Monday, January 5, 2015

Week 69 in the Philippines - "new years resolutions"

My dear family!

Happy new year! Welcome to the exciting year of 2015!!! Woohoo! How was your new year celebration??? You should all feel sad for missing out on macaroni salad that comes with new year celebration here:) Macaroni salad here is not what you would imagine. It consists of macaroni pasta noodles, sweet cream, fruit cocktail, cheese and sometimes corn. Ya it's not too bad, but when every single home you
visit on new years day, serves you a big bowl of it, you start to feel kind a sick to your stomach:)

Well, this week was pretty hilarious. We just had funny experiences every single day. I love Sister Respicio because we just laugh at everything. One such experience went like this: So we were walking and Sister Respicio pointed to a sister and said "That's Sister Rios", who is a LA I haven't met yet. So I approached who I thought Sister Respicio had pointed to, and just started talking to this sister like
we were old best friends, thinking she was a LA member who already knew Sister Respicio... As we were talking, Sister Respicio asks her "Where do you live?" Which made me all confused because I thought she
already knew where she lived...So then I figured out this was not the sister she had pointed to and had to introduce ourselves and ask this sister her name... But the crazy part is, she turned out to be a member after all! She hadn't been to church in years, so we got to invite her to come try again. So even though Sister Respicio was laughing so hard at me for approaching the wrong person, someone we had both never met before (she thought maybe I knew the sister from a previous area), and pretending we were close friends and everything,

Heavenly Father purposely put her in our path so she could be reminded of her membership in the church:) He sure works in funny ways sometimes, or maybe just through unobservant people off in their own world;)


One other experience I would love to share with you all, is about Nany Maria, who is in the picture I am sending. She is Bishop Quinquero's mother, who is one of our investigators. She attended church for the first time last week and again yesterday. But the cool experience was on Tuesday. We were teaching her lesson 3, planning on extending baptism at the end, but she beat us to it! We were talking about the importance of baptism, and she stopped us and said "Sisters, I am ready and want to get baptized". And then when we extended the day for Jan 31, she was like, "how about January 25! On my 80th birthday!" 

She had it all figured out:) It has been so amazing this week to see the change in her though. She used to be hesitant about everything until she finally got to church! and now everything is just coming together! She is so excited for her baptism, telling everyone, she even invited another one of our investigators to get baptized with her! Every time we visit her now, she is so much happier-the power of the gospel:)

Well, I just want to leave you with a quote I read by Elder Cook from his talk about choices from the priesthood session of last conference. He said "...I encourage everyone, both young and old, to review goals and objectives and strive to exercise greater discipline. Our daily conduct and choices should be consistent with our goals. We need to
rise above rationalizations and distractions. It is especially important to make choices consistent with our covenants to serve Jesus Christ in righteousness. We must not take our eyes off or drop that ball for any reason...In all things we should remember that being "valiant in the testimony of Jesus" is the great dividing test between the celestial and terrestrial kingdoms."

I thought this was such a good reminder as we make our new years resolutions for the year 2015! I love you all! Thanks for your examples to me and to everyone! I love you all tons and tons!

Love, Sister Malyon


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