Two Gringa's Preaching The Gospel!

This week went well. We are still working with V and have been talking about eternal marriage. She is really interested, but her boyfriend doesnt seem to be moving his feet too quickly. However, we were able to have our first lesson with him yesterday. (He works a lot, but we finally caught them together). We shared the first vision movie; he liked it and wants a copy for the house, but he continued to say that he wasnt interested in changing. On the bright side, he is really supportive of V, so we still have a lot of hope and faith.

My new companion is Hermana King from Idaho. She lived for three years in Mesa while attending MCC so we know a lot of the same places and such. Its a little different having a gringa companion because she likes to talk in English, so now the languages are getting mixed up again. However, she is really loving and great and we are having a good time getting to know Caldera again. 

​ As you can tell, she is a lot more gringa than I am,so for once all of the horn honking and whistles and comments are not directed at me:) Some people even think I am Latin, so I am happy. However, it seems that the whiter and blonder you are the louder the comments get because the people are not at all embarrassed to be like "Wow you guys are so goregous" or " You're the most beautiful thing". It is super funny what they say to her, but we just laugh and keep walking.  We are on the hunt for more investigators as always here in Caldera, but we are focusing on finding a family that can progress together. Hopefully we will have great success in this transfer.  

I love you guys and hope you have another great week. Happy birthday Ivory! I hope you enjoyed your cupcake party and your 11th year! You are getting so grown up already. I love you:)

Hermana Biggs

Happy Birthday Emilee!

Thank you for all of the birthday videos! They were so cute. I especially love the Aspen one because she is upside down. "Hello Im Aspen!" They are all cute and I have put them on my memory card for safe keeping. 

Sounds like little miracles are always happening for you guys and I am so grateful. Great job on all of the projects for the show. Sounds like it was a huge success. When is the next show? This is show season isnt it?

We got our new transfers on Saturday and Hna. Palomino is going to Chañral and I am staying in Caldera with my new companion Hna King. I met her a few times because she came with my hijita and was serving in Arica, but she arrives in Caldera tomorrow. I think she is going to be great. 

We are sad to see Hna Palomino leaving Caldera. She has been here for six months and although we have had our days, I am going to miss her. In the end we are great friends and I learned to love her. We had such a fun time together; hopefully my new companion will mean even more great experiences. 

This week we had a really great miracle with "V". We went to visit her on Saturday, and she had read her assignment in the Book of Mormon. Even better was that her 9 year old son had also read and loved it. They began telling us all that had happened in the chapter and we were able to show them how some of the principles apply to us today.

Before starting the planned lesson, we asked "V" if she had taken the opportunity to pray to know if our message and the Book of Mormon were true. Surprisingly, she responded with a resounding yes! She had knelt down to pray two days earlier! Now I was super happy and surprised because 9 times out of 10 the people forget, but I was happy. The only worry I had was that she hadn't felt an answer. However, and to my surprise, she  had! she felt calm and a happiness in her heart after the prayer. It was warm. She told us, "I know the Book of Mormon is true". 

It was amazing. Seeing as I havent had as much success on my mission as I would like to have, I had never heard  an investigator describe their experience like that. I was overwhelmed with joy and with the spirit. These are the grand joys that make the hard work and long days worth it. I felt so revived after the lesson and with a renewed desire to keep teaching and working with my all. 

I have learned in the past few months how to work smarter and how the gospel really blesses our lives. I have learned the importance of the Spirit, and have tried to rely on it to teach those basic principles that change and bless us. I was so excited with "V" and cant wait to start up the next transfer. 

I love you all and hope this week is a little more relaxed:)

Hermana Biggs

Orbical rocks that fell from space and landed in one of the beaches in Caldera. They only exist in Caldera and some place in Australia. I was touching something "out of this world"

One of the farewells of my companion with Maggie and Marcos, two investgiators.
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We went to the lighthouse again and this time the gate was broken! after the long journey we had made on foot a few weeks ago, of course I had to take advantage and actually touch the lighthouse:)
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PS. Im feeling 22uu:) Thanks for the birthday wishes.

Another Miracle!

 This past week went by really fast, and I assume this week will be the same. The 18th of September is Independence Day for Chile and everyone is getting ready for the celebrations. There are parades and folk music and dance and a ton of empanadas. Lots of people have come to our little city for the week, but all of the people from Caldera have left, so it's going to be difficult for lessons, but it's fun to see the city full of so much life. 

We had a big miracle this week! I was so excited! We had fasted last week for our investigators to attend church. Only once in 3 months had we had one of our investigators there for Sunday, so we thought it was just to ask for church attendance for the three remaining Sundays of the transfer.

I was a little disappointed when the day of the fast, nobody came to church. The elders in the branch had two youth, but again we were sitting alone. We prayed all week that we would be able to find someone to go with us. We didn't care if it was an old investigator or someone new or even someone who just happened to wander into the chapel on Sunday. We wanted attendance.

We worked all week to invite people, but it looked complicated because of the holiday. However, we couldn't lose hope. Saturday night we called to remind people and no one answered the phone. Not a good sign. Sunday morning I started making calls a little earlier than usual to give enough time for the people to shower and what not. We really wanted our new investigator "V" to come since she was excited about the topic of baptism, but in the two attempts to call her she didn't answer. It was soon 9:15 (45 minutes before church starts) and I was feeling down thinking that the majority of the people we had called couldnt go. 

However, at the last minute, I decided that we should go and visit "V"to see if she was awake. With 45 minutes we could have time to help her get ready and then take a taxi to the chapel. We arrived outside of her house and I admit I felt like we were taking a shot in the dark. However, to our surprise, she answered the door immediately and was wearing a skirt! She was excited to go to church and brought two of her young children. We were so surprised and felt so blessed. A member that had accompanied us to one of the lessons was there to welcome her, and "V" knew two other members as well. It was perfect. We were so grateful to see that our fasting and prayers had been answered. 

Yesterday, we had a great conference and I learned so much. It was awesome! We are going to be working much smarter now!

I love you guys so much and will talk to you next week. We will see where the transfer takes us. 

Hermana Biggs

Add Professional Tire Changer To The Resume!

Well this week we didnt have much change in luck, but it was still a fun week. We had zone conference Tuesday and then we spent the night in Copiapo for our interchanges? (Is that what they are called?). It was a lot of fun to work in a different sector for a day. I got to learn from having a different companion, but I am always amazed at how much I grow to love the people we visit. I am with them for an hour, but I start to feel like they are my investigators or less actives. I think that when you are helping people come closer to God, that you develop ties much quicker. 

On Wednesday, we went to visit one of our less active members in the hospital in Copiapo. She had been there for over a month to have a tumor removed. She was so happy to see us, and we were grateful that they let us in to visit. She returned to Caldera on Saturday and says she is feeling much better. 

We had a lot of energy and excitement to be back in our own sector and working together. We prayed that we would be able to find new people to teach because all of investigators are fading away. We decided to do even more street contacts. I remember the first two weeks when I arrived in Caldera I went street contact crazy looking for new investigators and out of all of the people I talked to I never received one address! We've kept obviously doing contacts since then, but not as crazily. Nonetheless this week we had great success. Out of all of the contacts we did about 1 in every 5 didnt want to hear more, so we were in the clouds with future invesitgators. Hopefully this week we will be able to have some great appointments. 

For Pday today 4 hermanas from Copiapo came to Caldera to visit Bahia Inglesa. We thought that we should travel in style and asked our favorite members if they could take us in their car. They recently bought the car and were super exxcited. We wanted to go to the lighthouse first to show the hermanas and then to the beach, but when we took the road there was the same protest happening when my companion and I had gone three weeks earlier. The protests had stoped but it looks like they are at it again. (Shellfish fishers against a mining company). However, the family that took us wanted to go the back way by a dirt road. To make a long story short after a lot of rock hoping and sand we made it to the lighthouse, but when we got out of the car we realized that a tire was rather slowly leaking air. 

The husband said that we should go look at the lighthouse and that he would change the tire, but after taking a quick tour of the lighthouse and talking to his wife, it appeared that he may not know how to change a tire. I remembered the time that I had knocked the tire off the rim in front of the piano teachers house and dad taught me how to change the tire, so I went to help. Good thing I had learned because he was really unsure of how to go about changing a tire. In the end, although the family didnt want a flat tire, they said that everything worked out because had it happened when they were alone that wouldnt have known what to do. Everyone was pretty impressed with my skills:) Put the jack on the frame of the car not a plastic part, tighten all of the bolts a little bit first and then retighten so that the tire is balanced and straight all of the little tricks ( at least I think it was all of the tricks, the tire didnt fall off or anything:) Thanks Dad!

 love you guys and hope you have a great week. Good luck with the shows and busy schedules!

Hermana Biggs

Our Search For Happiness

The pictures of Jett are so cute. He really does look a lot different than Brax when he was born. So adorable! I cant wait to meet him in December through Skype. Its a good thing that you guys live pretty close to Amanda to help her out. I know Brax is still in the terrible twos and another baby has to be a chllenge. But he is cute! Mom, are the glasses a permanent thing now? Hahaha jkjk.

This week has gone by pretty fast again. We have been working hard, but Indepence Day is coming up and more and more people are leaving their houses or having visitors, so it makes our work difficult. The bright side though is that we still get a lot of work in with the members and less actives. They normally are more confortable with letting us in with their families and such. That's great for us because our little branch needs some help. We are trying to form a branch family with the members, so that they are more loving and understanding. I think we have made great progress, especially with our weekly activities. We had a great attendance again this past week and the best was that the members stayed and talked to each other. Although no investigators came, I still felt like it was a successful event. 

My companion and I are working on revamping our lessons. We both felt that things were getting a little repetitive. To some extent it is unavoidable because we are teaching the same lessons and the same principles every day. However, we want to have different lessons, lessons where the spirit teaches more than we do. We have been practicing and planning better what we can ask and say and share so that each lesson is different and stronger. So far, things have been going great! Our lessons seem more like conversations and we have avoided repeating the same scriptures or experiences. I feel like I am really learning to be a better teacher and its awesome. 

We are still working on our transfer of change and we have three weeks left to see how it goes. We have been talking a lot about the things we have learned in the mission and the things that we still want to improve, so I think we are going to see great success at the end of the three weeks. Its kind of funny, because my current companion has been the most difficult so far, and its not that bad,  but yeah a bit of a struggle. Nonetheless, we are getting along really well and are committed to being better. We pass every other minute laughing and joking and then talking about the craziest, most random stuff. I remember what my very first companion had read from "Our Search for Happiness" back in the MTC that sometimes we let little differences and things of the world interfer with the big truths; That we are all children of God and need Him and His love in this life. Its great to know that when Hna Palomino and I have the same goals and the same desires we can put the little differences of personality away and work really well together, and really have a great friendship. 

The weirdest thing happened on Sunday. We were in the Sunday school class and one of my favorite members from Caldera was teaching. It was a great class about Oseas from the New Testament, and she is a really great Sunday school teacher. For a brief moment she stopped teaching to take off her jacket and I am not sure if it was the top she was wearing or the way she had her hair or what but when I looked up to see her again, she looked just like you, mom. I kept starring at her but all I could see was you. Of course I couldnt help the tears from falling as I thought about the things that we havent been able to do in the last eight months, but at the same time it was conforting to feel you so close. I hope you are doing well and staying on top of all of the activities, weddings, projects, shows, children, and grandchild. I love and miss you! Have a happy birthday this week. 

I love you all and wish you the best. No more dumping ice water on each other hahaha. Ciao!

Hermana Biggs