Last transfer!

So we got transfer calls this morning and I'm staying here with Hermana Maxfield!!!! We get to finish together and we're SO EXCITED!!!! But the elders from our ward both got transferred out so we'll miss them but they're sending the zone leaders out here so we're excited about that! It'll be a really great transfer we're so excited :D :D 

Pamela came to church on Sunday which was a miracle! I think I told you guys about her last week, how she was the less active member we found who lived in our building and who said she would come back this week?? yeah her haha. And she did! She came back this week! So that was amazing to see. 

Jorge and Jessica from Ñuñoa also came to our ward this week so it was super fun to see them! They told me they had a surprise for me outside so told me to close my eyes. When we got outside I opened my eyes and standing there was Jorge Vilches and Jaime!!! Two of the recent converts from Ñuñoa I got to teach. It was sooooo good to see them again. It brought back so many memories of miracles and gave me so much hope for these weeks we have ahead of us. 

We're still looking for new investigators which is always a challenge over here but we started an English class and Fabiola (recent convert from last month) is putting it all over Facebook and is inviting all the people from her work so we're really excited about that! Hopefully we'll be able to meet lots of new people through that. :D 

Our mission also just called two sister missionaries to be the Sister Training Leaders over all the Sisters in the mission so they'll be kind of like the Sister APs! So that's cool :D Hermana Maxfield and I were watching the district yesterday and I actually totally called that that was gonna happen in our mission too and I even guessed which sisters they would be haha. So basically I'm psychic. 

So right now we're also teaching a man named Roberto. Maybe I mentioned him before not sure though. But he is married to a member and so all of his in-laws are members and his daughters. We've been visiting him off and on during the whole time I've been in this ward and the missionaries before us too. He started off having a lot of doubts and things but we've seen a lot of progress in him that we're really excited about. The lesson last time got a little of track last time and kind of turned into something more philosophical. So then we read some of Christ's words from 3 Nephi 11 and it was amazing how that brought the spirit back and put us on track again. Another experience to show me the power of the scriptures. We testified of the simplicity of the gospel and everything seemed to clarify. It was beautiful. 

I'm realizing more and more everyday how important is to be rooted in Christ. That's pretty much all I was thinking about during personal study this morning. It's crazy how different I feel when I'm rooted in Christ versus in something or someone else. We might even be focusing on something good, but its just not the same as focusing on Christ. There's a spirit that goes along with that that I felt during my prayer afterwards that just felt eternal. There's no other way to describe it. I knew it would always be there. When we don't feel it, its always because we were the ones to leave it for a while. And when we come back we realize that. We feel it and its undeniable.

Love you guys so so so much :D

Sending allllll my love,

Hermana Cannon II

1. Us at the temple with Ruben who is investigating :D

 

2. Me with the awesome Ñuñoa converts at church on Sunday!
3. No explanation needed. (Cheetah jammies for Christmas, from home.)
 

Hello!

From Sarah's letter dated January 5, 2016

 

Hey people :D

We have walked SOOOO much this week!!! It's been crazy. In Chile it's super common for people to go on a 1 or 2 month long vacation for the summer so that is just GREAT for us missionaries haha. Idk if you guys remember Monica?? We've been teaching her for about a month and had a really amazing lesson with her this last week. We read the introduction to The Book of Mormon with her and got to explain again a little bit about the Restoration. I love teaching because that's when my testimony grows the most because of how strong the spirit can get. We saw the wheels turning in her mind and thanks to her spiritually receptive heart she commited to read The Book of Mormon without us even asking her to. Then she told us she was leaving on vacation for the month haha so that was a bummer. At least she'll have lots of time to read. :)

Oh yeah another reason why the lesson was so special was because that morning during personal study, I decided to pray again to ask if The Book of Mormon was true and if this was really the restored gospel. I think it was the first time I felt something right there, directly after praying. It felt like a wave of warm peace that started at my head and then just covered my whole body. I just sat there, glowing for a while and the words came to me that felt like a nodding head saying, "it's true."

That was the spirit we brought with us to the lesson which I think was also communicated to Monica.

Things like this remind me that what we're doing is so much bigger than ourselves... We passed by some pictures of the universe when passing by an astronomy lab in our area this week and it made me feel sooooo tiny. I've also found that feeling small is a really great way to cure anxiety haha. Our worries and troubles just somehow seem to shrink when we put the universe next to them. And then we think, "My God, how great thou art".

He is great. :)

We also started teaching a woman this week named Pamela. We contacted her in our elevator one day in our apartment building and as she was leaving, kind of just blurted out that she was actually a member of the church but had since stopped going. She gave us her apartment number and said we could come back later. So this week, after having all our plans fall through for the day, we both felt like it would be a good time to stop by. Turns out it was all meant to be because when we stepped out of the elevator, she was just leaving her room to take her laundry down to the washers. She was super surprised haha but you could tell she was happy to see us.

We ended up teaching about repentance, redemption, and forgiveness. Hna. Maxfield and I both shared some really personal experiences about those things. She had expressed to us how she always felt that the gospel was true, but somehow just fell away without really knowing why. She had gotten into drinking a little bit and a few other things and said she doubted whether or not she would be able to come back. I think the path looks far away sometimes because we forget that Christ will pick us up to bring us back wherever we are. We don't have to do any of it alone. We just have to take his hand.

She said she would come back this Sunday. :) It's been years.

I love you guys so much and think of you everyday. :)

Prayers, hugs, and love,

Hermana Cannon II

1. We climb a hill for P-day today as a zone! We sang hymns and had a testimony meeting up there. It was awesome. :)

2. Because we're buff.
 

3. Las Condes zone and the beautiful view and the nasty smog

Merry Christmas!

Hey everyone!!

So crazy it's almost Christmas haha. Its blazing hot over here just like last year. :D So its weird and not feeling like 100% Christmas but still an amazing time of year. When we talk to people in the street they've been seeming more willing to listen about Christ so maybe that's thanks to the Christmas spirit. :) 

This week has been crazy! First it was Hermana Maxfield's birthday so we celebrated that a little which was super fun. I made her a delicious breakfast of pancakes and an omelet and everyone we visited that day knew it was her birthday and gave us tooooonssss of food haha so it was fun. It was a great day. And the lessons we had that day we're really great too. We actually got to teach Matias's brother, who isn't a member and had a really powerful lesson about Christ and the true meaning of Christmas. We shared experiences about how we had felt his presence and power in our lives and it was really cool. I shared about how I've found strength in him during hard times and it's actually in the middle of those times that I get to know him more.

Fabiola's getting baptized this week so we're super excited about that. She's just amazing. All we did was teach haha. She found US. She's the one that came to church all by herself and that's how we met her. She's a inspiration. 

Love you guys so much! Enjoy some pics XD

 1. Delicious gluten free dairy free made by the lovely Hermana Young. We had a zone activity with all the sisters from our zone last pday. Good times XD

2. The sisters from my zone LAS CONDES

 

3. Hermana Maxfield's birthdayyyyyyy!

 

4. Ran into Nena and Ettiene from Ñuñoa on Saturday at a Christmas concert! So good to see them. We would visit them all the time in Ñuñoa and would always share messages about missionary work and how amazing our missions have been for us in our lives hoping that he would make the decision to serve. So then I saw him there and he told me he just decided to go on a mission and just put his papers in!!! So that was AMAZING. :) 

 

Love you guys! Have the best Christmas ever!

Hermana Cannon 

Some pics :)

From Sarah's letter dated Dec 9, 2015


1. Ignacia got baptized this week! Hermana Maxfield and I taught her so we got to see her baptism even though she got baptized in another ward. Those elders are the APs. She got baptized in their ward. 

2. We had to say goodbye to Adrian last night because he got a got in another city and is moving today. :( But he is excited to meet the missionaries over there and get baptized over there. He bore his testimony on Sunday after a "psst you should go up there" from me haha. Everyone was really touched by his testmiony and his conversion and were still talking to us about it two days later. He's changed a lot and we're really sad to see him go, but happy that he found a good job and exciting to see how he progresses in the new ward. 

 

 

 

We found 4 new investigators this week and each one was a miracle. 

I have never felt closer to my Savior than I do now. He truly is my Savior. He is life. He is the solution. I love the simplicity of the gospel. I hope I can proudly proclaim the rest of my life the testimony I've gained that he is my Savior and this is his restored church. He is the answer.

All my love,

Hermana Cannon

Transfers!

From Sarah's message dated Dec 1, 2015

Hey fam! :)

Good news!! We got transfer calls today and Hermana Maxfield and I will be staying together another transfer yayyy!!!!!!!!!!! We were soooooo excited when they told us we'd be staying together haha. Now we get to be together for her birthday, and Christmas, and New Years!! Plus Adrian and Fabiola are scheduled to be baptized at the beginning of January so that would've been sad if one of us didn't get to be there for that. So yeah! We're happyyy!! :D

Okay so miraclessssssssssss

This Sunday was stake conference and this way happy super bubbly girl comes up to us and just introduces herself and said she was an old investgator of a set of missionaries that used to be in our ward and that now she was ready to get baptized! haha so crazy!!!! So we're super excited to start teaching her this week :D Her name's Jamie. 

Okay so then we had a really awesome lesson with this guy named Christian. We met him on the street last week and had our first lesson with him yesterday. He seemed super nice and friendly so we were excited to teach him. Then as the lesson gets going we realize that he seemed to only want to meet with us to prove us wrong. He talked for a reallllly long time about lots of different things about different churches and how he believed that no one really knew what they were talking about. We listened as carefully as we could and I was just praying the entire time that the spirit would let me know what to say. I prayed that God would give us charity and let that love come across through our eyes and our tone so that he'd be able to feel it and know how much God loves him. After a while he stopped talking and when the spirit told me it was time, I bore my testimony. I told him about how the spirit works and how through it we can learn the truth. I told him about how I went through a time in my life where I didn't really have faith either, and was tempted and considering to just give up my faith... but at the end of the day I couldn't deny what I had felt. My heart knew things that my mind couldn't explain and that's why I was here on a mission. I had felt way too many times the love of God, the power of the priesthood in a father's blessing, the miraculous one-on-one communication I get with God through the Book of Mormon, the sensation of being redeemed through Christ's Atonement, and the glimpse of hope in the future that I get from having sacred experiences in the temple. These things are true and my heart knows it. 

By the end of the lesson he was soooo different! We had marked a couple chapters in his Book of Mormon to read and before we got the chance to schedule the next appointment with him he said he would love it if we could meet again next week. 

So that was amazing!! :) I'm learning more and more everyday the power of prayer and the importance of the spirit. It really is only through the spirit that we are converted. It overrides our doubts. Sometimes we are still left with questions, but also a newfound security. 

I love the spirit. :) 

Love you guys lotssss!! :) Have an amazing week!

Hermana Cannon II    

1. Me with a cute pineapple turkey made by the Traverso family who had us over for Thanksgiving :D

2. We have a CHRISTMAS TREE! And that's hermana Maxfield's cute face.

I'm thankful for MIRACLES :D

Okay so miracles!! 

Oh yeah also HAPPY THANKSGIVING this week!!! haha. Its not celebrated here in Chile obviously hah but luckily we have an awesome family in our ward who spent time in the states and understand Thanksgiving who invited us over for dinner that day. They told us on Sunday they already bought the turkey so I guess it'll just be super awesome! haha. We're excited. Plus they invited a non member and a less active member so we're even MORE excited! haha. It'll be great. Also today we had a Thanksgiving zone activity which was super fun. :) It was the first zone activity of my whole mission because my other mission president didn't allow them haha. It was super fun! :)

Anyways. Miracles! Remember Fabiola? Well she just accepted a baptismal date! That lesson was so incredibly amazing. The spirit was soooo strong. She started describing a feeling she had been having and she asked us if we had those feelings too or if she was just crazy haha. We said OF COURSE we've felt that before and we taught her about how to recognize the spirit. Then we taught her about the gift of the holy ghost and how she will be able to receive it when she is baptized. Then she just said, "about that... when can I do it?? Do I have to wait a few months or something??" And then my heart basically just exploded and I told her that Hermana Maxfield and I had actually been thinking and praying about her and we felt that she would be prepared to be baptized January 2 and then we invited her to be baptized that day and she said yes! New year new life. It was sooo amazing. Her testimony is incredible and will just deepen every day as she reads and searches The Book of Mormon. 

Sooo amazing. 

Then today we ran into Adrian on the way over here to write you guys haha and we just got talking and all the sudden came up with this amazing plan where he is going to talk to his brother about the church, give him a Book of Mormon, then he will get back together with his wife and they can get married and then they can both get baptized together with Adrian and then go to the temple and get sealed! So that is our plan now haha. After saying all that Adrian was just like, man, that would be such a dream for me. Then he said he would talk to his brother so hopefully something amazing comes out of that! We're excited. :) 

Okay so I just love you guys soooooo much. Next week I'll be starting my second to last transfer which is CRAZY. Soooo crazy. Time is just flying as always but I am soooo happy. So life is good. :) I hope you guys are all happy tooooo! I pray for that soo much. I hope you can feel my prayers. :) I love you guys so so much. Have an amazing week! :)

Hermana Cannon II 

1. The best zone ever!

 

 

2. Our district

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. District again

 

 

 

4. Hermana Young and the weirdest gluten free pasta you will ever meet. She takes care of me :D

 

 

Charity :D

Sooooo this was the best week ever!!! :) 

Adrian finally accepted a baptismal date! Miracle time. We weren't even planning on teaching him that day but the other appointment we had fell through and for some reason we just both felt like we should go visit him. Idk if I mentioned this before but he lives in our same apartment building, so we just took the elevator up to the 9th floor and rang his doorbell. He came out, and we went downstairs to the lobby for the lesson since he was home alone. Hermana Maxfield and I talked before and decided this was the moment to try, yet again, and see if he was ready to accept a baptismal date. We asked him what baptism meant for him and he said it was a renovation, a restart. He talked about the life he had before he met the missionaries and how he needed to put it all behind him and start over. He told us about how when he met the missionaries in the elevator so many months ago, he was in the middle of a pretty big conflict with some people and was actually planning on doing some things he would've regretted. But since he started recieving the lessons, he changed his mindset. He's changed a lot. Even more than I realized. He said he no longer has bad thoughts. He no longer drinks. He has since given up coffee even though he doesn't completely understand the why behind it. He has been praying for support from his family and really wants at least one of them to join the church with him so he doesn't have to do this alone because he has every intention of enduring, and realizes that it will be hard once the missionaries leave. But he wants to. That's why he was putting off a baptismal date--he had been trying to talk to his family about it but just hadn't found quite the right opportunity yet since they live a couple hours away. After that the spirit changed the date we had already planned to extend to him which was november 28, and my companion asked him if he would be willing to be baptized January 1st of 2016. My gut reaction was like whatttttt?!?! haha because who knows if I'll still be in this sector by then. But then I let the spirit work in me and I realized it was kind of perfect. It would be a new year, new beginning, fresh start, clean slate. Plus then that would give his family time to hopefully learn and accept the gospel in their city, and give him more time to really get comfortable in this ward and make some good friends who can support him through this. 

That was the last lesson of the day and when we got home and I just threw myself on the ground and just laid their for a while with a GIANT smile on my face and Hermana Maxfield and I took turns saying "I can't believe it......." "finallyyyyyyy" haha. I was SO happy. I'm STILL on a cloud about it just writing this haha. Seeing that change in him was so sacred to us. The series of events of how he met the missionaries flashed through my head, the experience he had with them, with Hermana Vega and I, and then finally with Hermana Maxfield and I. I saw a replay of his progress and just sat there marveling at how far he's come. I felt the whisper of the Spirit teach me once again that God loves his children and truly does have a plan for each one of us. He puts things and people in our path for a reason and as we strive to be sensitive to the Spirit and follow his promptings, he will usually teach us why. That's true for all of us-- not just missionaries. Miracles can happen every day if we just look for them and ask God to let us be part of them. We'll find ourselves seeing people through His eyes, which makes us suddenly aware of the lense we've been wearing that was put on us by the world and all its unrealistic standards and false definitions of beauty, success, love, happiness, etc. We stop classifying people and begin loving them. Love being an action word. We start finding ways to communicate that love in ways that are more fool-proof than words like giving service, time, listening, understanding, ministering, sacrificing, and so much more. We can read about Christ and pattern the way we communicate love after His. And if for any reason we get scared or nervous to show that love, we can remember what it says in Moroni 7-- "charity never faileth" because it's true. 

My Savior. :) Loving him more and more everyday. And all of you. :) 

Have the best week ever. Fill it up with charity. :) 

xoxo

Hermana Cannon    

Pics from last week that I couldn't send haha:

1. Me opening the awesome halloween package y'all sent me :D I downed that bag of candy corn sooooooo fast 

 

2. Me and guitar reunited AT LAST. Happiest week of my liiiiiife