Dear family and friends,
Guess what?! I'm being transferred on Wednesday! Very bittersweet. I said goodbye to a lot of people yesterday at church and am going to say goodbye to more people at FHE tonight.
So guess where I'm going? St. Helena, which is a small town in Napa Valley. I'M GOING TO THE WINE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES. YES. I am so excited! I hear nothing but awesomeness goes on in St. Helena.
It's a very touristy town with lots of very wealthy people touring vineyards. And then there are the vineyard owners, and the workers (who are mostly Hispanic, so the Spanish sisters have dibs on the humble and ready, sadly). Supposedly there are so many beautiful vineyards and castles and such to tour up there :) I can't wait!
Oh, and one more bit of news about St. Helena: it's a branch, which means it's small. But we go to the St. Helena branch and then later on Sundays we drive to a veterans' home for Sacrament Meeting. Sister Zenger AND Sister De Rurange served in St. Helena and told me the veterans home is so much fun - lots of old, old, OLD men (80+) with funny senses of humor.
I am so excited! My new companion will be Sister Harston, and she's actually companions right now with my MTC companion, Sister Shurtleff. So I'll be taking Sister Shurtleff's place. The only hard thing will be we have to do lots of tracting (door knocking). I've been spoiled here in Santa Rosa in the singles' ward - the only time I've tracted has been when we feel prompted to knock a door we pass or when we help out our zone and they ask us to tract in their area. It'll be different.
But Facebook is such a cool tool - we usually can find people to teach in our own area via Facebook. We call it "virtual tracting."
I never talk about our Facebook work. I'll tell you how it's going!
I'm only solidly teaching 2 people on Facebook - one is here in Santa Rosa, the other lives in Oregon. But I've been teaching on and off 2 men from Ghana and 1 from the Philippines and another high school girl from Mexico.
The 2 solid people are Austin and Eli.
Austin is someone I "tracted" into online (AKA I just sent messages out to random people and he responded and we've been talking ever since). He has some interesting perceptions about God, but he is really learning and progressing.
And Eli is a 35 year old man who added me on Facebook and sent me a message saying that he wants more LDS friends. We ended up talking and come to find out that he lives a block away from an LDS church! He's been interested in meeting with missionaries, but is hesitant to have face-to-face contact. I taught him a few principles of the Gospel, and I felt prompted to ask him to be baptized and he said yes! So then I asked if I could get his address to send missionaries to his home to teach him face to face and he said yes again and immediately gave me his address. It was incredible.
I sent the referral to Salt Lake, and they gave it to the missionaries who work in that area locally, and they went by his house. He's being taught now and is going to attend church next Sunday. He's working on repairing his marriage with his wife and was telling me last time we spoke via Facebook chat that the Book of Mormon is helping him find ways to fix things bit by bit.
MIRACLES. Things like this happen often on Facebook, too. I should talk more about my Facebook miracles...I'll try.
Weeks go by so fast and it's hard for me to remember all the amazing things that happen. I can't write them all in my journal, either...it's hard for me to find time to write enough. But then again, it's hard to find time to do much of anything besides missionary work out here haha. Which makes sense, since I'm a missionary.
Sadly, this past week and the next few days are my last with Sister Zenger. She's staying in the Redwoods YSA ward and training a new missionary next transfer, and I'll be a junior companion up in St. Helena.
She has been so awesome! Sister Zenger has really helped me to push myself and to be exactly obedient. The obedience has brought so many miracles :) This week alone we picked up 5 new investigators and ALL of them accepted the invitation to be baptized. One's name is Quentin - he has lots of cooking-related tattoos (he's a chef - we met him around Christmas while we were stapling a flyer up on a pole near his house). One of his tattoos is a cheese grater on his bicep...I was wondering why he had a cheese grater tattoo. Then during our conversation we were talking about striving to always be better, and he flexed his bicep with the cheese grater on it and said, "I always strive to be GRATER." Haha I chuckled about that for a little bit. It's kind of sad that he tatted his body up, though. "Know ye not that ye are the temple of the Lord, and ye are not your own?" (Paraphrase from 1 Corinthians)
We were also able to help a lot of our less active members, and finally got in contact with two members who have been less-active for 2 years. Their names are Bonnie and Lani, and they're sisters who live in Rohnert Park (Rohnert Park is 20 minutes south of Santa Rosa...our area covers the south half of Santa Rosa all the way down to San Rafael, but the furthest south we go is Petaluma, which is 45 minutes south of Santa Rosa...check out a map to actually understand what I'm saying haha). We had the most incredible lesson with them about Christ's life. We showed them a Bible video called "For God So Loved the World" and they both ended up crying. They hadn't felt the Spirit in a loooong time. Lani works on Sundays, but Bonnie said she's going to try to come back to church. And both of them said they want to start reading their scriptures and praying again. It was powerful.
Sister Zenger and I also both got royally lost Wednesday night in Rohnert Park. We were trying to find this referral, Katie's, apartment in this HUGE complex and just couldn't seem to find it. We were also literally RUNNING around the complex because it was so freezing cold and it was too cold just to walk, and all the people outside thought we were weirdos...oh well.
But we had a miracle! We met these two girls, Magen and Tera, before Christmas time contacting in the parking lot of that same apartment complex. They were nice but we didn't think much of it. About 2 weeks after that (so beginning of January), we felt prompted to knock a random door with this big Eminem poster outside of it, and what do you know? Magen answers the door - that was her apartment! She was really sick, and she ended up wanting us to sing her a Christmas song even though it was 2 weeks past Christmas. We sang Silent Night and the Spirit was there so strong - her other roommate, Jessica, loved it as well and Magen told us that this is a sign: her coworker had left a Book of Mormon on the table earlier that day. THEN, on Wednesday night as we were jogging around the same complex trying to locate Katie's apartment a girl smoking weed on the balcony of her apartment yells, "HEY! I know you!" We look up and now it's Tera, the OTHER girl we met with Magen. She said Magen had told her about how we knocked on her door, and now Tera saw us! She said, "Wow, must be a sign."
I was thinking about it and yes, it IS a sign. God is preparing people to hear the Gospel, and the fact that we ran into both of them again, and SEPARATELY, proves that they are being prepared to hear the Gospel. Sister Zenger is going to go by both their apartments on Wednesday night, so I don't know what will happen, but I KNOW that it will be something good :)
I think the last thing I'll talk about is our move. A senior couple in our mission, the Kenney's, are leaving on Wednesday to go home (they live in Mesa! Maybe I'll send something home with them!). So the Kenney's have this super nice condo that their lease isn't up on, but our lease on our little apartment was, so they decided to move us 4 sisters into their condo! We moved last Saturday. It was TIRING. We had to scrub down our entire old apartment and pack up things and move to the new condo. It is so big. We're very spoiled. It's a 2-story condo. It has 2 bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms, a huge living room, and a much bigger kitchen than our last one.
5 elders who live near us helped pack the moving van with our things, and they moved all that to the new apartment while we cleaned and unpacked and such. It took our ENTIRE Saturday. And not to mention today, too, to finish. The nice thing, though, is that all my stuff is already packed for transfers on Wednesday! So sadly, I moved into a mansion and will shortly be moving out of a mansion. I'll be sure to take a picture of it before I leave, though.
I'm going to miss Sister Zenger so much - this transfer together FLEW by. I learned SO much from her: how exact obedience brings miracles, like I talked about earlier; how to "work hard for the pillow" (and we definitely work hard - I don't think I've ever slept so solidly in my life until this past transfer); how to look for the simple joys; how to notice the small and big miracles in every day missionary work; how to devote oneself completely to the Lord...
Wow. It's seriously been such a wonderful transfer. I feel like I've grown so much in just the past 6 weeks. And I realized today that come Wednesday, I will be 1/4 done with my mission...weird. Time is flying! And I want to devote 100% of that time "lost in the work." It is so true that when you lose yourself in the service of God, that's when you find yourself. I feel like I know my strengths and weaknesses so much better, and I can just feel myself growing closer and closer to God. But more importantly, I have the opportunity all day every day to see others I love grow closer and closer to God :)
I love you all! Hope you have a magnificent week!
Love,
Sister Nikole Decker
P.S. Punny quote this week: "Do you need a PAGE turner?
Because I'm your guy." (Elder PAGE)
P.P.S. I'll send a couple pictures, but I can only send them one at a time for some reason.
P.P.P.S. Send letters for the next little while to the mission home address: 5301 Badger Road, Santa Rosa, CA 95409 USA
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