. (My French is suffering after almost 4 transfers of neglect....I don't speak anything anymore.) The best part of that last lesson was that we taught the Restoration, and the parent who was present wasn't being very nice and kept interrupting - but he fell asleep when we got to the part about Joseph Smith and his vision. Tender mercy. Basically, it was a week FULL of miracles!

I know that God lives because I see miracles every day. I know He's working very hard in each of our lives. As one of my previous companions told me, He's probably doing a million things for each of us right now, and we're aware of about 3 of them. I love you all, and I hope you have a great week!

Hermana Ducha (Shaver)

ps: This transfer is 7 weeks, but yes, we ARE more than halfway! Two missionaries in my district and one in my apartment are going home! So weird. 

pps:  I am officially unofficially the ward organist now. 

ppps: Guess who I got a letter from!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SISTER FINKEN!!!!!!!! It was a super cute christmas card! :D 

Adventures:)

BUENOS DIAS! 

Hermana Rivas and I went on a lot of adventures this week. Some were really exciting (like dying my hair or getting members' attention by throwing snowballs at their window) and some were less exciting (like waiting outside someone's house for 40 minutes for her to get back from walking her dog). 

        Before and after pictures of my hair

                                                                                              

By the way, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but it SNOWED. A LOT. The first real snowfall of the year brought over 30cm of snow on the first day, and a few extra cm each day since.... We've done a lot of shovelling....

Speaking of shovelling, that brings me to one of our adventures! One of our lessons cancelled and we had a bunch of free time (and our kilometer limit for our car was pretty much dead) so we grabbed some shovels and walked around until we found a car that was completely buried. We could only see a couple inches of the side, and we almost missed it completely. So we spent a good 30-40 minutes shovelling around it and brushing snow off. The owner walked out of his house and tried to give us money. He tried really hard but we refused to take it and he had to leave (in his brother's car) to go to work so he didn't have time to argue with us. But as he was walking away, one of the men working on the house across the street called out, "Are you mormons?" which was cool because he wasn't close enough to read our name tags. After the car owner left, that construction worker offered us hot chocolate. It was so nice! We left a mormon.org card on the car with a phone number for the French-speaking missionaries.

Another adventure was helping decorate for the ward New Year's Eve party. Hispanics go all out with their fiestas. We and the elders decided to surprise them by adding a balloon-drop element to the mix! We made a pouch out of tablecloths and filled it with balloons, then hung it from the basketball hoop (it's a really high ceiling) with strings to tug on at midnight to make it fall. Unfortunately, it was a one-shot kind of thing, so we couldn't test it... even MORE unfortunately, it didn't work! D: We were told that they eventually got the balloons to come out but they had to watch it like a pinata. 

      We couldn't go to the party because it started at 10pm....

One more thing! We have this new investigator from Venezuela and he has a baptismal date AND came to church yesterday!!!! This is the first time in many transfers that this area has had an investigator come to church. AND he LIKED it, so he's bringing his son with him next week! YAY!

I hope you all have a wonderful week! Happy New Year!

Hermana Shaver

 Our whole mission on Dec. 22!