Hermana Rosie Nissinen: Sugar? Pushups? Hmm...

Hey fam!

Gee whiz, Monday already. What a solid week it's been!

Like I mentioned last week, Elder Dyches from the 70 came and we had a mission conference! He was way awesome. He served as mission President in Portland OR in 2008 I think. I ran up after and told him I'm from Hillsboro and we got to talk about some people we each knew and what-not! Remember when missionaries use to leave those little white shirts in our bathrooms made out of notecards? Haha yeah that was his idea! He taught all of us how to make those and asked that we would start doing that. Pretty funny! But he gave awesome trainings on the importance of the Book of Mormon. I liked when he said, "If you read the Book of Mormon every single day, you won't fall away." We decided to take this advice and read with our progressing investigators/recent converts everyday. For example, with one of our investigators Pablo, we call him at night and read a few verses out of the Book of Mormon with him and talk about it. After a few days, we have now delegated that to a ward member to start doing with him! It's been real cool. He also taught about the importance of the sacrament and how as missionaries, we have to focus on getting people to church. Before church, I went through our phone and area book and texted/called probably 40-50 people to come to church... and not a single one came. Lol. Hey, whatever.

We found out some sad news this week. One of our investigators Diego, his older brother Daniel who is 24 and is a less-active member and someone who we have been teaching unexpectedly died on Thursday. We went over on Friday night to give flowers and talk to their mom. They don't know how he died :( It's real hard for their family. Hermana Meredith and I will be playing a musical number at his funeral this week. I'm seriously so grateful to have a testimony that families are forever!! Please pray for this family!

We totally ran out of miles for the month, so we biked! Haha on Wednesday we biked 16.1 miles😁

My favorite conference talk this week was from this last conference by Elder Lynn G. Robbins called "Until Seventy Times Seven." I love when he says, "Our success isn't going from failure to failure, but growing from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm." I know I can focus on this more in missionary work because we see a heck of a lot of failures! But I can learn to grow from them, rather than just dwelling on it.

Sister Knapp (one of the English sisters we live with) and I decided to have a competition. Neither one of us are going to eat sugar until the end of the transfer unless offered by members, and even then only just a little bit (not going back for more). If we do, then that night we have to do 50 pushups. We started on Saturday. That night we went to a birthday party, and I had told some of the members I'm not going to drink coke or eat the sugar for a competition, but then they all started offering it to me and made me eat it! I have a few videos. It's pretty funny.

Today for P-day we are taking the big van and going bowling! It should be real fun.

HAHA so... at the veteran's home we made a collage about ourselves and cut pictures from magazines and this guy named Neil just cut pictures of the women and glued them and it was so so funny