Sister Akayla Juliann Ferrara: Wonderful Week in Nebraska

This week has truly been amazing...I finally feel like I am seeing the fruits of my labor! I hope you all are doing well also!

Monday was pretty rough...Sister Durrant was really struggling emotionally and health wise. We came here to the TC and asked one of the senior elders to give her a blessings and then she went to bed early.

Tuesday we went on exchanges and saw many many miracles! I stayed in my wonderful Bellevue with Sister Hanks and Sister Durrant went to Lake Cunningham with Sister Mahlstede. We had 3 lessons with members present which is more than I've ever had in a whole day since I've been in Bellevue. Maybe even more than I've had in a whole week! We've really been struggling with having members support and getting them involved, but I feel like we did SO much better this week. We also were able to get a new investigator and then went to a RS activity with our investigator, Carla! Great successful day!

Wednesday we had interviews with President Weston. It was so wonderful! Just gave me a boost of spiritual energy! This interview went WAY better than my first one...Didn't shed a single tear. That's new ;) Haha President Weston helped me to know how I can best help Sister Durrant. I've been putting too much pressure on myself and not giving her enough to do, so we discussed how I can delegate more responsibilities to her so I think that's really helped us this week too!

On Thursday Paula had her interview with our district leader, Elder Martinez. That went great! Woohoo!

Let's see...Friday was definitely interesting! We had an appointment set up with our new investigator that we got on Tuesday so we were searching and searching for a member to come out with us but had no luck...but then when I was praying Friday morning this lady's name popped in my head so I texted her and sure enough she was available! We went to try this new investigator but she ended up not being home. On Tuesday when I met her she told us she spoke french so I told her we would get a french copy of the Book of Mormon to give to her on Friday...anyways, we ended up going across the street to see her sister in law (Dede) whom is another investigator that we've been trying to get a hold of. She wasn't home either, but we ended up meeting her nephew named Gaben who is 23 and also speaks french. The member that came with us happened to speak french so they were able to talk and since I had the french copy of the Book of Mormon already in my bag, we gave that copy to him and set up a return appointment with him. Miracle! It was so neat. Another neat thing is that the member was telling us that a copy days earlier she had the prompting that she needed to work on her french since she hadn't spoken it in a while....and then on Friday she found out why :) So cool how the spirit works! And I think it's interesting...why didn't the spirit tell me her name in the first place when we were trying to find a team up? We have to realize that Heavenly Father is not going to answer our prayers right away. We have to be PATIENT! That's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I know Heavenly Father always answers our prayers even though it's not usually when or how we want them to be answered.
Â Ha! so that night we had a dinner appointment with a less active and guess what she made for us.......SALMON AND SHRIMP! AHHHH! Yup, I about died. I hate sea food. I felt so sick afterwords. And even worse is that she dished our plates for us and we ate the salmon and shrimp with rice and ranch dumped all over it.

Then Saturday was just about the best day ever! Paula got baptized at 1:00 and it was so special. We were all bawling the whole time. Then we got to go see Meet the Mormons with some wonderful members. Our investigator Carla came with us with her son David and we had such a great time! Such wonderful memories! Anyways, I should probably get going now. I hope you have a great week! I love you all so much!
Sister Ferrara :)

First Baptism