Springville 7th Ward Relief Society

  St Patrick's day dinner Hello my friends and family!!! It is so good to write to you all again. It is a blessing to be able to look over the week and just see how good God has been, and then share it with you! All the up’s and down’s, indescribable joy and difficult times, crazy fun and miracles from our Heavenly Father. I also want to thank all of you who have sent me emails. It means a ton to hear from you. I am not able to respond to everyone but know I read every one and am just so thankful for you. Alright into the amazingness of the week. What a wonderful time it is to be in right now. In just a short span of time we have so many incredible and fun things happening. Saint Patrick’s day comes first (my homeland🍀) and then we get spring rolling in, Easter, General Conference, the resurrection of our Savior, my mom’s birthday, and we definitely cannot forget about March Madness. All these amazing times to feel joy! There’s not a better feeling in this world than just being an...

  I hope this week’s email finds everyone happy and healthy. I know those of you in Utah are more than ready to see a daffodil pop up or hear a bird sing. We are watching the weather there, and we know that Utah broke a forty-year record for snowfall. Although I’m sure winter is getting old, the greatest thing is that the moisture will fill the lakes and end the drought! This past week here in Thomaston has been a great week with both happy and not-so-happy events. First of all, we had to say goodbye to the first Elder that was here in our mission when we arrived, Elder Dunn. What a terrific young man he is. He’s diligent in the work, committed to his mission, and he’s doing great work here. He also loves to play cards, (and might I add, just a bit competitive) so for many P-days, we had the Elders over for lunch and had a rousing round of Fast Track or “May I”. We were sad to see him go, but happy for him to be transferred to Atlanta to serve as a district leader. We had another w...

  Week 71: I can see the checkered flag.... Scout Benson Hey hey hey yall. Here we are. Another week has come and gone. And this week things started settling in. We got transfer calls and sister johnson and I are staying in lynn haven! This is my very last transfer. So now I know that this is the rest of my mission. Lynn Haven with sister johnson. So good! But so strange. Six weeks left and they're gonna fly. Baptisms and conference, zone conference and temple trips. It'll fly. But its good! Cause the other day I had a mental breakdown and cried cause I was so excited to hug my mom. So it might be getting time haha.  Now on to the stuff yall really want to hear. Miracles and people!  Selvin: is magical and we love him. We taught him the word of wisdom and he readily agreed to give up coffee and follow it. At first he was like well why and we explained that God doesn't want us to be addicted to things, because then we are being controlled. It takes away our agency. And he ...

  ¡Hola mi familia y a mis amigos! Wow, this week was something else. Maybe just a little crazy. I loved it though I learned a lot and had a ton of fun experiences. I started this week with the opportunity to do divisions! This time I got to do divisions with Elder Henriod. He is from Nevada. He is an amazing missionary and it was his last week this week. I went to his area to work and learned a lot. With all his experience in the mission I got to pick and prode a bit to figure out how to be the best missionary and what I can do now to be a better leader. He's going to be missed a lot in the mission he was awesome. The rest of the week was very normal. Lots of teaching and lots of visits. The thing that was different is we used The Book of Mormon a more. We talked and testified in every lesson. Honestly I could feel that my Spanish was better and that our friends understood the lessons better. The power of The Book of Mormon is so real and powerful! One big thing that happened this...

  Hi Family & Friends, Monday, we left for the airport at 8:00 so grateful for a flight that left at a good time 11:00am and it was direct! We boarded the flight and after sitting for a couple hours they asked us to take everything and deboard. They were having mechanical problems and a part was coming from Seattle and would be here in a couple hours. They pushed back the flight all day until 5:00 when they canceled our flight and asked us to rebook. Almost all of the 22 missionaries got on a later flight to LA, then to Hawaii. Dan and I were the last to rebook and did not make it on the same flight. We had a connection in Las Vegas. The 1st picture is of very tired travelers in Vegas!  Tuesday, we met our mission leaders Sister and President Sid Bassett and his counselors. We had a nice dinner with them and our new friends we met sitting in the airport with all day. There is a picture of them playing the ukulele. The Barkers from West mountain, the Thompson’s from St. Geo...

  Happy Monday, everyone! Last week was a very busy and very fulfilling week. On Wednesday evening, we attended a wonderful dinner with all of the other senior missionary couples, the Mission President and Sister Farias, his wife, and a visiting general authority, Elder Shayne Bowen, and his wife, Lynette. Sister and Elder Bowen spoke to us about the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant and the wonderful blessings that God promised to Abraham and his posterity that remains in effect for us today. It was very deep and meaningful. Then we moved into the cultural hall for dinner and socializing. It was a great opportunity to talk with the other senior missionaries and share ideas. We came away with a few exciting new ideas that will help the people we are working with. Also, this past week we had our first experience as apartment inspectors! We were assigned to do a cleanliness inspection of the apartments of three Elder companionships and one sister companionship. We were pretty lenien...

  ¡Hola mi familia y a mis amigos! I hope that everyone had an amazing week this week! My week was pretty good! Had lots of things happen with divisions, zone conference, lessons with members, I hit eight months as a missionary! I learn more and more each week and I have learned so much this week especially. I got to start off this week by doing divisions with Elder Fletcher! He is super dope. He has about four months in the mission so it was fun to see how the experience is coming along. He has so much confidence to talk with everyone and that is something that I want to be better at. He taught great for only having such little time. He definitely knows more Spanish than I did at that time. This is also the last week of this transfer so we will see what is going to change next week! Then Wednesday and Thursday were super chill. Thursday we got to have a family home evening with a part member family and that was a really good time. Thursday night was a little crazy because we had t...

  Week 70: Hey Jesus, its Selvin. Your little boy. Scout Benson Hey yall! Party party out here in the haven. Sister J got sick this week so we were out for the count for a second there, but the rest of the week was pretty good. So not a lot happened but for the things that did happen.... so fire!!  We went to teach Maliah and Tanzi this week and guess what! Tanzi has decided that she wants to get baptized with Maliah! So we moved their date so that they could be baptized together :)) We are so stoked about it theyre the best!! So we are looking at April 8th right now. Woo hoo!  We had a lesson with Selvin and he told us that hed found a bunch of stuff about joseph smith that was crazy. But then he said that he didnt care because he knew this church was true and he felt the Spirit here. So that was fire! But we are moving his date a little bit too so that he doesnt feel so rushed. He also gave us each a Hondorus key chain, and said the closing prayer. He always says it in ...

  Tuesday, March 14, 2023 Howdy ya”ll!! Last week started off really slow, and if we’re being honest here, this work is hard!! We started off the week with a visit to a sister who is on oxygen and trying her hardest to avoid having to go back on kidney dialysis. Our next visit was with a brother who is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. It can really be a challenge to bear these people’s burdens with joy in our hearts to lift them up. But we are commanded to “not be weary in well doing” so we are doing all that we can to bring a little bit of sunshine and hope to these two wonderful people through their difficult journeys. Then we went to the soup kitchen to do our weekly morning of service and they told us they didn’t need us that day because they did all the preparation the day before. And then our friend, Latrice, who we have been teaching with the Elders, decided to discontinue meeting with us. Fortunately, at the end of the week, we had our Stake Conference to look for...

  Hi Family & Friends, I hope all is well with everyone and your families. We survived the first two weeks of our mission and had a spiritual feast at the MTC. As we have met so many new friends from all over the world and studied Preach My Gospel, our testimony has grown of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are off to Laie on Monday and look forward to meeting our mission leaders and everyone in our mission. We will keep you posted on our new experiences as we get there. May God bless all of you! Much Love, Dan & Stacy

  STILL THRIVING  Kelsey Sumsion <kelsey.sumsion@missionary.org> Hellooooo familyyyyy I am so sorry for being so bad at these weekly emails. Citrus heights has seen lots and lots of rain this week and it's always a gamble of whether or not I need to wear my rain coat. Our friend Jacob got baptized this last week!!!! it was so amazing to see him filled with the spirit and supported by all the lovely members of our YSA and his mom. He was so ready to be baptized after many struggles in his life and he was baptized two years to the day after he said his first prayer. He was confirmed yesterday and now has a temple recommend and we will be going to the temple with him to do baptisms tomorrow!!! Talk about drinking out of a fire hose! We also put our friend Jessica on date this week for April 8th, the day before Easter. She is so incredible and faithful. Last week she kind of scared us and said she had been reading more in the bible and less in the book of mormon because she ...

  Week 69: Best Life Ever Scout Benson Heyyyyyyy!!! This week was like... actually insane. But so good. Let me tell ya about it :)  On Wednesday Sherry had her interviews for baptism and they were beautiful. She had to get interviewed by a member of our mission presidency for various reasons, and it was so amazing to see how the Spirit lead president wainwright, and how it touched Sherry. it was a really cool expirience that i was so grateful to be a part of.  Wednesday afternoon we left for tallahassee. Drove our 2 hours and stayed with the other set of sisters in our zone in an abandon elders apartment in tally. Needless to say it was not left in prime condition when said elders were switched out. BUT. it was okay. it became home for the next couple days. we crashed hard that night.  Come thursday morning we are all running around getting ready and then running out the door to zone conference! Zone conference was a good time, I got to see sister palmer cute girl. w...

  Forgiveness Cooper Acor <cooper.acor@missionary.org> ¡Hola mi familia y a mis amigos! Another week down in the work of the Lord. I can not explain how fast time is passing on the mission. Sometimes I will wake up in the morning and then I feel like I am going right back to bed. The days go by so fast and the weeks even faster. Highlight of this week is that I got to go on divisions with an Elder in my district. Elder Halls! He is from Gilbert Arizona and he is so cool. We are in the same group so we have the same time in the mission and we are both training. We did divisions in his area and that was fun to see a new area here in Encarnación. We truly saw some miracles during our divisions. We taught so powerfully with the spirit and testified strongly that the church is true. It was such a fun experience. Then we went back to their apartment which is right across the hall from the zone leaders so we talked that night and it was fun. Elder Henriod is hilarious and I laughed ...

Doesn't get more Texas than this  I love Jesus Christ Spencer Neel <spencer.neel@missionary.org> HELLO MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY!!!! How are ya!? What an amazing time it is to be alive. I am so thankful to be a missionary and a representative of Jesus Christ. It is humbling to wear His name and life is just so good because God is so good! What a week it has been! We found 6 more friends this week and it was a huge miracle. We just kept running into situation after situation that just lined up at the right time and the right place. We’ve basically restarted our teaching pool here and I am excited to progress with these new friends. I am so thankful for all your support and prayers back at home and if you could please pray for our new friends to have the desire to learn more and grow their relationship with our Savior. Their names are Raul, Danny, Erik, Rafael, Ricardo, and Martin. I love them all so much and good things are coming for them. We had such a cool experience with our n...

  Miracles happen when we are grateful Spencer Neel <spencer.neel@missionary.org> Hello my friends and family how are y'all!? It's going good over here in Lubbock, the weather has been in the 70s and 80s this week and I've missed warm weather so much. And then there’s always a little wind which levels out the heat. Enough about the weather though let’s get into the week! Elder Kitchen and I have been off and running this week. I don’t think we’ve ever worked the area harder. Even with exchanges we’ve been able to really exceed our goals. He’s a hard worker and I’m excited for these next couple weeks. We went on exchanges this past Tuesday and I went to the Friendship Mesa area with Elder Nichols. We went out right after district council and just started to go. We didn’t even have a chance to switch out of our suits unitl 9! We stopped by and met with a lof of amazing and unique people. They had met a lady in an apartment complex a couple days earlier and we decided to...

  Hello everyone I hope you are all doing wonderfully well. I am still in the Tualatin Branch (woohoo) with a new companion sister blake. She's from Spanish Fork so that's pretty cool. For those of you who don't know obscure Utah geography that's 15 minutes away from my house. We both went to BYU before the mission as well but we didn't ever actually know each other until now. She's super awesome and has so much energy and fire for the work it's amazing! We moved apartments and now it feels like we are in a cozy little cabin! Wow we have been busy this week and the members have been really involved which is such a miracle. Cool things: ☆ fausto explaining to everyone he meets that he has felt so joyful since learning about the gospel and trying to describe the feeling of the spirit and asking if others have felt the same.  ☆ dinner with the Alvarez family (our friends we are teaching) and a member family and learning about all of the cool Chilean food ☆ lear...

  Week 68: President Pushup, Peaches and Answered Prayers Hey hey yall!! Welcome to another episode of the life of Sister Benson. Lynn Haven is popping off like nobody's business lately and its so cool to see. This week was awesome so lets get into it :))  We drove 5 hours to Jacksonville this week so that we could go to MLC- mission leadership council- and have a big long meeting. It actually was a really good meeting where I felt like I learned a lot. The Spirit was really strong and it was so cool to see how much each of the leadership teams wanted to move the work forward. It was fun to be there, but it was also like really weird and sad because the majority of my friends who would usually be there, have gone home. So i was like.... who do i talk to..... Such a strange feeling. But it was great. Now for the first part of our title, President Pushup. So President Elbert was discussing with us something... to do with exercise? Anyways he was like well i can do a burbee. and ...

  Good morning, family and friends, These Mondays sure do seem to roll around quickly! We had another fantastic week in the lovely land of Georgia. Spring has sprung, everything is blooming, and the allergies are coming in with a vengeance. These peach trees have begun to blossom with beautiful pink flowers and will be brimming with plump, juicy peaches by July. Georgia peaches are one thing we’ve really been anxiously anticipating! Our first highlight for the week was our new investigator, Latrice. It’s such a delight to teach her. She’s gone to many different churches over the years, resulting in nothing but confusion. She does not have a strong, scriptural foundation, and she is elated with what she’s learning. She came to church yesterday for the first time. She has a beautiful smile that was glowing on her face the entire morning. We will teach her again on Wednesday this week. She is very anxious to progress on her spiritual path. We also had a wonderful visit with the Wyatt ...

  Trials Cooper Acor <cooper.acor@missionary.org> ¡Hola mi familia y a mis amigos! Well everyone this week was a pretty uneventful one. It seemed like nothing really happened this week. People didn't really want to listen. No one is really progressing, but hey! We have weeks like that sometimes and that's completely ok! Tuesday was just a very normal day. We did not make much progress. Wednesday though we did divisions and I did them with Elder Contreras from Chile. It was not the best division because we started and we took the wrong bus home and during that it started pouring rain so all in all we took like three hours to get home. Then we got home and it was pouring buckets and we just couldn't get anyone to accept us so we wrote testimonies in copies of The Book of Mormon and talked.  Thursday had our weekly planning so it was a bit slow then we went out and worked and no one wanted to listen and no one had time. Then we visited with some members which lifted our ...

  Monday, February 27, 2023 Happy Monday everyone! Well, we knew we couldn’t stay on a spiritual high forever, and this week we were presented with a few challenges. Most of our appointments were canceled and those we did have were met with some very sad stories. So many of the people here are living in poverty and squalor. There are many dilapidated trailers and run-down homes. First, we met with a woman named Laura. She and her husband had a wonderful marriage. They had eight beautiful children. He passed away just a few years ago in his early forties as a result of a brain tumor. Her husband’s mother is in our ward. She then married his best friend, whose mother is also in the ward. They have one little girl together, and she told us that the marriage is now over. So, she is alone with nine children. What makes it even sadder, is that this once very faithful leader and teacher is now questioning the very existence of God. She has stopped coming to church and has taken her childr...