Happy Birthday to the Lukey Duke! I thought about you all day and had to tell everyone it was your birthday. Did you like the card? I liked it and would randomly play just to freak Sister Haws out. It was fun. Luckily there are a few more birthdays I can do that with.

So this was a pretty spirit filled week. We spent a ton of time knocking doors and meeting new people. Didn't really get any contacts out of it, but some pretty funny stories. The stories some people tell to get out of talking to us can get pretty interesting sometimes. Alberto y Mari are doing pretty good. They are still reading in the Book of Mormon, but not coming to church. We meet with them often, but she still believes the Catholics are right and he believes that any church is right. We may have some hard lessons coming up.

But on with the Spirit stories. So in Preach My Gospel it teaches us that it doesn't matter how good of teachers we are or how smart we are or how well we do anything, if we don't have the Spirit than we are never going to have sucess. We were doing a focus 5 lesson with a less active member named Sister Chicola. She has MS and so she thinks she can't do anything or go anywhere. Last lesson we taught her we were so fed up with her talking about how stupid that everyone was that we shared 3 Nephi 14 and talked about judge not, beams and motes, and used all our intense scriptures. We hadn't been back since and so we thought we had offended her. It didn't even phase her. She started right out talking about how her husband and sons were so dumb and then she started going into evil spirits. She said she wouldn't have us over before because there were too many evil spirits that were going to hurt us. She kept going on and on about seeing them and we could not get a word in to change the subject. The feeling in the room changed so drastically it was tangible. There were no good feelings whatsoever in that room and it kind of scared us. We finally were able to teach the lesson, but we couldn't really teach. We went from memory and just said the words. We couldn't think of any questions or any way to relate it to her. There were no thoughts or feelings or impressions or anything. It was the worst feeling in the world. We got out of there as fast as we could and felt horrible. We decided to pray and beg to have the spirit back with us. As soon as Sister Haws said the words we immediately could feel it. There was warmth and light and every good feeling back again. It made me so so grateful to have the gift of the Holy Ghost. I know that as a missionary I would not be able to do anything without it. I know in life we would not be able to do any good thing without it. We truly invite the kind of light we want into our lives by our actions. If we speak of bad things or do bad things than we cannot feel goodness, but if we speak of good and do good than we can. The Spirit does everything.

Story 2: At Christmas time we found a man named Miguel. He was golden we knew he was going to be baptized, but he left to go fish in Alaska for 2 months. We taught his wife for a little bit, but she got anti-mormon material and would never let us come back. We knew that Miguel would come back soon, but we had no idea how we would be able to see him. If we went to the house she would turn us away. Last night we were driving by their apartment and talking about if we would ever see him again when we drove right by him and his family walking down the road! We went around the corner and told Sister Haws to pull over. She said it would be so obvious that we were creeping on them. I told her that we would just get out and start tracting and they would run right into us. So she finally pulled over and we got out and we "just happened" to run into them. His wife and kids were cordial, but kept on walking. He stopped and talked to us for 10 minutes. He had just gotten back, but just found out he had to leave again on Tuesday. He still had our number and was actually going to call us until he found out he had to leave again. He had started reading the Book of Mormon and really liked it. He promised he would give us a call when he came back in 3 weeks. It was so awesome! We were so excited! We knew we would never be able to see him again if he wasn't put in our path because we couldn't go back to his house. So the Lord put him in our path. If we had not taken the slightly awkward creepy opportunity to talk to him we would never have been able to see him. Sometimes we are given answers to prayers that may involve some work on our part. The Lord places these opportunities in our laps and just waits for us to overcome our own insecurities so that we can take part of them. If Sister Haws and I had been overcome by our feeling of how awkward the situation was and how creepy we looked we would never have been able to talk to him. Ah! The Lord knows all!

Story 3: Last night we got to go with a recent convert move-in family named the Robinsons. This family was living in a mini-trailer that barely had room for one person let alone a family of 5 when they were found by the missionaries. After the baptism they were kicked out of the trailer and were homeless for the last 6 months living on the living room floor of some "acquaintances." Neither of the parents had graduated from high school and he kept getting laid off. They literally had nothing. They lived across the river and one of the members of the ward would give them rides to church and work. One day that member could not give them a ride and the person he had asked to give them a ride forgot and so Brother Robinson took his kids and walked several miles through a huge snowstorm to make it to church because he knew it was a commandment and it was where he wanted his family to be. This last week the ward found them an apartment and furnished it with some beds a table and a couch. When we walked in last night it looked very empty and compared to our standards there was basically nothing there. But the whole family was so proud of what we considered to be nothing. The dad asked us to sit on their brand new couch ( a couch donated by a family that had had it for years and it had random holes and stains on it) and made us eat pizza because they had a whole pizza and so it was a lot. The kids kept telling us that they actually had mattresses to sleep on and that they didn't have to share a bed. They wanted to show us their new home. The mattresses were old and well used with stains. The blankets were thin and ragged. The two mini dressers had drawers that couldn't open very well. There wasn't enough bedrooms for everyone so the parents still slept on the living room floor. But they were so proud of everything they had because to them they were living like kings. They wanted to share what little food they had with us and made sure we had the best of the best. They told us if we ever needed anything we could come over and they would give us whatever they had. When we left Sister Haws and I were in tears. These people had literally nothing and yet they were so happy because they felt like they had so much and they were willing to give it all to us. I felt so selfish. We had just spent several hours in a super wealthy part of town where every house had a pool and several sports cars and the people living there were bored out of the minds and didn't feel like they had very nice stuff to the most humble of homes where they felt like they had everything. It was truly a humbling experience. We have so much and yet so many suffer needlessly. I began to think if every one of those wealthy homes had donated just one thing to this little family then their house could be fully furnished, but as it was the majority of their furniture came from another very poor family that had almost nothing. We are so blessed to have what we have, but there are so many out there that could benefit from all we have.

Sometimes I wish that everybody could see what we get to see everyday. I love the Lord and I know that He knows all and that through Him is the only way to salvation.

Have a good week!

Sister Probst