HOLA

HELLO!

It was a good week! We are striving to look for the miracles each day and working hard! I learned a lot this week. My companion has been super stressed out, I felt like she didn't trust/respect me or any of the plans that we made this week. I already feel inadequate as a trainer which made it a pretty stressful week! I was praying so hard for charity and you know how when people say if you pray for patience Heavenly Father is going to give you opportunities to be patient haha well I guess the same goes for charity! Finally we got to the end of the week and she apologized to me saying that she was a brat all week and that she was just really home sick and ended up taking it out on me. It is interesting that how when we give our trials to the Lord, He works them out in ways that we wouldn't have necessarily thought. She told me that she doesn't have complete trust in the Lord yet and that is something she is going to work on this week. I bore testimony that once she gained her trust in the Lord that there would be nothing hindering her heart from the work, that as she came to trust the Lord she would also come to trust me and all of our other leaders. I don't necessarily know when I came to the realization that I have given my will to the Lord, but I do know that the thing that keeps me going each morning when I wake up is my love for our Savior Jesus Christ. He is the reason for everything we do!

On a less stressful note haha.. we had an awesome church tour with Michelle and Alex this week! They are soooo coool. Seriously I don't know if I have ever felt the spirit that strong on a church tour. They are doing great and we are excited for our lesson with them tonight! We had some really great lessons with the Hernandez family this week also! On monday we taught them the plan of salvation and then on tuesday we had a member come a give her a blessing because she has been super sick. Afterwards we felt that we needed to teach her about patriarchal blessings (she is a less active). She was so excited that she could get one for herself, so we will be helping her prepare to receive hers! 

So I have gone this far in my mission without receiving any media referrals or church headquarters referrals and this week we got two!! One of them was such a miracle. We knocked into a really cool girl named Itzel on wednesday and we gave her a spanish book of mormon and told her that we would come back in a couple of days to check up on her reading. The next day we received a media referral for a girl named Itzel, wanting an english book of mormon, and it was the same address of the girl we had contacted the day before!! We went over and she said that she had been reading in the spanish book but there were some things she didn't understand so she wanted an english one too. SHE WAS READING. It was such a miracle, and her family only speaks spanish so we will be going over for a lesson tomorrow and hopefully involve her family! 

Yesterday we also had a pretty sweet miracle. I have come to the conclusion that sundays are either the best or the hardest days of the week because you work so hard all week and by sunday you are exhausted, its either the best day because people come to church and you actually feel like all the work you put in that week was actually making a difference... or no one comes to church and you wonder what went wrong or what you could have done better to help people act and come to church! Anyways yesterday was kind of one of those days, we went knocking on doors before church and we had two families say they were coming... but no one came! .... at least we thought no one came... We went by one of the families last night that said they were going to come to see what happened and turns out they actually did come!!!! They were just late so they sat in the foyer and then Kristina (the mom) had to get to work so they had to leave after sacrament meeting. SUCH A TENDER MERCY. Ah they are the coolest. It was a great week! We have transfers next week but there is a really good chance that we will both be staying because hermana marble only half way done with training, but you never know! I love being a missionary and I love the people we are serving. I hope you all have a great week!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE YOU

con mucho amor

hermana wortley

I have no idea what is going on in this picture HAHAHA but I did buy that dress for $1 #classicjayne #can'ttakeanormalpic

I was hugged by a mexican grandpa this week

HELLO!

Ok we had so many miracles this week!! One of the coolest miracles happened on thursday. So we had interviews with President Ware and specialized training thursday morning and the training was all about church tours and how we can use them to help people get excited for church and what not. Anyways the training was super good and everyone was pumped about setting up some church tours for the next week! So we finished up with the meetings and then we went on with our day and we were sitting in ward correlation at about 7 and we get a call from this potential investigator Cesar who we had been trying to meet with for over a month... and he tells us that he is on his way to the church!!!! So we were like ok we will meet you there! haha and so a member comes with us and we met Cesar at the church and had a church tour with him and his two friends! Talk about applying what we learned in our specialized training!! Cesar is so prepared. He was taught back in Royal City (by hermana pulido!) back in the fall and wanted to get baptized but ended up going back to mexico to be with family, but he brought his book of mormon and all the pamphlets and shared them with his family. He told us that he would continue reading and praying and prepare to be baptized. It was such a miracle. Poor hermana marble was freaking out because she had never given a church tour before, it was kind of last minute but as missionaries we've got to learn to go with the flow! haha 

Also we had a miracle with our new investigator Veronica! We had knocked multiple times and weren't able to get in contact with her for a while BUT she answered on saturday and invited us right in for a lesson! She asked a ton of questions about the temple and we were able to teach her all about the restoration and that she would be able to go to the temple after she was baptized! 

So as of this week we are now only attending one ward. We will be focusing on building this new spanish group with the mission ridge ward. I am pretty excited about it because now we have more proselyting time on sundays, and I feel like it is really going to help the work progress here. We have been having such a hard time figuring out who should go to which ward and the boundaries were kind of non-existent but now we can just focus on strengthening this spanish group!! 

Ok funny story.. at least I think its funny! We were walking down the street the other day and we see this guy walking towards us, so naturally we say hi and start a conversation.. but when we said hi he looks at my name tag and says "WORTLEY! What's it been like 3 years??"  hahahahahaha I was so confused because I had never met this guy before! I just said I have actually only been in this area for about 4 months, and he was like wow time is really a weird thing. And then he just walked away!! Oh geeze it was so funny.. I am laughing just thinking about it! 

We passed Jaime to the english elders this week. It was really hard, but we weren't consistently teaching his family (who only speak spanish) and Jaime prefers english so we felt it would be best to have the elders teach him! It is interesting how we grow to love those we teach, I felt like Jaime was my child haha but I know that he will continue progressing and growing in the gospel even if it's not us helping him along the way. Thats where the eternal perspective come in.

Training is still going well! I am truly humbling myself. I am grateful for a loving Savior who loves us in our weaknesses!! I hope you all have a great week, LOVE YOU MUCHO!!!

con amor 

hermana wortley

This is Alice. You see that little bear.. his name is wortley :)

HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Hey Everyone!!

It was a good week as usual! We had some miracle referrals. So we get a bunch of referrals from the english sisters that share our area and sometimes they are actually interested but for the most part they are not interested at all but they speak spanish so we get referred to visit them haha so it makes for quite the adventure when contacting referrals! Anyways we had this lady Kristina that they told us to go visit and we went and visited her this tuesday and she is so golden. We taught her and her 12 year old daughter Eli the restoration and invited them to be baptized. She thought about it for a minute and said yeah I'll be baptized! And Eli said she would be baptized as well! They asked some great questions and were listening so intent to everything we said. 

Miracle number 2.. we went to stop by another referral, Michelle. We knocked and she let us right in! We were able to teach her, her boyfriend, their 2 cousins and her boyfriends mom! It was such a miracle lesson and the spirit was so strong as we testified of our Savior.  

On wednesday I went on exchanges with hermana garcia! She is so great. We did a lot of knocking and talking to people, but it was kind of a bummer because we only talked to 1 hispanic all day which is super crazy! But as we were talking about the exchange and the things we learned we both talked about how grateful we are to be serving. Missionary work is a lot of planting seeds. We talk to people everyday, we offer service, we share our testimonies and strive to be a light.. but more often than not, the work that we do is just seed planting and preparing people for the next missionaries that come along. 

My testimony was strengthened this week on our missionary purpose. We are called to invite and help others come unto Christ and as long as we are doing all that we can to invite and help, it is up to them to act. Thats the problem with agency.. haha just kidding. I love the missionary purpose and the chance I have to meet so many great people each and every day!

On saturday night at about 8pm we get a call from one of the members of the bishopric in the spanish ward asking us if we could speak the next day. Hermana marble was freaking out because she had never spoken in spanish in church before haha and on sundays we have meetings starting at 7 that go until about 4 so we didn't quite have time to write a talk! But we accepted the challenge. I decided that I would just talk about a conference talk that I liked, and hermana marble did the same. She wrote hers in the car going from our first ward to our second and I was planning to just follow the spirit hahaha. We get to sacrament meeting and turns out an english member was blessing their baby in our ward so the ward was full of white people and they asked one of the kids from that family to speak and our ward mission leader translated and then they told hermana marble that she could speak in english so the people could understand (tender mercy on her part haha) and by the time it was my turn to speak there wasn't any time so they told me I would be speaking next week! It was such a blessing because now I actually have time to prepare a talk! haha 

Last night we were walking and knocking, talking to people but for some reason we were having a hard time finding people who actually wanted to talk to us... I turned to hermana marble and said hey what if we said a specific prayer that we would find someone to teach? So we just stopped on the side of the road and said a quick prayer. And what do you know, the Lord put someone in our path! We talked to a really cool guy named Luis and he invited us to come back and teach his family! TENDER MERCY of the week!! I hope you all have a great week!!! I love you!

con amor

hermana wortley

Sorry this is an old picture but a good one nonetheless!! 

semana de milagros como siempre :)

Hello!

Ok I know I say this every week, but this was a week of miracles!! I learned so much and am so grateful for the growth that I have seen so far this transfer. 

First of all conference was AMAZING as usual. I was spiritually edified and uplifted. I kind of felt that one of the overall themes of conference was Enduring to the end and that we must never stop trying! Super powerful. Some of my favorite quotes were... (but I watched most of it in spanish so my translation may not be great haha) 

The savior knows the difficulty of the way

true repentance is our escape from sin

spiritual food is necessary for spiritual survival

our decision to believe shapes all our other decisions

fear is dispelled through faith in Christ

As we fear God more completely, we love him more perfectly

No one is predestined to recieve less than the lord has predestined for us

If we dont try we are just latter day sinners 

Christ makes joy a possibility

The atonement was the most majestic manifestation of true love

enduring to the end is a hallmark of true discipleship 

only the savior has words of eternal life 

as we yield our hearts to the lord we become converted

AND..... Because of what I learned in conference, How will I change??

Sorry I just couldn't seem to pick a couple, they were all so good!! I love conference. So yesterday was Easter! La Pascua was a really great day. We left early before conference started with a member to pick up some of our investigators and they came! Jaime came and he LOVED it. On the car ride home he was quoting some of the talks ah it was super cool, also Veronica (a less active) and her two boys (who haven't been baptized) came! Veronica is pregnant and she had really bad morning sickness but they still came and they seemed to really like it. 

So how we came to know veronica and her family is a miracle. One day the elders were walking and all of the sudden a car pulled over in front of them and they were kind of weirded out but turns out it was veronica and her husband Ivan. Veronica was baptized in 2011 down in tricities but with the move up here and what not she just lost touch with the church. She is 26 and has 5 kids!! They are the most adorable family ever. We are pretty excited to be teaching her boys and hopefully her husband! She is really confused right now because other people have been inviting her to other churches and she hasn't been to our church for at least 2 years but she has so much faith and her family really needs not only the foundation of the gospel but the support from the ward. We made them an easter egg hunt with each egg having a picture of Christ and a different part of his life whether it was his birth, ministry, death, resurrection.. the kids are so eager to learn about Christ. After our lesson with them we got THE sweetest text from her saying how much her kids love us and that they really needed our visit. It was just one of those tender mercy kind of moments where you feel like you are actually helping in some way. I love that family.

So a couple of weeks ago we started teaching a lady named Esperanza and she has a 12 year old son Jose. Anyways we stopped by the other day to check up on their reading (she can't read so we left him with a chapter to read to her) and Jose said that he has been reading the book of mormon every night because it helps him to feel less scared! Ah it was so cool, this 12 year old kid recognizes the light that comes through reading in the book of mormon.

We had a sweet lesson with Jose Juan and Alejandra this week. We taught the plan of salvation and they were SO in tune with everything that we were saying and had great questions. They are so prepared. I am so grateful for my Savior Jesus Christ and for everything He has done for me. I love this Easter time and the hope that comes through the Atonement!! 

I love you all! have a great week :)

con mucho amor

hermana wortley

(thanks for the new sweater mom :))