Roasted Pig anyone?!? 12/9/13

This week has been really good. I've been stressing about Transfers, which we are finding out today at 12 so I will let you guys know about that later today probably. I am done with training, so anything is possible, and it's kind of scary. 

On Tuesday we did some walking around and we met a lady named Tricia, she is really cool. She does personal training for Geriatrics. She told us that she was Catholic and her husband was Protestant and that she was looking for a church around here to bring them both together. We went back on Saturday and talked to her and we sat down and she was giving us chocolate and a blanket and some fuzzy socks, we had been there for maybe 5 minutes, ahh I love her. We answered some of her questions and got to know her better. Taught a little about the Restoration. She talked about how she had seen Books of Mormon in the Best Westerns that they stay in, but she couldn't just steal one. We gave her a Book of Mormon, and she was SO excited, It was like a little kid on Christmas. She had us write our names and the date so she could remember. It is her B-day tomorrow and she wants to improve her life, She is getting baptized, I know it!

Thursday we had exchanges/splits with the Hermanas. Hermana Jones came with Sis. Davis and I and Hermana Sudweeks went with the other sisters. That Exchange was one of the best things of my life! Hermana Jones is kind of like my missionary idol, probably because she is one of the few older missionaries out here. Sis. Davis and I learned so much from her. Part of training is that I get to take lead in teaching and planning. This was hard for both of us because Sis. Davis likes to take charge, and I like to go with the flow. I think I got this boost of confidence with Hermana Jones, because I was talking to people more and just being BOLD. Friday was probably the best day on my mission so far. I was the happiest that I have been in a long time and it was because I was sharing the gospel, and I wasn't afraid of anything. I don't know where it came from, but I loved it and now that I know what it is like I want to have that all the time! We went over to Mataeo and Hermana Jones was talking with him. I understood very little of what was going on, but he has been reading the Book of Mormon, he asked why Nephi killed Laban, but as Hermana Jones was talking to him, I knew I needed to bear my testimony. I bore my Testimony on The Book of Mormon, and then Hermana Jones translated after. It was the coolest thing, to have him feel the spirit.

On Sunday, Betty taught the Relief Society lesson. She did awesome. It was on Joseph Smith. She has been a member for a month and she did so well. Well we have to get going to DHS but I will email about transfers later today! I love you all, Thank you for your support!

Love,

Sister Kellee Gardner

Yes that is a roasted pig. The Constantinos had us over for their family Christmas party. They are Filipino so there was lots of food! The second picture is from Betty's lesson. She made scriptures with the Hershey Treasures candy and since it was on Joseph Smith she did "we believe" for the Articles of Faith. It was super cute! So for Transfers, I am staying here in Yucca! All of our district are staying actually but we are getting 2 sets of Elders, one for our ward and one for the other ward. It will be exciting and very helpful. Im glad that we don't have to worry about moving or anything and I don't have to stress anymore, the only bad thing about being in Yucca right now is that it is Freezing. When we went to DHS today the other missionaries were freezing, it was 49 or 50 degrees, we thought it felt great. It is about 36 or 37 right now, but the wind is ridiculous. I'm kind of glad I'm not in Utah right now with the way it sounds there. No snow yet, but I'm sure we will get some soon. 

Love ya,

Sister Gardner

Is it really December? 12/2/13

Wow, I can't believe it is December, mostly because it is still about 58-62 degrees most days. December in the desert is different :D

So This week has been alright. We had several lessons fall through, but we were able to visit lots of people. Tuesday we taught Vic, that lesson went pretty well, but we haven't heard from him since. I think he really liked talking to us, but I hope he still has an interest, he cancelled our appointment on Fri. Emily is doing great! She has a sincere desire to do what is right and find out if this is what she needs to do in her life. Her sister is a great example and helps answer questions. The Bueno family also cancelled this week, I guess thats what you get when everyone is off of school for the entire week and Thanksgiving. We were able to talk with Lisa for a bit on Wednesday, and we shared a Mormon Message with her family. She knows the next lesson we are planning on teaching her is the Plan of Salvation, we just have to be able to meet with her.. She's really busy and so it is hard to get an appointment. The other sisters had to go to the dentist today and it is the office she works at so we told them to say hi to her, hopefully shes there. On wednesday we went out walking and we met a few people, one of them is Lalo, he is really cool.  Anyways as we were talking to him he asked us what was the difference between our church and other churches.. In my head I was like "Well let me tell ya ":D we briefly went over the Restoration and how we have a Prophet who leads us today. He seemed to like that. We brought our dvd player with us and we showed him the Mormon message about the Restoration, The spirit was there and I think he really liked what we had to say. He was glad we celebrated holidays because he is pretty into those :D. He is Catholic but likes learning about religion. I am excited to teach him more. 

Thanksgiving was really good. Betty invited us to eat with her, she always invites single elderly people to Thanksgiving and some of them we met at her Baptism. We kept that short and tried not to eat too much because we had dinner at the Prudholms. That was yummy too. Between dinners we went and passed out pass along cards at a restaurant in town that does free thanksgiving dinner every year. That was fun and slightly awkward, mostly fun. Hopefully something will come out of that. 

Friday we had an appointment with a Less active part member family. The Fassbinders, He actually has a son who lives in PG, who might be in a Stake presidency somewhere, I figured mom probably knows him :D. Anyways his daughter( I think) Joyce, is not a member, but I'm not really sure their relation, who takes care of him and her granddaughter. He isn't in good heath and wasn't really interested in us, but we did set up an appointment with Joyce. 

That wasn't really grammatically correct I'm sure, but I hope you get the point. 

Saturday was a baptism. Mom had asked if we had had one on Sat, which would have been the Somers, but we haven't been able to really get in contact with them since we put them on date.. so that didn't happen, but the other sisters had Adam's baptism. They had one back in September, Carmel, and Adam is her husband, so that was cool to see him become interested, stop smoking and everything. Bruce was able to come watch the baptism, and we have been trying to help him understand the importance of being baptized because he really does know it is true, but there have been so many things holding him back, that are little things. Not to mention that he had told the Branch president 2 weeks ago that he wanted to be baptized but he hadn't told us. Which leads toSunday.

We had church, which went well. We were at Linger longer/Break the fast for the ysa branch and all of the sudden, Bruce is like "So I've been thinking about a date for me to get baptized. The 4th is a Saturday and then the 5th has always been a significant number..." Us:" So January 4th? Will you prepare yourself to be baptized on that day?" anyways long story short he finally committed to baptism. He has learned and grown a lot, and there's a lot we still have to teach, but it is nice to know that he is understanding.

So It has been a pretty good week and one more to go for this transfer, Sister Davis and I are hoping we don't get transferred yet.. who knows though. Anything can happen. 

I love you all!

Sister Gardner

So I just remembered something else. A few weeks ago we were teaching Chante(Shawntae) and Jason and then they moved to DHS. well our Zone leaders have been able to meet with them and they have a baptism date for Jan. 11th! Also Karen dropped us this week. Anyways, Love ya all!

Sister Gardner

11/25/13

Dear Family, 

Well I had an email in the works and then the draft got deleted.. Oh well it wasn't that good anyways. This week was pretty good. Monday we had dinner with the Nelsons and they invited Emily and a guy named Jay, who is a former member.. long story. But they have 2 ball pythons and I held one. Only because it was not moving it just sat in a ball the whole time.On Tuesday we had a really good District Meeting and a great reminder that I am not here for me.. My purpose is to invite others to come unto Christ. As I focus on serving others, I will grow as well but if I am focusing on myself, I am not helping others. I was having a hard time with studying for lessons because I was studying what I wanted and not what my investigators needed. That is something that I am continually working on. 

It got really cold and rainy on Thursday and Friday. That was no fun.. On Friday we taught Alicia again. She had a few questions about the Plan of Salvation, but said that she would do anything to get to the Celestial Kingdom. She also said the closing prayer and was pretty nervous but asked if she could give the closing prayer after every lesson! Shes so golden! She just wants to be the best mom and have a happy family. We are meeting with her again tonight and hopefully her husband joins in.On Friday night we picked up a Laurel from the Palm Desert Stake. She got to stay the night and be a missionary for a day. It was a cool experience, I think it would be cool to actually go out with the missionaries for a day and see what it is like. It was cool to get her perspective as a "normal person" of what she thought missionary work was. 

Anyways, sorry this was short, but I better wrap it up.  This pic is in 29, there are a couple of streets that we want to take pictures of, but so far Mormon tr. and Utah tr. are the only ones we have done so far. There's a Memory ln and Boo ln. also Kickapoo tr. is a fun one. Old Woman Springs rd is one of the main roads we drive on, at first I thought that was a weird name for a street but I've gotten used to it and some of the other weird names. The other picture is a sign we found in front of a house, there are several people who have posted signs about how they have a religion already and they don't want missionaries. This is the biggest one ive seen.. Anyways I love you all! and remember that God loves you.

Love, 

Sister Kellee Gardner

11/18/13

Dear Family,

This week has been fun and uplifting. We have 3 new investigators this week, Vic, Alicia, and Emily. Vic is a guy we found as we were walking on Tuesday. We went back and taught him the Restoration on Friday, He read and seems interested in learning more. Alicia is a referral we got from a lady in our ward, well she told us about Alicias husband and so we went to find their house, we had a general idea. We talked to Alicia and she was sick but told us to come back on Sunday. So yesterday we met with her. She is from the Philipines and knows the two sisters in our ward who are Fillipino, and knew they were Mormon, she didn't know we were Mormon at first. We talk about how God is our loving Heavenly Father and that he wants us to live with Him forever and then we taught the Plan of Salvation. We pull out our pamphlet, and she was like "I have one of those somewhere!" so She has been introduced to the church, but we didn't even know it. She loved what we taught her. It was cool to think that we went over to meet them, and they had already been introduced to the Gospel. I don't know the whole background but I think that she is ready now to hear more. Emily is 17 and her sister just joined the Church in March. Right now she just wants to learn more, but has seemed to really like it. We had a potential investigator named Meto, we set up an appointment and went over there on Sat, her mom said that "she's 15 and doesn't study with Mormons". That was so sad for us. When we asked Meto if we could teach her, she said yes right away.. One day she will be able to learn. On Thursday we were in Joshua Tree and we got to our appointment early so we decided to walk around the area for a few minutes. We saw an old man walking his dog and so we talked to him. anyways he was like I'm not really a religeous person... I asked him if he knew anyone who would benift from the message of Jesus Christ. He started telling us about how his neighbor could then goes on about how he's thought about learning and going to a Mormon Church.A lot of people think we are Jehovah's Witness out here, which is probably what he thought.. We were like "We're Mormnon!" Long story short haha he said he would be at church on Sunday. He didn't end up coming, but it was still a cool experience.

Saturday was the best day ever, besides not being able to meet with Meto. We had our mission conference at the mission office. It was so cool to have all of us there. It was good to see all of the missionaries I knew from the MTC, but the best part was the things that we learned. There were a lot of rumors about some big announcement, but there wasn't one. The purpose was to unite us as a mission. We talked a lot about our goals and what we can accomplish as a mission. Another thing that I loved was just keeping it simple. We have been challenged to teach 5 minute lessons and to keep it simple. The Spirit will be there as we teach simply, when we get complicated, the spirit leaves. It was a great reminder that we are teaching people not lessons. President Madsen, talked to us about how we are God's warriors and how he will fill our mouths Jer. 1:5-8. We may be young but we are powerful.  President Miskin,(cool story, some of the boys in my EFY group like 5 years ago are from Redlands and Yucipa and President Miskin is one of their dads.) talked about being obedient. There were so many cool stories shared. I learned a lot about what I can do better in this area right now. I am really excited for what is happening. There was so much more, but my notes are at home.. :(

I love you all and hope all is going well!

Love,

Sister Kellee Gardner

11/11/13

Dear Family,

So this week has been pretty good. I think last week I talked about Melinda coming to church. On monday we met with her and also on Friday. She is a lot more open than she was a month ago, which is good. I am excited for that. We also had the best Empinadas ever! Sister Hobbs is kinda famous for them, and I wish you could all have some!

Friday was really good too. We met with the Tomeks and Shaunte, she is moving to DHS which is sad but we let the Zone leaders know about that so they can hopefully teach her. Our lesson with Melinda went really well. It was the Plan of Salvation, and she really liked it. When we taught the Restoration, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to her, but she said that this made sense. We went out walking in Joshua Tree, hoping to stop by and see Gina, who is interested, but her family is not so its hard to meet with her. She wasnt home when we got there, so we walked down the street to her neighbors who were outside, they weren't interested, so we walked around the block and knocked on a door up the street from her, no answer but then she called out to us, they were outside. Cree, who recently moved there but has been investigating for a while, just not ready to quit smoking. Hopefully we can keep teaching her and her family. After we saw her, we walked back to our car, and Gina came home, so we were able to talk to her! Her family wasnt there so we were able to talk for a bit, we would have probably taught a lesson, but we had an appointment to get to:( so that was awesome and perfect timing! We went to our apointment with a less active family. We had dinner with the Trammells and Betty and then we watched the Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration with them. Such a good movie. 

Saturday was Betty's Baptism. It was beautiful. She asked me to play the piano, we had asked someone to do that already so I just played the closing song, but I made the mistake of telling her I could play :D Anyways she invited a bunch of her friends and had 6 non members there. They all really enjoyed it, and one of them wants to come to one of our teaching appointments with Betty, so theres potential there.  On Saturday after the baptism we met with Lisa, who is a referral we got from someone my 2nd week here. We have set several appointments with her, but things have come up each time and we were wondering if she was even still interested. We almost dropped her, but we decided to drop by and see if we could set up an appointment or something. She's rarely there when we stop by, but she happened to be there and available so we talked to her for a while and she is interested. We set up an appointment for wednesday.

A lot of our appointments fell out this week,but we were able to find quite a few people. One of our less actives that we invited to come back to church last week was at church this week and has committed to be there each week. His son has been going to both family wards each week and is a great kid, and is doing some great missionary work, he had a friend at our appointment last night.

Things are going well here, we have a Mission Conference on Saturday, which should be really exciting. President Van Cott seems really excited for that.  Running out of time, but I might be coming back later today..

I love ya all

Sister Kellee Gardner

Spanish, A lizard and a good week 11-4-13

Dios es nuestro Padre Celestial. Nostros somos Sus hijos. Sister Davis and I decided to learn a couple of spanish phrases this week because we have a potential investigator, I don't know if I mentioned Mateo before, but he speaks very little english, probably as much Spanish as I know. So we go over to his house and our WML talks to him, which is awesome, but I understand about 2 words of 100. We have a Spanish PMG and we have found short little sentences that we can learn and say. It's been kind of fun. This past week went well.On Tuesday we met with a girl named Shauntae, who is friends with a less active family in our ward and they set up the appointment. It sounds like they want to get coming back to church and she is really interested, we met with her again on Friday. Betty is doing Amazing. She told us that some of her "friends" have been trying to discourage her from being baptized and she got up and walked away from them. She also invites a ton of people to come with her to church. They don't come, but she invites them. She ran into one of the ladies we taught awhile back, Melinda, at C&S and invited her to come to church, Melinda told her she had been and wasn't sure if she really wanted to learn more and make all those changes. She has heard a lot of negative things. Anyways Betty told her to decide for herself if it was something she wanted. Melinda came to church this week.. that was cool to hear how that all happened. So Thursday:Halloween, we went to the Trunk or Treat and passed out pass along cards, that was fun. Hopefully something will come of it one day. Quite a few non members came so who knows. Saturday we helped clean a members home. Funny story. We were cleaning out the fridge, Sis. Davis had been washing the drawers and I was drying. I saw this brown dry thing and I thought it was a grape vine or something. it was stuck in the front of the drawer so I start pulling it out and once it was out look up close and saw something that looked like a head. I drop it and look closer, it was a shriveled up dead lizard. Yeah, I touched that and pulled on it. I was only slightly disturbed:D I should have taken a picture, oh well.On Sunday we had a few less actives come, one potential investigator, Jay and our investigators. It was a really good day. Our Heavenly Father is truly mindful of us. I am constantly reminded of that, mostly because I constantly forget, but I know He loves each one of us.

I love all of you and I love getting letters and emails from you all, it strengthens me to hear from you! 

Mucho Love,

Sister Gardner

10-29-13

Transfers calls were today, both Sis. Davis and I are staying. Sis Davidson is going to Palm Desert, but Sis. Gonzalez is staying. I'm glad I get to stay for at least 6 more weeks. So this week has been pretty good. We met with Betty a couple of times at different members homes, she makes friends really easily so that is great. She is still on track for baptism on the 9th! On Tuesday we had a Mission conference. Elder Walker from the 70 came so we went down to Banning and met with about half of the Mission. It was SO GOOD. He talked about how we have all been called already-foreordained, but the goal is to be worthy of the call when it comes. He also talked to us about Alma 8 and how we can apply what Alma and Amulek did to our areas, that was pretty cool. He is an awesome man and I learned a lot. On Wednesday we had dinner  with Sister Hobbs, she invited some non members, we invited Betty and Sister Pace and Sister Cooper who also had a non member friend Jackie. That was interesting, the conversation kind of reminded me of home. On Thursday dinner was at C&S which is the best place to eat pretty much. Its a cute little coffee shop with the best Biscuits and Gravy and Chicken Fried Steak. We basically ate with the same people on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. These are some amazing ladies, their testimonies are so strong, I love them all. On Friday we met with the Somers. Bro. Constantino refered them to us and we were finally able to meet with them. She had ankle surgery and so its been hard to schedule an appointment. We taught them the Restoration and we invited them to be baptized on Nov. 30th, they both accepted. I'm excited for them Sis. Somers is so ready for it. Bro. Somers drinks, so we have a concern there. Our Baptisms though have both come through Members, which is the coolest thing.

On Sunday we had the Primary Program. I don't think I ever realized how powerful that is. The kids in the ward are so stinkin' cute. Also, I don't know if any of you have ever seen the Mormon Message "Daytons Legs" but KSL did a behind the scenes kind of a thing for that one and the missionary opportunities that came from just that one video are amazing. So I reccomend that you look up the behind the scenes thing. I almost cried, which doesn't really happen very often. 

It's starting to get cold here, it is super windy today, and was pretty windy yesterday too.  Anyways, I love you all and hope all is going well.

Love,

Sister Gardner

Betty took us to C&S for breakfast, she made me get the Chicken Fried Steak along with my french toast and eggs... Its some really good food, I'm telling ya. So this was at Sis. Coopers on Friday. L to R: Jackie, Sis. Hobbs, Sis. Davis, Sis. Cooper, Sis. Pace, Me, and Sis. Finster. So Jackie was visiting and her son is a member (since he was 15). Sis. Hobbs told her to call her when she is getting baptized:D. She is an awesome lady and I hope she does decide to be baptized.This cake is actually what we had last week when we met with Betty for the first time, it was heavenly, Dad you would love it.. actually I'm pretty sure everyone would like it. Chocolate cake with Raspberries and whipped cream in between the layers.