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What Do We Do With Sis. Dunlop? || Wasilla, AK

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

LIFE UPDATES - THE REAL REASON YOU’RE HERE
Hello hello family & friends! Can you believe I made it this far? I can’t. This is insane. I’m pretty sure you’re all just here for the photos+transfer news anyways so...I’m staying in WASILLA for the rest of my mission #ripsisdunlop. This is not a drill. When I came up here in the beginning of August, did I think I would stay here until the middle of March? No. When President Toone called us to tell me I would finish my mission in Wasilla and that Sister Bentley was going to be my last companion, did I think he was kidding? Yep. What’s six more weeks when you’ve already done six months? πŸ™ƒ it’s definitely bittersweet #sisdunlopcantbestopped. I’m pretty sure that President just didn’t know where to put me anymore because I’ve already served all over the mission and so he just left me up here in Wasilla. If I’ve learned anything about the transfers of my mission, it’s to trust in God’s timing and not my own #patienceishardsometimes. Sister Melton is heading down to Eagle River to be with Sister Jewel (lucky) before Sister Jewel and I head home in March. Mission life is crazy.

JUST BECAUSE IT’S TRANSFERS DOESN’T MEAN WE STOP πŸ’₯
I went to the Colony Ward with Sister Fa’anunu on exchanges Tuesday & Wednesday and we celebrated my seventeen month mark on January 17th (ps happy birthday dad) by eating ice cream for lunch. Oops. Sometimes I forget that we were companions up in Fairbanks together for so long and then we go into teaching appointments together and say the exact same things haha. She’s a good one πŸ’•

This week Sister Melton and I have continued working our tails off trying to lay a strong foundation for future missionaries serving in the Wasilla Ward. Lots of tracting and contacting. Frozen hair and frosted eyelashes. Some return appointments but a lot of “we are not interested but stay warm out there” and a shut door in the face. Sister Melton is a champion though because she’s felt sick all week but still wanted to go out and work. I adore her #proudmom.

Our return appointment with the Cult book lady went well, I guess. She had cancelled our prior set lesson on Tuesday because she wasn’t feeling well (everyone and their mush dogs have the flu up here right now) but we stopped by on Friday to check in and see how she was doing and almost an entire century later, we popped back out of there alive. Patti (that’s her name) wanted to know how+why the Book of Mormon had made such a big difference in our lives and our personal testimonies of it. She had a lot of “deep questions” that we helped clear up for her using the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Things are starting to click for her. Conversion isn’t an overnight process but “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass”. It’s coming.

Because we’ve been tracting so much, we’ve met a lot of people who have potential to become more serious investigators. So we have been touching base with a lot of them and figuring out who’s really ready and willing to let us invite them closer to Christ and help them grow. I think that one of my favorite parts of being a missionary is that the message that we share in no way demeans or destroys the already standing testimony of those we meet, but it enhances and enlarges it. The gospel is so good. 

THE BOOK OF MORMON IS TRUE+SUPER GOOD
I don’t know if you remember me telling you this, but Sister Melton and I set a goal to read the entire Book of Mormon together this transfer. And we did it πŸŽ‰
I absolutely love the Book of Mormon and am so grateful for the way that it has brought me closer to my Savior and to come to know Him better. People love to bash the Book of Mormon and tell us that “it’s replaces the Bible” or bring up the scripture in Revelations 22 - which is not relevant to the Book of Mormon - or whatever but that’s usually because they have no idea what it really is. In no way does the Book of Mormon replace the Bible, it supports it. It’s an additional witness. Here’s a really good chocolate chip cookie, don’t you want another one? Duh. Anyways, I wanted to share a scripture that I read and loved this week with you, it’s a classic ☺️
“Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.” - Moroni 10:32
I love this scripture because it invites us to “come unto Christ” and have total faith in Him. Total faith is scary sometimes but He always meets us where we are and helps us become more. “His grace is sufficient”. He loves you more than you know.

I’ll just be up here in Wasilla for the rest of my life if you ever need me.

XOXO Sister Dunlop the “Wicked Witch of Wasilla”

I'm Not Throwing Away My Shot || Wasilla, AK

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Hey friends. I’m still up in Wasilla fighting off Satan #godunlop and trying not to become a human Otter Pop in someone’s driveway and make sure Sister Melton survives being trained in Wasilla. It’s always an adventure, that’s for sure.

We’ve still been tracting a ton, despite the ridiculously cold wind and frozen solid ice snow. Our goal is to tract for at least two hours each day and then get at least one return appointment with someone. We’ve been doing pretty good so far and Heavenly Father always blesses us with some characters to write home about ☺️ and so here’s my favorite tracting experience from this week: the weather this week was slippery, dark, windy, rainy, grossness but we kept doing missionary work anyways #goteam #stopSatan2k18. We were out tracting this neighborhood of apartment complexes and the wind and rain was ripping so bad our faces stung and we were praying that someone would let us in so we could thaw out (not the first time on my mission that I’ve prayed for that). We get to the apartment on the corner and do our missionary thing and the lady at the door tells us that she’s not interested because she’s “already been saved” and all those fun excuses that we hear all of the time. But I was freezing and I was going to get in this door - I’m not throwing away my shot. So I asked her if there was anything that we could do to help her and she said “you can read the Bible” which then commenced Sister Melton and I spitting out the 8th Article of Faith (“we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God”) almost simultaneously and then testifying of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Restoration. She stood there silently and then reluctantly invited us in after asking a few more probing questions. We sat down in her living room and she left to go get something and came back almost ten minutes later with a pile of books. I could tell that it was a bunch of anti-Mormon stuff and she was furiously trying to flip through the pages to find something to throw at us but couldn’t find it. Then she pulled out a little red book from her stack called “Cults” and started reading about Mormonism *eye roll. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that “Mormons are a cult”, I could end world hunger and then have leftovers to resolve world peace. It’s insane. She jumped right in and started to read it out loud spewing old and outdated myths about the Church that were just flat out false for about five minutes before Sister Melton and I got her to zip it in the politest way we could think (“this book sounds really interesting and there’s a lot of things we would love to come back and clear up for you, but would it be okay if we shared a quick message with you?”). No objection from her. We shared the message of the Restoration and testified of it’s power and truthfulness without a single interruption of anti from her. She felt it and something clicked inside her. She accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon and we have a return appointment with her tomorrow...

We had to let one of our investigators go this week and doing that always rips my heart up - that part of being a missionary sucks. She hasn’t been progressing for a while and hasn’t been keeping commitments either, and so sometimes we have to move on and invest our energy into others who are more ready (readier?) as we invite them to come to Christ. It’s hard. But shoutout to the Area Book app on our devices because in six months from now, her name will pop up again and send the missionaries that are here to go and check in on her - that’s a huge blessing. Missionary work is sometimes like planting seeds and as time goes on, those seeds will grow and eventually be ready for harvest later down the road πŸ…

Thursday was Sister Melton & I’s last Trainer Trainee Meeting togetherπŸ’”I absolutely love Sister Melton and have learned so much from her. Alaska isn’t going to look the same when she’s done with it #proudmom. [my last] Transfer Calls come from President Toone this Thursday night and so it will be interesting to see where+how things are going to wrap up for Sister Dunlop in Alaska. Time has seriously flown by so fast - it’s a little scary. Stay tuned.

Church on Sunday was a struggle bus mess. Saturday was full of “ice rain”, which made the streets of Wasilla a giant ice rink and so zero people wanted to drive to church Sunday morning. Someone sent us a mass text that church was going to be cancelled because of the roads and then we woke up the next morning to another text saying that it was “uncancelled” thirty minutes before it was supposed to start - we boogied to church and made it there with the (maximum) seven other families that were there. The whole meeting was an impromptu/pull it together party because no one was really there, so that was exciting and adventurous. Go Wasilla.

“It’s in the DOING, not just DREAMING that our lives are blessed” - Thomas S. Monson
Just go & do it.
1 Nephi 3:7
XOXO Sister Dunlop 


PS super sorry about the most pathetic photo selection this week - here’s our Zone photo from Zone Conference last week πŸ™ƒ

I'm Honestly Impressed That I Haven't Frozen Solid Yet || Wasilla

Monday, January 8, 2018

Hello hello! Alaska continues to be my greatest adventure despite the fact time is flying by - it’s a love/hate relationship. I think one of the worst parts about people finding out that you’re on the homestretch is that they just automatically assume you have the next five years of your life planned out and ready to go. Yeah, nope.

Talkeetna Report: It was cold and windy and we didn’t get to see Mayor Stubbs, but a nice man bought our lunch at Subway and Mt. McKinley was so pretty on our drive in that I started to cry #worthit πŸ˜πŸ™πŸΌπŸ”

Missionary Report: one of our Zone Leaders always says, “you can do missionary THINGS or missionary WORK,” and let me just tell you that Sister Melton and I have been putting in some serious missionary WORK these last two transfers. It’s awesome. We’ve been doing a ton of tracting and the other day it was so cold out and we had been tracting so long that our jaws started to freeze up and we couldn’t formulate words at the doorstep. We had a good long thaw out session in the car after that. We’ve also been going through lists of former investigators, which is always an eventful time. Lots of door slams and almost getting decked with a frying pan, but we are still alive. Wasilla Zone Conference was this week and all got our new smartphones - they are super weird. They’re Samsung smartphones and I have zero idea how to use them but luckily I’m surrounded in a zone of greenie missionaries that all have Samsung tablets so they just rock and roll with everything #grandmadunlop. Go team. 

There you go, short & sweet. 
I love you from Alaska and back. 

XOXO Sister Dunlop πŸ’•

2018 || Wasilla, AK

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Hello hello! HAPPY 2018 FRIENDS πŸŽ‰πŸ‘πŸΌ❤️
I can’t believe that another week has flown by and it’s already time for another one of these weeklies. Life is crazy, but also super good #nocomplaints. Also, I FINALLY convinced my Zone to actually do something fun on PDay instead of playing basketball all day so we’re going to Talkeetna 😍
Side note: the mayor of Talkeetna is a literal cat #AK

Last Wednesday evening we had blocked out some time to go knock doors. We’ve set a goal in our mission right now to spend at least an hour each day finding new people to teach and then scheduling at least one return appointment with someone. It’s been really successful and has helped us grow our teaching pool a TON, but it also means that sometimes we have to put our big girl pants on and go tract in some ridiculously cold wind + weather, but it makes you tough #icandohardthings. Anyways, the sun had set a few hours ago and it was about four degrees outside with the glacier winds ripping through the Valley for an added bonus. It. Was. Cold. We had a quick dance party in the car (with the heat cranked all the way up), prayed that we would find someone whose heart was ready and open for the message of the gospel, and then made the polar plunge outside and started knocking. It started out with the usual: a few slams in the face, “we’ve already been saved but stay warm out there”, some conversations through a sliver of an opening in the front door and over loud barking dogs, “we’re JW”, etc. All that good stuff. We had been out for about an hour and still hadn’t set up a return appointment yet and everything from our nose to our toes felt like an ice cube. But let me just tell you that when you ACT IN FAITH, God ALWAYS provides. Faith + works = power. We have a few more doors to go and are hoping and praying our little hearts out that we can find someone to bring the joy of the gospel to, and then we met Glen. After we spit out our “we’re the cold little sister missionaries at the door trying to spread goodness” line, HE LET US IN πŸ™ŒπŸΌ I will praise his name forever. He had questions, like real and genuine questions that didn’t come from a place of hate or trying to bash (like usual), that we answered and then shared the message of the Restoration with him and invited him to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. He was all about it. We set up to meet with him again a few days later and brought a few members of the Wasilla Ward to come with us. We get there and Glen pulls out his computer and has an entire list of things he wanted to talk about, which was completely loaded with Bible and Doctrine and Covenants cross-references and General Conference talks and everything. This guy is a smart cookie who had some deep doctrine questions that we usually don’t go into with investigators but he asked, so we answered. It just about got to the level of talking about the body temperature of a translated being. Deep stuff. We eventually roped in all back in and challenged Glen to continue read and pray about the Book of Mormon. He said he would read the whole thing. Stay tuned people. 

Spoiler alert: when you find out that your investigator has already been baptized. 
There’s this lady that we’ve been meeting with since I came up to Wasilla in August - Barb. She lives in Wasilla Ward’s boundaries but had requested for sister missionaries to teach her, so I met her when I was serving in Memory Lake and then when they pinkwashed me into Wasilla, I just got to keep her. She’s this sweet old lady who has had some rough stuff in her life’s journey and has been going to another Christian church for a long time and loves it there. We had usually just stopped by off and on to check in on her and see if we could do anything to help her because she’d said that she wasn’t interested in having missionary discussions anymore. Sister Melton and I had decided that we would try to slip in a few lessons here or there and so on Thursday night we stopped by with one of our cute ward missionary ladies who had just moved into the ward. Let me just tell you, those two were a match made in Heaven. We talked about the Plan of Salvation and at the end of the lesson, we invited Barb to follow the example of Jesus Christ by being baptized by someone holding the Priesthood authority. She paused and said, “want to hear something funny?” then she goes on to tell us that she thinks she was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when she lived in Washington like 60+ years ago. I died. 
We did some FBI missionary research and found her records. Yep, she’s a member πŸ™ƒ

We finished cleaning up the “Man Cave” (see photo evidence below), helped carry some giant drawers from the truck to back porch, and then fixed some welding tools in the garage #whenthesistersareasbossastheelders. 

We had a Zone Tract for the Memory Lake Elders on Saturday and went to this neighborhood that Sister Yeates and I had tracted out a few months ago. It hadn’t been super successful when Sis. Yeates and I were there but it was so interesting to see that just in that little amount of time, people’s hearts had been changed and we were able to set up return appointments and share the Book of Mormon with families. 
Go Memory Lake. 


We had to be back to our apartments early last night because of New Year’s Eve but spent the day after church having lunch with one family and then dinner at another. At dinner, one of the daughters’ boyfriend was there and he isn’t a member of the Church (yet) so the dad asked if we could share the first discussion with them about the Restoration. The Willow elders were there again too #quadsqaud. We invited the kid to read and pray about the Book of Mormon and he said he would. He seemed genuinely interested, and not just because his girlfriend’s dad was sitting right next to him. So that’s good! We were going to turn our apartment into a blanket fort for New Year’s Eve but remembered that we had to give all of our extra blankets away to some sisters in Palmer so we didn’t have any extras. Plan failed. 

I hope you have a super sparkly 2018 and that you love & laugh every day. 
I love you. God loves you. Life’s a party. 

XOXO Sister Dunlop 

 
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