Ah, the Joys of Technology

Hey guys. ; )

Just a little back story to the title: we have started getting access to a few apps that should help us to be able to proselyte more effectively in this, the digital age. One of these is the Area Book Planner App. It's like a paper area book, but it stores all the information in the cloud, which is actually pretty awesome. There are only two problems: One, we have to be very careful what we say because there are privacy laws we have to follow with it being in the cloud. And two, it takes freaking forever to input all the information from the paper records to the app. ; ) We're supposed to dedicate two hours a day to putting it in, and it's so boring. ; ) We're getting through it though, and doing our best to make sure it doesn't affect our proselyting efforts. And it actually has been pretty cool to see how much we really do want to get out and get to work when we're doing it, because it shows how important this work really is to us.

Anyway. There's my short rant. ; )

Favorite miracle:

I don't know if any of you remember me talking about Carol, but we had a super amazing lesson with her and her daughters this week. It started off with her just needing to talk to us, to de-stress a little bit. But when we got to the lesson, we decided to start by singing "I am a Child of God." It brought the Sprit so strongly. It was really cool to see Carol sing that for probably the first time in 20 years or so. She got kind of emotional, just thinking about the words. We then shared the scripture in 1 Nephi where Nephi tells the angel that he doesn't know all things, but that he does know that God loves His children. It seemed to make such a difference to Carol. She has decided that she wants to come back and have the gospel in her life again. She came to church with us on Sunday, and we're hoping her girls will come too next week!

Favorite scripture:

I read this one today. It's Mosiah 1:6-7. We've had a lot of people this week trying to convince us that the Book of Mormon isn't necessary, and that the Bible is enough, etc. I just thought this scripture was a nice reminder of why it's so important to study the scriptures, and that the writers of the Book of Mormon knew that it was true. I am so grateful for the Book of Mormon.

Favorite funny moment:

As STLs, we have a responsibility to help keep track of the zone's baptismal dates. But to keep it organized, every time a companionship picks up or drops a date, they text the zone leaders, the district leaders, and the stls. We dropped one of our dates this week, so we texted the district leaders saying, "we are dropping Jonathan for lack of contact." Their response was a rapid text in Spanish, saying (basically) that they've had contact with Jonathan and that he's progressing and not to drop him. It took us a second, but we figured out that they thought we were telling them they had to drop their Jonathan. We, of course, explained to clear things up, but then they just kept responding in all Spanish since we'd freaked them out so bad. It was just funny for some reason.

Other stuff:

Sister Pinter is so sweet. We get to do half an hour of language study in Newhall, and she's getting really excited about it. With the smartphones, we now have Duolingo, which is a language learning app. Her first day using it, she learned the phrase "yo soy una mujer," which means "I am a woman." She's been going around saying it to all the Spanish Elders lately. And every time she does, they just cheer her on. It's pretty great.

I hope you all have a fantastic week!

Love,

Sister Garfield

Jessica and Sister Pinter looking pretty excited to be learning about their new phones ;-)