I love the mission!

Hola familia y amigos,

This week has been absolutely amazing.  We continue to find and teach more every day!  And I am truly convinced that we are finding people prepared.  I pray hard every day that we can find those prepared for the Gospel and that I can know how to help those that we are currently teaching.  For that is why I am here!

I am so excited for the Christmas Missionary devotional.  I have been praying lately that it is a successful tool in missionary work!  The ones we did in the Utah Ogden mission were very successful!  I do not sing well, but I love the power of music and the chance to sing in such a great cause is inspiring to me.  I am very excited and consider myself very blessed to take part in this great devotional!

We had a practice for the devotional today, and it was so awesome.  We went through the nit- picky parts and really learned the songs.  Like I have said, we are under the direction of 2 Mormon Tabernacle choir ex-members.  They are incredible.  

I actually was talking to one of them, Hermana Sullivan.  I was telling her about how excited I am for the choir, and how I really really REALLY want it to go well!  I am praying daily that people come and that God can make me sing like an angel for just a few hours!  I am trying really hard to memorize the songs and follow the instruction we are given, but I don´t always know how to sing better and they use a lot of technical terms I do not know.

I was telling her that I was nervous I was not going to do so well. She told me that what made a program successful is a lot more than what we sing.  She said if I look happy and confident, then I will be okay.  And nobody will hear my mistakes.  It really made me feel better. 

Now i just hope people come.  Please pray for us this week that we can invite and commit people to come!  The concert is on the 16th!

We are planning a fireside for our ward to get them pumped for missionary work.  We have a good plan, and I hope it is well carried out and that it is well recieved.  I think we are doing it at the end of the month.  It is supposed to be a kick off to the New Year.  I will let you know how it goes!

Our plan is to watch Elder Holland’s conference talk from a while ago (The first great commandment?)  It´s the one where he talks about Peter and how he just went back to fishing and Jesus asks Peter 3 times if he loves Him.  Then we are going to share personal experiences of how we have seen the blessings of members in missionary work.  We are going to have a member who served talk about her mission.  We are going to have a recent convert share an experience.  And then we are going to invite the ward to ACT!  We want each person to participate in the work.  We want each person to find someone ready for the Gospel.  If everyone works on it over the year (a long time, no?) We can DOUBLE the size of the ward!  Thats the plan anyway!

I have been studying Alma lately and I love learning about Aaron and Ammon.  They were such powerful missionaries!  I read Alma 26 today and it was cool for me because I recognized that I understand the joy Ammon is talking about.  I too have felt it.  To teach people and watch them progress and enter the waters of baptism has brought such a joy to my life.

At the very end of verse 16 I really like how Ammon says he cannot express even the smallest part of what he feels.  I was reading that this morning and I understood how he feels.  Sometimes I cannot explain the joy I feel at being a missionary.  It cannot always be explained, I think sometimes it simply has to be felt. Oh, how I wish everyone could feel it!

Con amor,

Hermana Olsen