Ministry of Angels!

We're just buzzing around on the LDS homepage and found this one of my favorite talks and thought you might enjoy it! Love ya! Sister Hatch

The Ministry of Angels

http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/the-ministry-of-angels?lang=eng

Finding Our Amulek!

So we just had an AMAZING Zone Conference with Elder Martino of the Seventy. Can I just say.. I don't know what to say! It  was just that great! But let me back up a little before I get on to the fun part:)

Bikes were not meant to be rode while wearing a skirt... I just want everyone to know. It is way to difficult and I don't know why we even tried some days. I have holes in several of my skirts and.. yeah.. just not the best time. Although, it was all totally worth it because, after only being on a bike for 7 days (7 to long if you ask me...) we receive the keys to a brand new car! Seriously! When they gave us the keys there wasn't even 5 miles on the thing. I loved it:) It still only has about 80 miles on it. Going to break the 100 since we have to go into Boise today to the Mission Office.

Anyways, back to Elder Martino. He read with us about Almulek before he was Alma's mission companion and basically shows us one way to interpret the story. Almulek was a Less Active Member of the Church and he just taught us beautifully how to help those who were once strong in the church come back to what they once knew. It was amazing. I wish that everyone heard what he shared with us.

Not much to mention about teaching this week. It's been probably one of the slower weeks of my mission but this week is looking to be the opposite which I'm super glad to be. Tonight, we have lessons booked from 6-9. Tomorrow has a few empty spaces but hoping to fill those later tonight.Wednesday is the same. Thursday through Sunday is completely filled with meetings and appointments with mostly member families so we are looking forward to that:) All of our investigators seem to like to take vacations all at the same time so we are refocusing this week to the members of our wards. Next transfer, each ward with only be sharing with one other ward so the members really need to step it up. One of our wards, the transition will be easy but in the other two... After the baptism this Friday, they have not really any strong potentials.. 

Oh yeah! Baptism coming up! Woot! We are so excited.. hehe Details next week on how it went.

The weather is finally starting to cool down. I warned Sister Johnson that there will be no warning at all. It will just be cold. That is what happened haha I'm so nice.. We were on splits (When we still had our bikes) So after the correlation meeting we went outside and Sister Johnson literally screamed! It was fall and you could tell. So we rode a mile and a half home and.. Love Sister Johnson. She was Freezing! I'm a wonderful companion to her haha

Anyways, Congrats Gunnison on your homecoming win! (Don't know who you played but great job!)

Hope all is well in Small Town, USA!
Love you all!

-Sister Hatch:)

Dear Parents,

We thought you would enjoy receiving a photo of Sister Hatch and her new trainee, Sister Johnson, from Chandler, AZ, posing with President and Sister Winder.  It is a pleasure serving with such wonderful young missionaries in the Idaho Boise Mission.

Regards,

Sister Gibbons

Idaho Boise Mission

The Master Finder !!!!!!!!! and Transfers Week!

So.. We totally destroyed the Elders. Simply put. Totally and completely.

Great Week.

You may now refer Sister Hatch and Sister Johnson as the Master Finders:) If you don't remember (and I didn't really explain the game very well last week) The Master Finder is a game of skill and spirituality.. and just to prove you have what it takes. You receive points from finding investigators, giving out materials (i.e. BofM, pamphlet, etc.) and doing some interesting contacts (like contacting an dwarf or a black person.. remember it's Elder Tingle who set this up) and at the end of the two weeks we had a total of 4310. The only other score that we know of is Elder Birk and Scot's which was 2325 and they were probably the next closest. Elder Tingle wouldn't tell us anyone but he did say we 'crushed' everyone.
Why did we get such a high score? Because of one reason alone.. We found 8 new investigators!! Crazy, right? In 1 1/2 weeks. Seriously. We knew that we probably weren't going to win because up until Thursday we only found 1 and hadn't contacted any dwarfs like we were supposed to apparently. Really low on points scale but we were still talking like we were going to beat everyone when we were at zone meeting because what else would you do if one of the Elders walks up to you and asks how the finding is going? "Oh, not very well. People aren't very willing..blah.." No! You tell them that you are TOTALLY going to win! Even if you were still at.. 725 points the second to last day of the competition..
After zone meeting is where the fun began.
MONSOON SEASON!
It started to blow and pour so much but luckily we were inside (talking to some potentials) and didn't get wet the first storm. After it stopped we got out in our car and were going contacting because we didn't have any appointments with anyone. We went over to a family of LAs (less active) that we have been trying to see for a while but once again they weren't home. When we started to walk back to our car we noticed a recycle bin had been tipped over from the storm (because people are awesome here and have a garbage AND a recycle bin) and thinking we could help some people out a bit we decided to pick up the cardboard that had flown everywhere in the storm. We looked further down the street and saw several others tipped over and, both thinking this would be an awesome opportunity to contact people if they saw us picking up the tipped over bins, we ran down the street to continue the good work. No one was out so disappointment.. Then it started to rain a little bit. We jumped back into our car and headed to another persons house that we have been trying to contact. A couple blocks down we saw a few more tipped over and we thought again it would be a great opportunity to meet people. After picking up a few more bins it really started to rain but no one was out still and we jumped back in our car. A block down we saw a few more tipped over and we thought... last time.. we jumped out in the now pouring rain and picked up the items that had been thrown everywhere. While a truck did stop at a corner to watch us down the street, we still didn't get to talk to anyone (not that we thought any smart person would be out in the rain). We got back in our car, drenched, and headed to our dinner appointment.
 Why was this important you ask? Because later that night we found SEVEN new investigators!!! and that's how we won. By being crazing enough to get out in the rain and pick up cardboard and plastic. At least that's what Sis J and I keep telling ourselves.But it was fun. Flooded streets are scary to drive on but still a fun adventure.

Speaking of driving, those of you who really know me might not believe this but, in the three months I have been out I have become a master of city driving! Totally. Boise may not be a very big city but it is the land of the crazy roads. Seriously. I missed an exit today to got to the Mission office but I drove under this one bridge and there was the other side of the exit. The roads so do not make sense here.

Anyways, transfers were this week and it was another messy one. We are now getting 36 added on to the 100 missionaries we have now (35 of them have only been out 6 weeks) so it's growing super fast out here. Last transfer we had a new set of missionaries in our stake and 3 of the 6 missionaries were brand new. This transfer we are not getting a new set of missionaries (although next transfer we will be getting 2 new sets of Elders here) but a lot of the missionaries are getting switched up.  Elder Meyer is moving to another Meridian area and Elder Hook will be staying with Elder Merrill as his new comp and District Leader. Elder Tingle is leaving to be a Zone Leader in Boise for his last transfer and Elder Williams is training a new Missionary.
On a more important note (jk),Sister Johnson and I are staying together! We are so stoked! Now the sad news... We are loosing our car :'( Sad, I know.. We are the only Sisters in the whole mission who will be on bikes.. buuuuuuuuut it's only for 2 or 3 weeks until Salt Lake sends cars up here so we are going to get an even newer car! (Sister Dickey and I are the only people to ever drive this car) Totally worth it to bike. It is finally cooling down -if you can't tell from the rain storm- and I'm excited to bike and for the new car! Even though I will most likely be leaving this transfer, I still get to drive for a while:)

Anyways, Sorry for the novel. Just had a little/a lot of extra time to write today so hope all it well and love to hear from you all!

-Sister Hatch

The Englishman, The Dane, and The Cricket

Sounds like a start of a bad joke, right?

That's what we said.  This past week we received, 41 new missionaries into the Idaho Boise Mission and one of them was paired up with our Co-Zone Leaders. This transfer our Zone Leaders are Elder Birk and Poplin with Elder Hughes as their third companion who just came out. Funny thing is Elder Poplin can make that annoying cricket noise, Elder Birk is from Denmark and Elder Hughes is from London. So we have the Englishman, The Dane and The Cricket, literally. It's going to be an interesting transfer to say the least.. We now have missionaries from Australia, Puerto Rico, Zimbabwe, UK and several different countries. I wonder what their reaction was when they heard they were going to Boise.. Hmmm..

 The bikes are going great! -ish. It's not all as bad as I first thought. The only bad thing was we set up all of our appointments last week when we still had our car so we've been biking hard between them. And skirts. Bikes were not made to be rode with skirts on..

We finally got an investigator to church! I cannot tell you how happy it made us! They have to come to church 2 consecutive times before their baptism so one down and hopefully next week as well as we head for the 28th. We are finally building up our teaching pool and have some good strong leads that we hope will turn into strong investigators. Several have been so prepared to receive the gospel, they have no idea. I wish I could tell you everything about every person we are teaching.. It's so amazing. There are still some hard days but still loving it.

Sorry for the shortness but the library is really cramping down on times so gotta go but stay awesome!

-Sister Hatch:)

The "J" and "H" Adventure Continues. . . .

This week has been an exciting one to say the least.
Right now, our district is in a competition called "THE MASTER FINDER!!!!!!!" (Yes, with 7 exclamation points t0o haha) I think that we should be getting extra points because both my companion and I have been sick for a couple days so haven't been able to work that much. We did get 570 pts the very first day out so we were hoping to beat Elder Tingle (our diligent yet insane district leader who has won every transfer for the past year..) and his companion.
The rest of the past week has been interesting to say the least. We were going to set to baptism dates two weeks ago but those appointments both fell through. Then last week we decided that we were going to turn one of them over to the Nampa Mission because that is where she is living right now. Her plan was she was going to move here after her baptism but that is most likely not going to happen so yeah.. Those Nampa Missionaries get a PURE GOLD investigator. Lucky them. We will still try and see if we can go to her baptism buuuuuut since that's in another mission.. I really doubt it. Even though her stake center is two miles from where I'm living at the moment. The other one we did set a date with for the 7th which was awesome! We told her parents that she NEEDS to be to church on Sunday (she's 9 and parents are coming back to church) but things got understandably crazy for them so they couldn't make it. We decided to push her date back a few weeks to let her parents know that she needs to be to church every week.
I don't know if many of  you remember my first letter home but my first week at the MTC I became a Professional Missionary Kickboxer! It was so legit! Last Monday you will never guess what else I am now professional at.. RUGBY! Totally haha one of my new favorite sports. I will tell you that it was touch not tackle. We missionaries aren't THAT apostate.. JK but it was a blast. Not sure if I will play when I get home but we'll see. It is a whole lot simpler than I thought. A member in our ward, her granddaughter came up this past week and she said she could hook me up;) so we'll see. I think I'm too much of a wimp, though haha
Other than that, nothing really new or surprising.. Except it's pouring right now! Super excited! I hasn't really rained here since I came out:) My companion is really excited because she's from Arizona and they really don't get this kind of weather.

Oh dangit.. I was going to share what I learned at our amazing Leadership conference but I'll do that next week. Exciting things are happening in the Idaho Boise Mission:) and times up for this Sister. Love you all!

-Sister Hatch:)

My Boise Roller Coaster Ride

I am starting to get the feel that a mission is just a roller coaster.. One bad week, then a good,  and then a meh week, and amazing week the next! Just saying..

So last week looked like it was going to be a pretty good week. Then came Tuesday. I was so excited because we were going to set two baptismal dates and everything and then I woke up and.. I was so sick. Not that much fun but we went to all of our appointments because I'm stubborn and I don't like to cancel but we got a call around 3 from our WML saying our 2 appointments had cancelled on us (the ones where we were going to set the dates) so.. Yeah I'll just spare the details but we just contacted the rest of the day. We rescheduled one of the appointments for Thursday but they cancelled again. We were totally alright with that because we just happened to find an new investigator that night! Super excited! 

Anyways, all you future missionaries, prepare for a roller coaster of a ride for 2 years:)

I just want to add that I really don't want to leave this stake anytime soon! We just had a stake conference and.. Wow! Totally revamping the way they do member missionary work! Love it! Every family is to make a Family Mission Plan and he just gave several ways to improve those missionary opportunities:) Our mission president also spoke and.. You can just feel the hastening going forward. At full speed!

I could go on for a while about the greatness of the work but I'll stop:) I'm sure I'll have more to add next week. I get to go to a leadership training this week for all of the Zone, District, Area (me) Leaders and such. I'm so excited. It's tomorrow and Wednesday so I'm going on exchanges with Sister Wightman who is also going. Super excited and pumped to see what new training they have in store for us.

Love you all and see ya next week!

-Sister Hatch