Week 72

Mom,

This week was great! We had a lot of cool miracles! R is getting baptized this week and she is beyond excited! She came to another persons baptism this last Saturday and loved it. The spirit was so so strong and she could feel it. J the 9 year old is also extremely excited for her baptism coming up! L, the one we bought the coffee pots off of is doing better. Their schedules are just so busy so it's tough to get on a good schedule with them. We've got some good plans tho this week to help them progress so we're excited! We have the Christmas devotional this week too which should be fun! Our recent
convert L is going to the temple to do baptisms for the dead and we will get to go with her so that will also be great! Overall, things are going great!

I think one of the highlights of my week was hearing how well Steven and the team is doing! It made me tear up a little when I saw that video of him! I'm just so excited for him! His hard work is paying off and he's reaching his goals which makes me beyond happy!

I love you Mom! Thank you for all that you do for me! You can just send all the packages to the office :) I don't exactly know our schedule for Christmas but ill let you know ASAP! :)

Love Elder Ashworth

anelee likes to race me after each lesson... She thinks she's fast... But I beat her ;)

Week 71

Mom!!  I'm so so so excited for Stevo!! Super pumped his practice is paying off! So excited for him!

So this week went really well! We went on a couple of exchanges which was really fun! I got to go on exchanges with Elder Chidester from high school which was super super fun! He's a great leader, I learned a lot on that exchange. We were able to see a bunch of people that day as well here in Hunter's Creek which was obviously a plus. We had a great miracle with finding a new baptism this week! The two Sisters who work in the employment office went to the post office and had this less active lady come up to her and tell her that she wants to come back to church! So we went and visited her that day and it ends up that she has a 9 year old daughter who hasn't been baptized who really wants to be! So they came to church and she's gonna get baptized on the 30th of this month!! We're excited to work with her! We then had the baptismal interview for our investigator R and she passed! R was also a miracle, she just walked into church one Sunday because she said God told her to! Haha and she loves everything about the church, she's been reading the Book of Mormon everyday and she loves it! So lots of cool little miracles this week! We then had a couple lessons with our investigator L, her husband is a member, and those went well! We somehow ended up buying her two coffee pots off her for $15! Haha we bought them so they'd quit drinking coffee and it's working well!! Overall we're being blessed tremendously! All these investigators have basically fallen in our lap. We just work as hard as we can and God will place the prepared ones right in front of us and it all works out. I'm really really excited for the next couple months here in this area!

Thanks for the Christmas tree!! I appreciate that a lot! I love you! Thanks for everything!

Love Elder Ashworth

Elder Chidester giving our investigator a nice little haircut!
Haha we serve in many different ways here! ;)

Our investigator in her sweet PJ's! The Christmas party was "Polar Express" themed so everyone
 wore their PJ's...We obviously couldn't do that so we just wore some dope sweaters!! Haha

Took some Christmas pics at the Reisings after exchanging back up in Eustis!

#class

Week 70

Mom,

I'm super glad you guys had a great week and a fun time in Gunlock!  Erin said she loved it!

I'm glad that all the boys had fun hunting and driving the rhinos and things like that! I miss that stuff! I'm glad you guys were safe! Hope Stevo’s game goes well this week. So this week we again had a good amount of meetings and things we had to do. We did go on an exchange with Elder Crismon and Egan and that was a lot of fun and was a great learning exchange. I went with Elder Crismon and we just talked about missionary work and Preach My Gospel basically the whole exchange and it was awesome! Elder Crismon was
here in Hunter's Creek when I was here before so we became really good friends during that time. We were able to teach a lot which was great! One really cool experience I had this week though was we were over
teaching a recent convert and his little step brothers were there who were 6 & 8 so we invited them to sit in with us. At the end of the lesson I thought it would be a great opportunity to teach the little kids how to pray so they could pray on their own later on in their life. So I taught the 8yr old how to pray and he said an awesome, heartfelt, sincere prayer that nearly brought me to tears! I then asked the little boy how he felt after he prayed and all he said was, "Loved" We left the house and I couldn't help but just ponder how simple the gospel is. When we pray, when we read our scriptures, when we go to church, when we go to the temple, when we go home teaching, we should feel "Loved" Heavenly Father always has his loving hands extended, we just have to reach out ourselves most the time to feel it more. It was so awesome to see that even a 8 year old boy who doesn't even know the gospel could tell that the feelings he received while praying were feelings of love. Another great thing that happened was that we had a less active lady who we both didn't expect to see just show up to church! As she was partaking of the sacrament you could tell she was pondering her life and the things she wanted to change. You could tell it was a spiritual experience for her. I mean it was a spiritual experience just watching her. She's committed to get back on track to come each Sunday and read her scriptures everyday and we're so excited to start working with her!

I love you Mom!! Thank you for EVERYTHING!! You're the best!

Love Elder Ashworth

Week 69

Hey Mom!!! This week felt the exact same way for me as well. Short, but very long!

One amazing thing that did happen though was that this Husband and Wife randomly walked in to church and wanted to learn more! We had them sit through sacrament and then afterwards we answered all of their questions. It turns out she was doing a school project and had to visit a church that was not of her faith and so she decided to come to ours! She was actually on vacation here from Pennsylvania so we got all of her info and are going to send it to the missionaries up there. So that was pretty awesome. Another cool thing that happened was we had one of our investigators who has been in and out of town for about a month finally come to church with his grandson!! It was awesome! They loved church and are excited to keep coming! Our members here are just plain awesome and it's made all the difference!! Overall things are just going really well here which always makes missionary work more fun :):)

I miss you a lot too mom!! I hope you guys have a great week!! Be safe and have fun in Gunlock! Have a happy happy Thanksgiving!! I can't wait to talk to you guys on Christmas! :):)

Love Elder Ashworth