Sister Wilwand: I Will Be the One!

Hi!

This week has been a good week!!

So first, this week has been a good week because we have had a lot of really good lessons! We got a few referrals last week, and we were finally able to contact them this week. It was awesome! The one who is living with a member family is great, and she even accepted a baptismal invitation on our first visit. She's great!! I'm hoping that she might be my first baptism!

We also had a really great lesson with one of our part-member families yesterday. Our Bishop and his wife came and worked with us for that lesson, and it was awesome! Our investigator was talking about how she's so grateful for the church and the 'revival' that she has felt. She just seems so happy now that she's here, and it's amazing! We really love her a lot. We talked to her about being sealed to her family, and the spirit was just so strong there! You could just tell that she really wants to be with her family forever.

We've had some really cool lessons with some of our less-actives too. One of our lessons was just a music lesson where we taught them lots of hymns that they didn't know. We were able to teach them out of the children's hymn book too. We taught them "Love One Another", and then we taught them the sign language for it. It was awesome! We also did another music lesson with a recent convert family, and their little girls loved it! They were laughing so hard when we taught them "Once There Was a Snowman".

This week we also had Stake Conference. It was amazing! We were able to go to the Saturday night session and the Sunday morning session.On Saturday, our mission president and his wife even got to speak. It was awesome! We were really excited to get to see them one last time before they leave.

One last picture of the Montalban Zone with President & Sister Sperry before the last transfers. President & Sister Sperry will finish their time in the Philippines at the end of June.

On Sunday, I absolutely loved the talks! We had Elder Nielson (our area Presidency, getting released this year) and his wife speak. They were great! They talked a lot about temples and other inspiring things. One thing that I love was from Sister Nielson. She talked about Filipino culture and how they sometimes say things in English in a different way than we would. One of those phrases is "I will be the one." I really love that phrase! How true should that be for us? We should all be the ones to share the gospel, to go to church, to read our scriptures, to pray... It's not anyone else's job, nor should it be. We need to be the ones to change our lives, to change our attitude, to do the things that we should be doing. We need to do what the Lord wants us to do. Not what he wants our neighbor to do, or what he wants someone else to do, but we need to follow his will for us.

I've definitely learned that a lot out here in my mission. Sometimes things happen that we think shouldn't happen. Sometimes we think, "Why me?" But we shouldn't. We need to trust that the Lord knows way better than we do. He can see our future and our past better than we ever can, and we need to trust that He knows why we go through certain trials. Out here, we definitely have lots of trials, but it's so much easier if we just believe that everything will work out. And eventually it will! Maybe it won't be right away, maybe it'll be years down the road, and maybe it won't be in this life, but everything will work out. I know it will.

I love you all! I hope you are all doing amazing things! Go do something fun, and go find someone to share the gospel with.

Love,

Sister Wilwand

Oops, I forgot to tell you about today. We had a really good day today!

Sister Wilwand says "You might be wondering why I'm the only one in a batman shirt instead of superman... Let's just say we had a little... mix-up over the shirts, and I ended being the only one in Batman. But hey, aren't we looking good? =D"

First, we had a super fun zone activity. We did a little mini olympics and had a bunch of different games. We had hot dog eating, water chugging, hula hoop battles, doughnut eating, did limbo and we played volleyball and frisbee out in the bukid. I think bukid means farm. Something like that. Neither me or my kabahays were good enough to get medals, especially since we had a lot of Elders, but it was fun anyways. I realized that I can actually hula hoop! Sort of... It was way fun! I think we all got sunburned.. Or at least all of the white people, but it was worth it! Maybe I'll get a tan out of this burn...