HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

Happy New Transfer!
I love fresh starts and new goals! I am super excited that I have another transfer In Dover with Sister Danner. I have very high hopes for what will occur the next six weeks.

A lot happened this past week! We experienced countless miracles and tender mercies. I don't have my planner with me because we are on a new transfer now so I have a new planner, but I will try and mention the big things that happened this week. I think I'll do something similar to last weeks email by sharing some simple random stories and experiences that happened throughout the week.

The first experience I want to share was our experience at church. One of the Elders serving in the branch is going home tomorrow so he asked if he could speak in church his final Sunday. Because he wanted to speak, our Branch President figured why not have all the missionaries speak. So that is exactly what happened. We were all asked to speak in Sacrament Meeting. President Clukey didn't assign us specific topics to speak on, he simply said go by the Spirit. I gained a lot more sympathy for the general authorities who address us in General Conference. it is not easy trying to figure out what to speak on with really no topic or idea. I prayed so hard all week for ideas of what to share with our Branch that they need this week. I couldn't seem to come up with anything. Randomly the title to a talk came to my mind that I didn't even remember what it was about. I didn't know why this talk came to my mind, but I decided to just run with it. The talk was actually a First Presidency Message given in the July 2012 Ensign by President Uchtdorf titled "In The Middle". The gist of the talk was how we are all in the middle of our eternal journey. I didn't know exactly why I felt impressed to share it, but I just prayed that someone in the congregation would benefit from hearing it. The whole Sacrament Meeting was pretty incredible. It was very neat to hear what the other missionaries were inspired to share. Later that day one of the members called me and Sister Danner and told us how much she appreciated our talks and how they were specific answers to her prayers.

I don't have time to mention much more from the week because the library is filling up quickly and I might not have access to the computer much longer, but I want you all to know how grateful I am for the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I love and treasure every moment of my mission and am so grateful for the experiences that I have each and every day.

I hope you all have a great week and a wonderful 4th of July!

Peace and Blessings from Maine!
Sister Dixon :)

MISSIONS ARE AWKWARD, FUNNY AND INSPIRATIONAL....EMBRACE IT!

Week six say what??? Where did this transfer go? I can't believe it has already been an entire transfer! I feel like I just picked up Sister Danner yesterday! My baby is growing up so fast! We had interviews with President Stoker this past week and he hinted that Sister Danner and I will be together another transfer. That makes me quite happy! Sister Danner is great and I love being in Dover, so life is good!
I got to go on exchange this past week with one of my old companions,Sister Cowley! I went down to Bangor and spent Tuesday night, all day Wednesday and Wednesday night there! I hadn't left Dover since I got here in February so it was a little weird leaving my home! I don't have much time to email today so I'm just going to share three quick stories with you. An awkward story, a funny story and an inspirational story.

....here we go

1. Awkward Story

It was Monday evening and we had just finished eating dinner at one of the members homes. We were contacting a potential and he answered the door and let us in. He told his daughter (who is about in her 30's) to come down. His daughter yelled back asking why, and he said that she had company. His daughter walks down the stairs and she was NOT happy to see us. They start arguing a bit back and forth and the dad tried to defend himself by saying in a roundabout way that he didn't want to let us in either. Sister Danner and I were wondering why in the world he even let us in then. After a painfully awkward moment we were able to get out of there. What an awkward way to start the week right We got a good laugh out of it anyway though!

2. Funny Story

This happened on Tuesday! We were driving to Dover when I saw what I thought was a cat crossing the road. I quickly realized that this creature was moving way too slow to be a cat. I soon came to the conclusion that this was no cat......it was a turtle! It was huge! I slammed on the breaks because there was no going around it due to oncoming traffic. I stopped in just enough time. About 30 seconds later the turtle makes it to the side of the road. Sister Danner got photo evidence.

3. Inspirational Story

Sunday afternoon was filled with a lot of incredible experiences. I wanted to highlight one. We were heading back to Milo and the Sister Training Leaders needed us to call them once we got back, so we were intending to go straight home. The thought crossed my mind to stop at the Leemans before we went back to the apartment. I didn't see any need to stop by the Leemans, so I tried to justify not going. I generally have an ongoing conversation in my mind with God throughout the day so I had a bit of a funny conversation with Him as I tried to justify not going to the Leemans. Right when we pulled onto the Leemans street the Flints (who also live on that street) immediately came to mind. Countless times we have tried to catch them at home, but we have yet to meet the Flints since I have been here. We briefly stopped by the Leemans and were able to set up time to help them this week with service, which I initially thought...hmmm maybe that's why we stopped by. After our visit with them, we quickly walked to the Flints to see if they were home. Right as we were walking up their driveway, their garage door opened and they were coming out the door! They were just going to go for a ride, but they were excited to see us so they invited us in to visit! It was awesome! So moral of the story is, don't question a prompting, even if it doesn't make sense! You just never know what God has in mind.

That's all I have time for this week!
I hope you all have an incredible week.

Peace and Blessings!
Sister Dixon

LOOK!

Another week has come and gone and I continue to wonder how and why the time goes by so quickly!
Here's a little update for this past week. We'll get the not so good out first.... Unfortunately all of our progressing investigators either had a family emergency this week or have gone out of town, so we didn't get to see any of them :( On a happy note though we were able to find MANY potential investigators this week, it was incredible! We also got to do some fun service. We got to go to the Bissell's farm on Wednesday and moved some more calves! It was quite hilarious! We had a harness that we had to get on each baby cow in order to get it from being in the barn with their Mom to their new homes on their own. I wish we would've filmed some of our attempts to get the harness on the baby cows, because it was a sight indeed. By the end though, you would have thought you were watching a professional rodeo! We harnessed and pulled those calves with ease!

We have been doing a really neat thing in our mission called seven minute lessons. This teaching is patterned after 1 Nephi 11 when Nephi wants to understand what his father Lehi saw in his vision. If you are familiar with the chapter, Nephi is able to see what his father saw, and he desires to know what it means. Rather than simply answering his questions, the Spirit of the Lord directs him to look for the answers himself. Nephi is directed to "look!", from there he explains what he sees and then from there learns what it means. We too are trying this same heavenly method of teaching by using the pictures in the pamphlets. The seven minutes is so that we teach extremely simply. It has been off to a great start. I do want to share a funny experience from it too. We had dinner with a member last night and we did our seven minute Restoration lesson. We start off by talking about the picture on the cover of the Restoration pamphlet which is Christ holding a lamb. Things were starting off great. We opened the pamphlet to the first page, and BAM it was a picture we had never seen! It threw us off pretty bad because we had been practicing teaching this many many times, so when the picture wasn't the one we were used to seeing it threw us for a loop. It was quite hilarious. The member we were teaching got quite the kick out of it too! I didn't know they had more than one Restoration pamphlet! Come to find out that they make pamphlets with pictures of people of different ethnicity and cultures! Learn something new everyday!

Another great miracle from this week happened with two of the people the Elders have been teaching. They were baptized this past weekend. It has been a pretty miraculous experience the whole way through. One of the members of the branch brought up a gospel conversation with them upon the first time meeting them. From this conversation they accepted to meet with the Elders. The Elders have been teaching them and they wanted to be baptized! Saturday was the big day! There are few things greater than seeing someone enter into the waters of baptism. These two people were so incredibly prepared to enter into this covenant with God. Sunday, not only were they confirmed members of the church, but one of them received the Aaronic Priesthood, and the other accepted a calling to serve as 2nd Counselor in the Relief Society. If that isn't miraculous, I don't know what is.

Sunday, Sister Danner and I taught Relief Society. We didn't get the lesson until the night before and the lesson was The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood. When we heard this Sister Danner and I thought "Wha?????". It sounds a lot harder than it actually ended up being. We watched a Mormon message called sanctify yourselves, which brought the spirit extremely strongly. Many sisters shared experiences of priesthood blessings they had received themselves and blessings their family members had received that changed their lives. It was such a great experience. I absolutely love the members of our branch.

That's about all I have time for this week! I hope that you are all doing well and that you have an incredible week!

I love you all!
Love,
Sister Dixon

So I totally forgot the whole point of my email. Gee whiz. I have something I wanted to invite every single person who reads this to do....... Ask God what His favorite color is. I promise you that you will get an answer. God cares about us so much that He will answer even our most simple prayers. So please do this and let me know your answer!

Peace and Blessings :)

WE'RE FACEBOOK FAMOUS!

So much happened this week! Every day was packed with wonderful experiences. We had an incredible day of training in New Hampshire with the other Sister Missionaries who are training/being trained. We had a sleepover at the mission home Monday night and then had our training on Tuesday. The training was awesome and both Sister Danner and I came out of it extremely excited and motivated to put all the ideas we got from the meeting into our work.

We had a lot of neat experiences throughout the week of having people come to our minds that we needed to visit. As we saw these people, we recognized immediately that the thoughts and feelings we received truly came from God. It is very exciting when things like that happen. There are many times when God tests you to see if you'll be obedient to a prompting. The majority of the time visible results don't result from acting on a prompting. He just wants to see if you'll listen. When God realizes that you will act on what He places in your mind, that's when He'll bless you with more guidance and additional promptings. We just need to make sure we are in tune and willing to act.

We had an incredibly busy weekend. Our mission participated in a Social Media Weekend. During this weekend, we had as many members with us as possible. The members came and took pictures/videos of what we do as missionaries. They then posted the pics and videos on their social media pages so that their friends/family could see what missionaries do so its not as intimidating when they meet us. You might have even seen a few of these hashtags with posts on facebook. #socialmediasplit #mormon # lds #ldsmissionary. We were completely exhausted in every sense of the word by the end of the week, but it was truly incredible! We are celebrating with ice cream today....Dad, I'm converted to having my go to treat being ice cream. Ice cream is pretty therapeutic if I do say so myself! Well, on that note I gotta go! We are going to play some wiffle ball with the district! 

I hope you all have an incredible week! Know how much I love all of you! Peace and Blessings from New England!

Sister Dixon