This Thanksgiving I hope you will all get to have a family to feel warm and loved with!! We are going to the Fortuna’s for Lunch (MY COUSINS….I’M HAVING THANKSGIVING WITH MY COUSINS ON MY MISSION!!!! I’M SO LUCKY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and we’re singing songs with an investigator!! For “Supper”(in the midwest they don’t say dinner!) we are having 2 families and another investigator! They’re making me a gf pie too, So don’t worry about me!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Also, tommorrow we are having a mission tour with Don R. Clarke of the Seventy come to visit us!!!! Yaaay! We’re so excited!! 🙂 There will be about 100 missionaries there! I will get to see Elder Herrin (my next door neighbor!) for the first time! He’s a Zone Leader now BTW. Everyone who knows him loves him!

THIS EXPERIENCE IS WHEN I LOVE LOVE LOVEEEEEE MY JOB!!!!!!! This whole week has been filled with amazing experience that I could never have if I wasn’t on a mission. 🙂 We had two people in church and 3 less actives that we are working with come also!!! It was my favorite Sunday by far!!!

Our most progressing investigator, Ken, is 70 years old and has never said a prayer before.We knew we had to get Ken to pray before He can know if anything was true or not. So our focus this week was to get him to pray!! We readAlma 22 with him where King Lamoni prays for the first time and is completely turned around from agnostic to a firm believer of Jesus Christ. We asked him a lot of questions to try to get him to “talk himself” into praying. I asked him how he would think a good prayer felt like. Then he kinda started choking up and said that on rare occassions, he feels people connect with heaven. He told us that when we first came to his doorstep and had a conversation with him, he turned us down, but he let us say a prayer before we headed off. He said, “When you prayed, I felt a real connection. I felt something.” I told him that he can have that too if he just tries with faith. We sat in silence for a long time after we assured him he was ready to pray. He stared at us and then finally bowed his head and offered the sweetest prayer I have ever heard! I was litterally sobbing! Like, my stomach was bouncing! My scripures were open and they were wet by the end of the prayer. Ken said, “here I am, praying for the first time in my life. Do you see what you girls have done to me?!” Hahaha He was totally crying too and he ran to get some tissues. We asked him if he felt heaven, and he said, “I felt it….I felt the connection.” He believes in God now!!!!!!!! We were fasting that day, and I totally know that it helped sooo much. 🙂 🙂 🙂 he Already finisted 1 Nephi and wants to read it again before going on to 2 Nephi….

THEN!!!! Lois came to church too and she just ate everything up! She is so adorable and raised her hand a ton! She is divorced and just completely prepared for this gospel. She was going to spend Thanksgiving all alone, eating a Banquet TV dinner, but not now!!!! She shocked us completely by telling us that she read to page 31 in the BOM already! She’s like, “Sorry I didn’t read more, but I just had a tooth extraction…” umm are you kidding me?! It was perfect. And we had a member there who just hit it off perfectly. 🙂 she gave us a cmas tree ornament with an angel in it because she said we’re her angels….Wow! She’s so ready!! I can’t wait to see her enter the waters of baptism. She said she would, but It’ll just take time to get a date. Hopefully next week we’ll know a date!!! :0)

A cute YSA girl came with us to 3 lessons because she’s putting her papers in. She was freaking out because she thought it was so fun! Haha I’ve been telling her to go for months now. 🙂 She’s so glad she’s starting! I had a dream that a man in our ward died named Brother Smith. I took that as a sign that we needed to go visit him. He has Cerebral Palsy and has been the financial clerk for 14 years. So all three of us went to visit him, and I’m soo glad we did! He told us how nobody ever talks to him and that he wants to move out of the state so that he can just stay away from the church. We were totally shocked and so sad! If any of you see someone sitting alone, please go talk tell them how much you enjoy their presence and how you love something they do. It’s very hard to want to read the scriptures and pray when you can’t feel any love around you…

We had a church tour with a future pastor, and he was actually really interested and told us he’d get baptised if he got an answer from God! So we’ll see what kind of a pastor he becomes! hehe 🙂

Another cute YSA girl had us come over to her apartment and answer questions that her roomate had about us. She was taking a class called, “Witchcraft and Religions.” My first thought was, “Omgoodness. She thinks we’re a cult!” haha but she just asked us really cute questions and she realized we’re normal people with really scrict standards. 🙂

Everything was amazing this week!!!!!!!!! I soooo hope that you are happy and enjoying this fancy fall time of year. 🙂

Eat too much pie and get good bargains this weekend! But most of all, count those blessings of yours! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Eternally Grateful to my Savior,

Sister Tobias 🙂