My Mission President is Cooler Than Yours 😎

Happy (late) Halloween everyone!! We had a pretty awesome Halloween cause our ward is awesome and so is our zone AND my mission president is the coolest. 

ALSO HAPPY 28TH TO MY SEESTER ANNIKA!!!! I love her guts a lot and she's basically the reason I'm a missionary right now so #shescool

Halloween!

We wanted to focus on family history for Halloween (because it's so close to the day of the dead) so we had an amazing lesson on the importance of family history work and now we're doing that every Sunday night for our Family Zone Evening!! Anyways, President and Sister Chapman are seriously the sweetest and gave us a "Halloween gift" and approved Coco for our zone to watch!! So we went to this AWESOME members place (the Ballard's) for Halloween night. They fed us so much food, let us make s'mores, and set up a sheet to watch the movie. They also made us some BOMB hot chocolate when it got colder. Then after the movie they set up their telescope to show us the blue moon and Mars! They are seriously the most generous people I've ever met. And Brother Ballard looks exactly like Iron man, so his son used his 3d printer to make him an Iron man suit. It's literally the coolest costume I've ever seen. 

Trunk or Treat (drive-through edition) 

Our ward did a drive-through trunk or treat on Halloween and since we weren't allowed to really dress up, we wore cheetah print and were the cheetah girls haha. It was pretty sad cause no one knew what we were lol. Anyways, the trunk or treat was actually kind of crummy. There was like...nobody there and everyone had to stay in their cars so that sucked. Buuuuut we still made it a party and decorated our car super cute!

Service

We did a LOT of service these last 2 weeks (I kind of forgot to mention some last week oops). We moved someone last week, then we moved someone this week and cleaned their ENTIRE house. Good thing I actually love cleaning cause we did that foreverrrrrrr. BUT. That floor I scrubbed was freaking SPARKLING when I was done. Are you proud mom? 😉 We also worked at this place sort of like the DI but it's only for foster families and low-income communities. Basically we were just folding clothes for hours but it was worth it because the owner let us all take a basket of food home and one item of clothing if we wanted. After that service, we went to a place that I can't remember that it's called but they basically get all their funds from donors and then buy groceries and toiletries for immigrants. We went through putting kits together and making sure nothing was expired. There was this huge case of macaroni that expired like 2 days before so she let us all take a bunch of that and some sodas too. After THAT service, we went to CommunityLink! It's sort of like the Bishop's Pantry, so we loaded up carts and stuff for a couple hours. We also had a car wash again!! This one was also super duper successful!! We had tons of people show up and got a couple of their numbers!! There was a lady that drove off in the middle of it though when we handed her a pass-along card so that was awkward haha. 

Teaching

Soooo this week was trash. All of our lessons fell through or didn't answer or something. But we have a lot scheduled for next week! Hopefully these ones will actually happen haha. Also remember that dude Frank we were challenging to baptism? Well it turns out he's and eternigator (eternal investigator) so we will be dropping him. I was unaware that he had been taught since 2013 and hadn't kept ANY of his commitments. He's never read the Book of Mormon on his own and hasn't gone to church. I'm super sad we're gonna stop teaching him, but he likes our company more than our message. He is SO awesome though!! I'm grateful the Lord has a plan for everything or it would be even harder to let these people go. BUT we have a lot of hope for Nelly, and a couple people we found on facebook. Speaking of facebook...

FACEBOOK FINDING

This week was a freaking BLAST with facebook. We played the abc game with it which means we have a race to see who can message someone with a first name starting with each letter of the alphabet. The only rules are not skipping letters, and they all have to be nonmembers. After that we had a TON of responses and at the end of each week we add up how many people responded to us. At the end of this week we had a total of 134 people that had responded to us!! So now we've got so many potentials!! SUPER successful week for sure and hopefully we'll have a bunch of new lessons by next week!

Weekly Spiritual Dose

Alright, today I want to share about self worth. We had an AWESOME lesson by Elder Stanley (one of the Elders in my mission who's literally a prophet in the making) and he based his lesson off of the talk "Value Beyond Measure" by Joy D. Jones. He talked a lot about the difference between worth and worthiness. Did you know that your worth is infinite? Your worth is literally immeasurable. Nothing can change that. Christ came here and suffered for us to make our worth infinite and because of that sacrifice, there is no other power or force that can change our worth in our Father's eyes. He loves us in such a way that it is beyond our comprehension. How crazy is that?? How amazing is it that? Did you ever think that someone could love you SO much that you couldn't even grasp the amount of love they have for you?? I definitely did not. It's still crazy to me that His love never changes. He will always love us no matter what we've done or how many times we do it. However, we have the responsibility to maintain our worthiness. Just because our worth never changes doesn't mean we get to go out and do whatever we want. Even though our worth doesn't change when we sin, our worthiness to receive blessings does. Like Joy D. Jones says "Let me point out the need to differentiate between two critical words: worth and worthiness. They are not the same. Spiritual worth means to value ourselves the way Heavenly Father values us, not as the world values us. Our worth was determined before we ever came to this earth. 'God's love is infinite and it will endure forever.' On the other hand, worthiness is achieved through obedience. If we sin, we are less worthy, but we are never worth less! We continue to repent and strive to be like Jesus with our worth intact. As President Brigham Young taught: 'The least, the most inferior spirit now upon the earth...is worth worlds.' No matter what, we always have worth in the eyes of our Heavenly Father." He loves you! He loves you so much and he wants you to be good so He can see you again! He is our Father, who wants nothing more than to welcome each of His children back into the celestial kingdom with Him. If you don't believe me that He loves you this much, ask Him! He'll tell you. 

I love you all SOSOSO much!! Also I love being a missionary but we're still stuck inside quite a bit so if you have any crazy life stories or good jokes, please send them my way (; 

Have a great week everybody (:

Sister Rogers

Pictures:

1. We only have one pan so this is how we transform it to the size of the recipe 😤

2. Spooky cookies 

3. Some of the squad at torchys tacoossss

4-5. The cheetah girls lol

6-7. Our missionary appropriate car decor

8. The set up for Coco

9. The blue moon 

10. Honestly I'm not really sure why this picture exists or how it even really happened...but these are the four "coneheads" of the zone. From left to right it's Sister Brown, me, Hermana Miller and Sister Hulme. This is how we look at pickleball when it's cold and our hair is in a bun haha. 

11. Cookies ~Texas Edition~

12-13. The zone at our Halloween party! 

Video: Elder Stanley getting creepy n creative for Facebook around the spooky season