Wonderful week!

This week was awesome. Leah got baptized! She is from the A Family. Her dad  Nefi is a less active, and her step mom Alicia is also investigating the church.   Alicia is the one who had a dream that the church was true. We are working right now to get them married so that she can get baptized and complete the family. So exciting!!

The opposition has been so hard this week. It poured rain every day and everyone sleeps when it rains so nobody wanted to see us.  We got soaked every day, but it was an adventure. We have been meeting with Alba. She is super cute. We know that the Lord loves us so much and during all the hardships we always see the miracles.

My comp Hermana Ferrer is super cute, and she speaks English perfectly. She is from Chile. 

Also something pretty sweet. Our district leader is from Nicaragua and he can't tell the difference between me and my Latina comp because my Spanish and accent are getting so good.  That was a pretty nice compliment for me!

Here are some pictures from Leah's baptism this past week.

Sorry this is short, I didn't have a lot of time.

Have a great week, Love you all!

Hermana Shepherd

Transfers!!

Wow!  So... this last transfer went by so fast. 

I am now on the final transfer of my mission, which means I will be leaving in 6 weeks!  Wow!!!  I am staying put for this last transfer but will get a new companion... Hermana Ferrer. I have never met her but I'm sure she is awesome!  She will join me as a Hermana leader in Nuevo Amanecer! 

I am doing awesome!  We we had the leaders meeting and I said goodbye to hermana Pancake.   She is super great and I hope to stay in touch with her. She goes home tomorrow.  We had the leaders meeting. The mission has changed so much since I have gotten here. It's been weird to start reflecting over my mission as a whole. I have changed so much

We had a tema with president the other day. We talked about how you can find Jesus everywhere in the scriptures. How the story about Joseph has a lot of symbols of Jesus and his life. Very cool. Read D&C 45 the very last 10 verses. So good. It has a lot in common with what is said in the story of Joseph.

Everything is great! Love you all!

Hermana Shepherd

Me, Hermana Pancake and Hermana Stewart

Nuevo Amanecer zone!

Conference was amazing!!

General Conference was amazing!  My favorite was the Sunday afternoon session, but really they were all so good!

I really liked the talk by Gary B. Sabin.   It was quite funny and had a good message. I don't have my notes with me so I invite you all to watch all of the conference talks. I am really excited to print some off next week when the become available. I hope you all enjoyed conference as much as I did and came away with some answers to your questions.

At the end of this conference I think we can all come away with three important concepts.

1. Who is our Heavenly Father?

2. How can I strengthen my testimony?

3. How can we help with the work?

I know that every word said in General Conference is the word of God and by living these principles taught, we can be made clean and worthy to live in the presence of our heavenly father again. I especially like the last question a lot.  How can we help with the work?  I have one way.  I would like to invite you all to make a goal to go to the temple at least one time every month.

Also, I have a super exciting invitation. This Easter the church has a really good video about Jesus. 

Here is the link

 https://www.mormon.org/spa/2016/pascua?cid=HP_SU_2-4-2017_dPFD_fMORG_xLIDyL1-C_ 

Share this with everyone with a testimony about our savior, Jesus Christ. You will be blessed and our lost bretheren around us will be blessed as well. Who knows, maybe through you they will be able to find the truth and happiness of God. 

l LOVE YOU ALL!

Hermana Shepherd

BANQUETE ESPIRITUAL

This week was awesome!!  We had 10 investagators in church yesterday and 8 less active people. We did a spiritual feast. We found the idea in the Liahona. We invited everyone to church.  Everything went perfectly, we had really good talks and the primary children sang.   It was adorable.

We are having so much success in our ward.  We had a baptism on Saturday!  Stiven.  He is 16 we finally got permission from his parents to baptize him. He has been going to church every week for 6 months. We are finding so many prepared people, I am so excited.

We had a really good zone conference this week also.  We talked about how repentance is a life long process and everytime we repent with sincerity, we become more like Christ.  I think I will write a little paper on it to explain. It has changed the way that we teach completely.  We don't want people to only stop sinning, but to reallly have a change of heart and feel the need to plead with the father for their sins to be forgiven. Oh man, I love it so much!

Overall, super great week. Thank you for all of the support, and a special shoutout to my mom.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!

Love,

Hermana Shepherd

I met an apostle!!!

This week was super good!!

Monday: Hermana Birch got her ears pierced (I talked her into it) AND we had a lesson with the A family. The dad, Nefi, is less active and his wife Alicia and daughter Leah are not members but they have so much potential. We taught them on Monday.  There always  seems to be so much oposition when we teach them but we always end up seeing miracles, I will talk more about them on Thursday.

Tuesday: WE MET ELDER NEIL L ANDERSON!!!!!! I got to shake his hand and everything. He gave us a lot to think about. It was incredible to be in the same room as an apostle. He talked about how there are two things that every convert needs.

1. To have a love for the savior and experiences with repentance. He taught that the people we teach should love the savior so much that even when we aren't there they still get on their knees and pray. 

2.  To gain a love for the Book of Mormon. That they read it and are putting time in to receiving it's knowledge. Then he talked about how we need to apply these two things into all of our lives so that we become converts forever. 

Wednesday: We had exchanges. I went with hermana Pelico to her area. She is the one that I lived with for almost four transfers. She is so cute. Everything went well!

Thursday: We had a training meeting instead of the regular district meeting. Hermana Birch and I had to talk. We talked about how we can work better with recent converts and less actives. Then in the nightime we had an amazing lesson with the A Family. Nefi wasn't there but Alicia recieved her answer!  She had a dream that she was standing with us next to church and there was a few other people.  She said that one of us told her that this was the true church and then she felt a huge peace come over her!!!  YAY!!!  She is going to get baptized but first they have to get married legally. Also Leah has a baptism date for the 15 of April :)

Friday: was a struggle.... I felt so sick all day long. We were having trouble finding people to teach, so we said a prayer.  Then we began to walk and I thought "hey we should go see Frank." and Hermana Birch said "I dont remember how to get to his house" so we walked a couple steps and the spirit said, turn right. so we did.  Then we walked a few more steps and Hermana Birch said "thats it!!" So we knocked on their door.  The whole time I was thinking how great it would be if I had some ginger to help my stomach.  We said a prayer with them and right after the prayer the wife looks at me and says "do you want some hot chocolate?" and our jaws dropped. "OF COURSE OH MY GOSH THANK YOU SO MUCH" so Frank went to go make us hot cocoa and when he came back he said here you go, I also put a little bit of ginger in there for you" MY PRAYEER WAS ANSWERED SO SPECIFICALLY, MY FATHER IN HEAVEN LOVES ME:)  Such a great day. The lesson went really well as well :)

Saturday: We did a service project with the Relief Society. We went to a monestary and sang to some really old nuns. It was a good time.  

Sunday: MIGALINA CAME TO CHURCH!!!!!! YAAAAAAS!   We had a cosecha, where all the elders in our zone came and contacted in our area with members to help us find more people :)

Super good week!   I realized this week that I can't understand Hermana Birch when she talks in English now, only Spanish. She has to repeat herself like ten times in English and only one time in Spanish for me to understand. Haha!

Have a good week!
Love you all,
Hermana Shepherd

A super great week!

So this week was awesome. We had a couple miracles

First, we found Jessica. She is the sister of a recent convert who just left on her mission to Mexico. So now Jessica is opening up her heart to the teachings!   She came to church on Sunday and we asked her if she wanted to be baptized and she said YES!!  Her baptismal date is set for the 25th.

We also have a family that we are teaching, Family Baez. They are a couple who have three kids and one on the way. Their oldest is a special needs and he is so cute. He is fourteen and while we are teaching he goes up to his mom and says "te quiero" which is I love you, and then kisses her on the cheek. So cute! We have had to push back their date a few times because we are trying to get them married.  There are some problems with their papers. Hopefully we will have it by next Monday so they can be married and baptized on the 25th.

We also have a reference for a little boy who just turned 8.  He is the neighbor of a member. He went to the baptism of the members kid and now he wants to be baptized.   We will go look for him this week and see if we can put a baptism date with him. 

This week we also had a leaders meeting. Of course, they called me to do a little talk thing. So my companion and I talked about the question: How can reactivating and retaining members help us to have more and better baptisms? We, as a mission are working really hard to be able to reactivate and retain and baptize all at once. So this talk was very helpful for me too. We talked about the talk that Elder Utchdorf gave in the conference about Alma and Amulek. It talks about how they were less active but then became great missionaries. We did pretty well I guess!

I learned a lot.

The most exciting announcement I have is that ELDER NEIL L ANDERSON, THE APOSTLE, IS COMING HERE ON TUESDAY AND I AM GOING TO MEET HIM. I am very excited and I will take pictures.

Have a great week!  Love you all!

Hermana Shepherd

Templeee!!

This week was so great we went to the temple! Also I am in the same zone as sister Pelico. I lived with her for three and a half transfers so we are pretty close and now we are together again. She is from Guatemala. She is training a newbie from Brazil!  It's going to be such a fun transfer

We also went to the temple this week which was amazing. I recieved a lot of revelation. I love the temple so much. There is such a peace that you can feel there.

We have gotten a ton of references this week also. More than I ever have in my entire misión. We are wokring so hard with the members!

George got confirmed yesterday! He even got up and shared his testimony about missionary work and how everyone should do it. We have a feeling he is going to help us a lot with the work. I am very surprised that he shared his testimony in front of more than 100 people. We are so proud of the progress that he is making

I love you all and miss you all so much! Have a wonderful week!

Hermana Shepherd