So Inconvenient

This last week of the transfer has been grrrrrrrrreat ;)

I literally am so happy here in morrisville.

They continue to be too good to me!!

Me and sister hall are staying in the area and we're getting a third companion!

Haha back in a trio again.

Sister hall goes home after this up coming transfer :(

Her 18 months is UP.

we're going to have the most fun this transfer and see 100 miracles :)

Last pday we FLEW A KITE!

On the Delaware River.

I was in heaven, so fun :)

We made homemade PIZZA with Carmelina

(and you all know just how much I LOVE pizza...)

Literally the best pizza I've ever had.

I put so much cheese and these orange little tomatoes grown from her garden.

We've been going BANNER crazy over here.

We made 3 banners this week and making one more today haha.

We made a happy birthday banner for Kathie(she turned 72!) a happy baptism banner for Kathie and Carmelina, and a ROSH HASHANA banner for our Jewish investigator :) we love everyone. And the one we're making today is a welcome banner for our new companion!

We took Kathie to the temple site down in Philadelphia.

I want you to imagine a 72 year old driving us down in center city philly in a sweet red jeep(:

That was us!! Hahaha I love her.

The spirit on the site is so strong and sweet.

She absolutely loved it.

Our district meeting was all about the Book of Mormon. I loved it so much.

The Book of Mormon is so special and important to me.

So grateful to have it in my life.

I used to take it so much for granted..but now I am reading it every.single.day.

And will read it every.single.day even after my mission.

I know we have ALL had spiritual experiences with the Book of Mormon.

Please go pick it up and read it if you haven't on awhile or today yet :)

We cleaned the baptism font to prep for Kathie and Carmelina's baptism!

There were too many spiders....

I've killed 100s of spiders out here in the east coast during this summer....so happy for winter! They will all be deadddddd. That's about the only thing I'm looking forward to the winter haha..

Me and sister hall went running in the pouring RAIN! #heaven

It's starting to get cold over here.....,pulled out a sweater!

The leaves are changing and already falling. Winter is cominggggg

Sooo Kathie and Carmelina's baptism was probably the most sweetest and tenderest baptism on my mission!

Don't get me wrong, I've loved everyone I've helped teach and prep for baptism.

But for Kathie and Carmelina I've been with them from the very beginning!

Seen and taught them for the very first time and saw them all the way to baptism.

That's something really special!

Either I catch the tail end of someone prepping for baptism (like Etta, bradley, kelly, and rebecca and Stan) or start them on the road to baptism and then get transferred before they're baptized (jessi)

So Kathie and Carmelina are the very first I've been able to be here for the whole thing.

Not that that really matters...but it's just cool to be able to see and experience the whole thing from start to finish. And they keep going! On to the temple.

The church is true!

I hope you all enjoyed the women's broadcast! So good :)

Loved the 10 virgin story.

"Daily drops of preparation"

We read this talk called "The Inconvenient Messiah" by Jeffery r holland.

First of all you can already tell how awesome the talk is by the title, and it's by holland!! My favorite apostle <3

Me and sister hall have really been talking about this subject a lot: being convenient verses inconvenient. And boy does this help me understand more of how satan works. It talks about something similar to this in my patriarchal blessing. He is just soooo subtle. If you look and study Christ's life, you will see how inconvenient his life truly was. And elder holland focuses on the story where satan tempts christ during his 40 day fast. It would have been easy for him to turn stone to bread and to do the things satan was tempting him with. But we see from our savior's is life that most of the times we need to be doing the inconvenient.

It's easy to not pay our tithing.

It's easy to sleep in and not go to church.

It's easy to go weeks without opening and reading our scriptures or praying.

It's easy to slack off and be idle.

It's easy to not go to meetings.

It's easy to give into temptations.

This has been a huge thing I've learned on my mission.

I can be a convenient missionary.

Or I can be an inconvenient missionary.

But I am here and we are here to do the inconvenient. To do what's hard so we can grow.

A quote from the talk

"If sometimes the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived"

I really like this quote..don't know who it's by...

"Christ chooses his followers when they're moving, and satan chooses his while they're idle"

Ask yourself if you are being a convenient follower and disciple of Christ or an inconvenient one.

One last quote I want to end with:

"As you labor to know him(christ) and to know that he knows you; as you invest your time-and inconvenience-in quiet unassuming service, you will indeed find that 'his angels [have] charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up'"

I love you!

Sister Manson

my favorite food place

So I'm kinda obsessed with bricks....but here's why!
"Making bricks isn't easy. They are put under intense heat. I learned that people are like bricks..life is a fierce furnace of trials. But we can emerge rock solid, with a testimony strong enough for others to build on."

SAVOR of men

Ahhh hello

it's week 6 already?

(Last week of the transfer)

We'll find out Friday what changes if any are made.

We got flipped off by some hooligans in their car because I almost might of accidentally slightly cut them off...........it was still RUDE of them.

Then we got lost trying to find an apartment complex. I get lost so easily out here it's ridiculous haha.

Cute ole little town of YARDLEY has what they call

"Harvest Day" it's this HUGE event in the town and people come and walk around and look at booths people set up. A cute little crafty welcoming fall fair type thing going on. We wondered around looking for opportunities to do some service and we found this old church/library building. We asked if we could help and she said yes actually, right now! So we handed out cookies and drinks to people coming in. One of the guy workers asked us 100 questions about the church and the Book of Mormon, so that was cool to answer. He said he lives within walking distance of our church building!!! Perfecttttt.

I love being a missionary. Some days are just plain right hard and it's easy to get alittle discouraged, but then you have awesome spiritually high days which make up for it all.

Thinking back on my mission thus far...I've hard some real crappy days, but the thing is I can hardly remember any of the details I just know that I've had them haha. But I do KNOW and REMEMBER all of the great spiritual miracle days. :) so I always remind myself to forget about the bad days and move on to the good ones.

Good note: Kathie and Carmelina are getting baptized saturday(: they both have made so many changes and it's so humbling to see it and hear them talk about it! They are so special and make me want to be better. We are taking Kathie down to the temple site in philly on Friday :) super excited for that.

Me and sister hall are doing this thing where we read a conference talk from any conference issue and read it together :) to prep for conference coming up in October!!! We're so excited.

General conference is like Christmas for us missionaries. I'm not joking. I LOVE IT. <3

One of the talks we read this week was called

"salt of the earth: Savors of men and Saviors of men"

Uhmmm please everybody go and read it.

I'm now obsessed with salt.

Don't wanna ruin the talk, but I'll sum it up mostly.

Quotes the scriptures where it says that we are the salt of the earth, and how it is useless when it looses its savor (taste/flavor)

He pointed out HOW salt looses its savor. And it's NOT by age. It looses it by contamination. By being mixed with other things...

Now I want y'all to think deep and hard and apply that to you(:

Aka..DO NOT LOOSE YOUR SAVOR.

Do not get mixed up in the ways of the ever changing current/flow of the world.

A newly found quote GEM:

"Before my eyes had occurred a metamorphosis--the transformation of a hideous beetle into a gorgeous dragonfly. … I had witnessed … a miracle. Out of the mud had come a beautiful new life. And the thought came to me that if the Creator works such wonders with the lowliest of creatures, what may not be in store for the human spirit!”"

(J. Clarke--The Lord of Life)

Love the last line.

Heavenly Father can change us. "The gospel of Jesus Christ makes bad men good and good men better". I've seen this LIVED and applied in the investigators and members lives as well as my own.

Share the gospel with everyone!

Be desperate to share it.

I love you(:

Sister Manson 

Soul Knowledge

Uhh...craziest week of my mission for sure.

Here's what went dowwwwwwn:
1. Very good and relaxing fun pday
2. Went on exchanges in Philly with our sister training leaders
(We got to handout cookies to the temple workers who are building the temple!)
3. Mission tour(: spiritual boost for dayz
4. District meeting
5. Dropped our investigator Lydia...(stopped meeting and our lessons with her)
6. Sister Wright gets a phone call from the Assistant Presidents and
is given the news of being EMERGENCY TRANSFERRED. Found out Saturday
evening and has to pack and leave Sunday night. (A sister missionary
was going home early so they needed to move sisters around)
7. We attended a funeral
8. Went to a catholic mass with one of our investigators
9. Kathie didn't get baptized
10. Dropped sister wright off :(

#insane.

I am pretty sad about sister wright leaving...
But the transfer is almost over anyways (2 more weeks) and we were
assuming she would be the one to go. She is up in Scranton, PA now (:
#THEOFFICE.
Now it's just me and sister hall running loose in morrisville :)

Our mission tour was sweet. We were the first group of missionaries in
our mission to meet with Elder Willford Andersen. Him and his wife
spoke as well as our mission president, President Anderson and his
wife :) PARTY with the Anderson's haha.

Something elder Andersen said struck me really hard. He was saying how
a lot of people don't really care who he was and what he did in his
life, and wanted us to remember WHO he represents. Jesus Christ. He
also went on to explain how as being called to be in the second quorum
of the 70, he was to be a special witness of Christ.

We talked about 3 different knowledges

1. Head Knowledge
---information, 5 senses, learn while we study etc..
2. Heart Knowledge
---inviting the spirit to teach us, helps us gain a desire and motivation
3. Soul Knowledge
---prACTice. All about becoming and doing.

And how important they all are into leading us to being converted in
the gospel.

A good example of this in the scriptures is Alma 10:4-6
"I knew concerning these things, yet I would not know. Therefore I
went on rebelling"
Amulek has the head knowledge, he KNEW, but he didn't have a desire to
act and do to KNOW.

It's a good self check and also to know this in order to help our
investigators.
True change and conversion comes when all 3 knowledges are present and
happening regularly. I can do all I can to teach and give people
information about let's say for example The Word of Wisdom and what it
is and what it means, but I can't expect them to change and live it if
they have not yet experienced it in their heart and soul by feeling
the spirit.

Gooooooood stuff. Idk if that made sense to you all but it does to me(:

So Kathie is getting baptized on September 27! Same day as Carmelina.

These two are ON FIRE. It's amazing to watch and experience the
changes they go through and the almost IMMEDIATE blessings they
receive from it.

All I can say is the church is true. And will be forever and everrrr.
And nothing will change that. The worlds view and standards seem to
change daily! I love the consistency and the solidness of the church
in my life.


Have a great week(:
Love sister manson

365 Days Later

AYYYO.

Kathie is getting baptized September 14(:

NEXT SUNDAY!

Super happy for her, she is so funny and full of energy. She knows the church is true.

Do you remember Kathie? She was the one who called up the bishop and said she investigated the church years ago and wasn't ready then...but is ready now! We've been meeting with her every week and she is going to be a member of the church! She told us the story of how she got the bishops number. She called the church headquarters in SALT LAKE! Haha and talked to the people there asking them how to find the missionaries here. She doesn't mess around(: I will send pictures of it next pday.

We had a really good zone training and one of our sister training leaders shared one of newest favorite quotes!!

"Some people I have had the privilege of working with over the years have had a hard time reconciling the fact that healing requires suffering and yet is a gift from our Savior. How is it that a loving God would allow us to suffer? I have come to realize that my Savior cares more about my growth than He does about my comfort. One evidence of His love is that He does not spare me from the suffering I need for my development and progression, even when I get mad at Him. As a client once told me, “I used to feel guilty for getting mad at God. Then I realized He can handle it.” - Jonathan G. Sandberg, Healing = Courage + Action + Grace"

MY SAVIOR CARES MORE ABOUT MY GROWTH THAN HE DOES ABOUT MY COMFORT

A.m.a.z.i.n.g. Huh?

Reminds me of another quoteeeeee:

---There's no comfort in the growth zone and theirs no growth in the comfort zone.

I think that pretty much sums up this past year of my mission. 365 days of growinnn.

I have done things this past year that have made me very very very uncomfortable, and nervous and scared, but because of doing those things I've been able to grow so much.

I'm like a plant! Haha

{Its all about our growth}

That's basically what life comes down to. Are we growing? Are we becoming better then who we were yesterday? If yes, continue on! If not..make the uncomfortable changes and start. Look for the areas in your life in which you can improve on and grow in. It could be anything. You are never just stagnant in life--you are either moving forward or slipping backwards.

I love being a missionary way too much, I will probably cry for a couple weeks when I go home...you all will have to help me adjust into the normmm but we can worry about that later(: like in February.

Fast Sundays are always the best. Just what I need(: a spiritual boost for sure.

I know Jesus Christ lives! My testimony of Him deepens of him and Heavenly Father the more I study and the more I pray(:

Have a good week!

We have something pretty awesome coming up this week.

A mission tour!

One of the members of the 2nd quorem of 70, Elder Wilford W. Anderson, will be here for this week and we are all meeting together and going to listen to him speak! I will take good detailed notes and share them with you next pday.

LOVE YOU(:

{sister.manson}

The Power of 3

Giving a warning now that this email will be very short...sorry!

we don't have a lot of time today because we are going to philly(:

TO TAKE A TOUR OF THE MASONIC TEMPLE

I'll fill you in next week how it goes

I just had a really GROSS realization that I only have 6 months left on my mission...

6 months translates to--

not long at all.

Alot of really good things happened this week(:

I'm gonna sum it up though..

I don't remember how much I've been updating you all on Lydia, Carmelina and Kathie?

Buttttt

Kathie is getting baptized September 14

Carmelina is getting baptized September 21

and our investigator Lydia is getting baptized on the 27!

so crazy and so amazing.

The church is true(:

Being in a trio brings miracles!!

3 is my favorite number

This is my third area

Christ was resurrected 3 days later

3 members of the Godhead

-Heavenly Father

-Jesus Christ

-Holy Ghost

I am sorry for the lame email

next week will be better

i promise

I love you(:

sistermanson