I'M MOVING TO ALASKA...I HEAR ITS WARMER THERE

This week has been pretty eventful!
As I mentioned last week we started volunteering at PAWS. We did that Tuesday morning and it was pretty great ha ha. So PAWS is a "free roaming" cat shelter, so basically the cats run the house....literally. There are about eighty cats total. We cleaned the Scared-y Cat room. It was pretty funny! All the cats in that room were very skiddish. That afternoon we went to Sister Picott's and made egg rolls with her and her daughter for the Relief Society Birthday party. The party was a blast. We had a pot luck dinner and an auction. We auctioned off a "Fun Filled FHE With the Sister Missionaries". We were sold for $186! Wohoo!
Wednesday we helped Sister Hilton move, and we got to do service on a dairy farm! The Bissell family in our ward runs a huge dairy farm so we and the Elders got to go and help on Wednesday. It was a blast, and my rubber boots came in handy!
Thursday we saw a lot of members which was awesome! It's so fun to get to know the branch better. I can't believe we are on week six of the transfer already! I feel like I just got here!
Saturday was super great! It finally felt like Spring. It got up to 40 degrees! People were walking around in short sleeves and ice cream shops opened up! I even saw a patch of grass!

The patch of grass!

Sister Harmon took us to dinner at the Nor Easter restaurant and then we rode down the the Women's General Meeting in Bangor with Sister Bissell. The broadcast was incredible! It makes me so excited for General Conference. Unfortunately the delightful 40 degree Spring weather didn't last long. We woke up Sunday morning to freezing rain. It took us a good while to get to church and not many people were able to make it because the storm was so bad. We were lucky because we drove behind a snow plow the whole way. They held Sacrament meeting and cancelled the rest of church and told everybody to go home. When I heard it was 75 degrees in Utah I thought....."That's not a bad idea". Ha ha ha, so if you'd please send out some Utah sun, that would be great! Everyone has said that this has been an unusual winter. It's funny because every time I write the date I instinctively start to put January, because that's what it looks and feels like. It's hard to believe that April is here. Time has been flying by!!!
I want to share a neat little story of something that happened on Saturday. We had just gotten dropped back off at the church after the broadcast and it was a little after ten o'clok. We were driving back home and I remembered the time that I was driving back to Snow College when I hit Bambi. I instinctively slowed down as I remembered that not so joyous memory and not even ten seconds later I saw a deer in the road. Because I had reduced my speed I had plenty of time to slow down so that Bambi II could have time to get out of the road. It was really neat because I didn't get this big prompting to slow down, I was just reminded of my past experience. God works in mysterious ways.
I hope you all make the time to watch General Conference this week, because it will change your life!

Peace and Blessings from the Frozen Chosen

Sister Dixon

YOU MIGHT HAVE A FUTURE IN BREAD MAKING

Well we've seen another miraculous week here in Milo Maine! So much has gone on this week, I hope I can remember all the great details!

We'll start at the beginning. We had an awesome FHE with the Oakes family on Monday. They have five kids and they invited another family over so it was just a lot of crazy fun!
Tuesday we stopped by Beth Ellison, one of my favorite members in the branch.....I don't even know if we're allowed to have favorites.....but I do! ha ha ha. She sent us home with so many goodies. One of which was an Amish cookbook so we decided to make some cookies for our new friend Chief Damien (the policeman who saved us last week). That night we had an awesome lesson with Mike and Michele. I honestly can't get over how incredible these people are. We had to park a little ways down the road they live on because their truck exploded.....literally so they weren't able to plow the whole road, and there's no way our little car would be able to make it, so we just parked it and walked the rest of the way in. We had dinner and an incredible lesson. After dinner and our discussion it was pretty dark, so they walked us back out to our car. The stars were UNREAL! It was even more incredible than last week because the sky was so clear, and we had just had a lesson on the Plan of Salvation so it couldn't have been more perfect! I just love this family!
Wednesday was awesome. We spent most of the day in Brownville with Sister Picott. She is the sweetest lady ever. She is a less active member in the branch, and she taught us how to make bread! We made six loaves! Oatmeal molasses and cinnamon raisin. YUM! They turned out pretty great! Her nine year old grandson Elijah got off the bus at her house after school, so he joined in the fun as we were finishing up. He is a hoot! We had a little dance party with him and he taught us some of his moves. He's a character. When the bread was coming out of the oven he said "Wow, you might have a future in bread making". We all got quite the kick out of that.

 We had dinner with the Leemans and they invited their friends Jim and Leanna. The Leemans are awesome people and they are not shy about sharing what they believe and love, it was pretty inspiring! Jim and Leanna are amazing people and Jim holds a church service in his home and over skype, so they are pretty strong in what they believe. I'm going to jump ahead to Saturday. So we had just had lunch with the Walsh Family and we had heard a few times that a good potential lives by another member in the Brownville area so we decided to see if we could figure out who it was. The first door we knocked on was Jim and Leanna's! We just about died! It was awesome. They let us right in and we had an incredible discussion with them. God works in mysterious ways!
Now jumping back....We went to bed Wednesday night excited for the upcoming day because we had zone meeting. Well it was definitely exciting to wake up, but exciting in a way we did not expect. We looked out the window and there was a foot of snow covering the ground! We thought that the meeting would be cancelled again! After a few phone calls, they decided that they were still going to hold the meeting because, we and the Dover Elders were the only ones who got hit with the snow, so they were going to hold the meeting regardless. The plow obviously hadn't come yet so Sister Burton and I got right outside and started shoveling our very long driveway. Ha ha ha we were shoveling like mad trying to make a path for our car. We did not want to miss this meeting. We prayed for a miracle and we got one. Our car made it out of the driveway with only a few little struggles. We also were able to drive safely to the members home that was taking us to our meeting. Thank goodness for wonderful members with four wheel drive! I am so glad we did not miss this meeting. It was absolutely incredible. We learned about the Ten Virgins and how we can become one of the five wise ones. The way we can do this is by getting to know our Savior Jesus Christ. That is what the five unwise virgins lacked. I left that meeting feeling SO motivated to be so much better and I want so badly to better know our Savior. I just love how much I get to learn every single day.
Here's one last random thing that happened this week that I'm pretty excited about. We were visiting a less active member in Milo and she was working on a newsletter for this organization that she volunteers at called PAWS. It's basically a cat shelter. We were asking her about it and asked if they possibly needed more people to volunteer. Her eyes lit right up and she said "Yes!" Right after we told her we'd be interested in volunteering she was on the phone with them and we are going to start tomorrow! Mom, I'm sure your eyes are already itching. We are pretty excited about volunteering though and I'll definitely let you know how it goes next week!
Those are just a few of the highlights from this week! Lots more to look forward to!


I LOVE YOU ALL!

Happy Spring......kind of
Sister Dixon

OH WHAT DO YOU DO IN THE WINTER TIME?

You know you're in Maine when you see a shirtless man outside shoveling a foot of snow.......Where am I?!?!?

This week has been crazy.  Again we have seen so many miracles!....and a few challenges.

We have made it a big point to pray for families to teach and this week our prayers were answered.  We found 2 families to teach which resulted in 5 new investigators.  God has truly been pouring out His blessings on us.  

Tuesday as we were trying to find some former investigators and one of the addresses on the record didn't even exist so we decided to knock on some doors that were where the house should have been, and that is where we met Casey and Morgan.  They are awesome!!  They immediately let us in and we talked to them about what we believe.  Casey, the mom, teaches Sunday school at the little community church in Brownville and she was looking for suggestions on what to teach so she asked if we could maybe come one weeknight and have a Q&A session with the youth there.  Then her daughter chipped in and said "Why don't we go and do a fieldtrip up to their church some Sunday, we have two vans."  Her mom thought that was a great idea.  We were just blown away!  It was so neat!

Wednesday was quite the day.  We were just getting ready to head out after lunch and I put some things in the trunk....after I closed the trunk and went to grab the keys from my coat I realized that the keys were not in my coat....or in my bag....or anywhere else.  They were in the trunk.  Oops! 

Of course the first thing Sister Burton and I did was pray.  We had SO much faith and we were just praying so hard that God would somehow open the trunk.  Well....sometimes God doesn't work that way.  Sometimes He has a better way to answer our prayers.  I felt super bad that I had locked the keys in the trunk so we began calling just about everyone we could to see what to do.  We decided to walk down to the library to do our mormon.org time and while we were there it started to snow....a lot!  We walked to a members home who was nearby and they just saved the day.  Sister Sneed called the police station and they said that they'd come right up and unlock it.  The Sneeds drove us back to our apartment and the Chief of Police came and unlocked our door.  by that time the snow had gotten pretty bad so we didn't dare drive anyways, but at least we had the keys!  Now we have an opportunity to take some cookies to the police station and hopefully we'll make some great friends ha ha ha.

Thursday we were planning on having interviews with President Stoker, but we were in a winter wonderland so that didn't happen.  Our cars were grounded so we ended up walking everywhere that day.  It was quite eventful.

Saturday we had our first meeting with Lorna and her two grandsons.  It was great.  We are starting at square one with them and it was quite a neat experience seeing these kids pray for the first time.  

Sunday during Branch Council we had quite the great time.  Our Branch President has quite the New Englander accent and we got quite the kick out of it.  Agendar, commar, arear, the whole deal!  Oh man we were dying laughing.  He got quite the kick out of it too.  I am just loving this branch.  Oh one more neat thing that happened on Sunday.  Well it wasn't super neat during the moment but it ended up being great.  We were just about ready to go and the two people we had set appointments with called....at the exact same time and cancelled on us!  We were so bummed.  We then knew that God had someone else in mind that we needed to see.  We just had to figure out who.  We went stopped by potentials and formers and less actives and then as we were nearly done for the night we remembered our neighbors who just moved in.  We had left some cookies and a Book of Mormon on their porch and so we thought we'd stop by and follow up on it.  They were home and we got to meet two awesome people, Molly and Jeb.  They were super appreciative of the cookies and we became good friends!  God never lets us down.   

Well that's about all the happy happenings for this week!  

I love you all and hope you have an incredible week!

Peace and Blessings 

Sister Dixon     

OFF THE GRID

Mind blown......
This week has been one of the craziest weeks of my mission. We have seen some amazing miracles.
The beginning of the week was a little rough we could totally feel that satan was working hard on us. We completely understand now why he was, we ended up witnessing some incredible miracles.
One of the biggest miracles of the week resulted from last weeks awesome miracle of the people who stopped us on the sidewalk. We called them one morning and they told us to come for dinner. We went to their home and it was unreal! They live like a mile off the road in a beautiful log cabin completely off the grid! We had a wonderful dinner by candle light ha ha ha with incredible people. Their names are Mike and Michelle. They recently moved from Rhode Island and decided that they were sick of working their lives away so they sold everything and moved to Maine! They are both very open to the gospel and they basically became our best friends. They have two daughters who are away at college in Boston that are right around Sister Burtons and my age so they loved having us over. We had one of the most spiritual lessons with them too. It is incredible how strong the spirit can be when there are no worldly distractions. We felt so incredible after that experience.....and they gave us homemade lip balm and peppermint soap, what's not to love about that?!
Another pretty awesome miracle was with Lorna. We knocked on her door and at first she didn't seem too interested. Somewhere in the conversation it came up that we follow the ten commandments and then she realized that Mormons aren't super crazy! She wants us to come back and to teach her and her two grandchildren about the gospel.....success!
Things are finally starting to pick up here in the sticks of Maine! God is preparing people everywhere!
Well I'm going to cut this email a little short today. Someone is waiting for the computer so until next week, farewell!!!!

Peace and Blessings,
Sister Dixon

BARNYARD FUN!

I don't even know where to begin! This week has been unreal!
I've been sent to serve in Dover-Foxcroft Maine! It is the northern most part of the mission..... and just when I thought Spring was around the corner....think again. We're even farther north than parts of Canada! Our arear is also the biggest arear in the mission, it's bigger than the state of Connecticut!!! My new companion is Sister Burton and she is AWESOME!!!!....oh and we live in a BARN!!!!!! I love it!

Our week consisted of cleaning the nice apartment the elders left for us. Let's just say that elders standards of cleanliness and sisters standards of cleanliness aren't even on the same spectrum. Ha ha we whipped it into shape and sisterized it in no time!
The rest of the week was pretty similar we worked on trying to find all our investigators and the people the previous elders were working with.
Here are some pretty sweet miracles that have happened this week. We went and stopped by a members home who lives not far from us. We were able to talk for a bit and get to know them, by the end of our conversation, they had given us six referrals! It was awesome!
Our next miracle is pretty mind blowing! So we were walking to go and contact some of our referrals and this car pulls up and a lady gets out and starts waving to us. We thought she was a member who recognized that we were the new sisters in the area. She came up and asked if we remembered her. We told her that we had only been here a few days. She thought that we were the Jehovah's Witnesses that had knocked on her door a little while back. We told her who we were and she asked if we had a message to share with her. Her husband got out of the car to come talk to us too. It was so crazy! We shared a scripture from the Book of Mormon with them and gave them a copy. They invited us to come by to share more of what we believe with them. Sister Burton and I were on cloud nine! It was too awesome! Great things are happening in this area!
We received a very nice warm welcome from the branch here. They are so excited to have sisters here. The last time they had sister missionaries was over 15 years ago, so this is quite the exciting change for them.
Those are some of the highlights from this week! It has been such a fun, new, exciting, tiring, overwhelming and great experience shotgunning.
Just like with anything hard in life there are always good things to come! I know this to be true!
http://www.mormonchannel.org/video/mormon-messages?v=911029449001
I love you all and hope you have a fantastic week! Happy March.....and Happy NINE MONTHS!

Love
Sister Dixon