2018 || Wasilla, AK

Hello hello! HAPPY 2018 FRIENDS 🎉👏🏼❤️

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 🙌🏼 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 🙃

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