O'Fallon Ward

Hello! 

Life has been weird and busy and everything else! I am so tired but I am excited.

SO my new companion is Sister Schow. She is from utah and she lives 20mins south of Salt Lake City. She is a sweet heart and very good, dedicated missionary. She came out a transfer after I did. I feel like my humor is too casual for her though, she can be uptight sometimes especially if she is stressed so it can get awkward when I am trying to lighten things up with jokes... But I think we will get along just fine :) 

Anyways the O'Fallon ward is awesome! We have so much help here with the missionary work and the less actives like us and I am coming in at a really good time where we are re activating some families! It is so exciting! A lot of the investigators we have are found through members and less actives too! It has been really fun meeting the members. Sister Schow is really good at working with members. And I love being so close to the city again!!! Maybe I will be able to go to the Arch again before I go home!

  

It is kinda weird because we have been doing a lot of planning and going to a lot of meetings this first week. Friday we had a Missionary Leadership Council meeting that lasted all day. It is where  President and Sister Morgan, the APs, Office Elders, Zone leaders, and Sister training Leaders meet and discuss the work for the transfer.The first hour we just asked each other questions and answered each others questions and got advice on how to help our areas and our missionaries. Then the APs gave a training and then after lunch President Morgan took us all to the temple! We had the rest of our meeting in a room at the distribution center right next to the temple where president and sister Morgan gave more trainings. We also decided our new baptism goal for the year! It was really cool to be apart of deciding our new goal to help push us this next year. President Morgan talked about how there is a growing trend in North American missions where the number of baptisms for the year are decreasing and decreasing drastically in a lot of missions. 2015 we ended the year with 360 baptisms. The year before that I think we had 394. We decided our goal this year will be 380 baptisms. Also we are preparing to watch a world wide missionary broadcast on Wednesday January 20th where general authorities and the missionary department are going to talk to us and help us redirect our focus. I guess the General Authorities worry that missionaries have too many responsibilities and that we are losing our focus of declaring repentance and baptizing converts. So hopefully we can receive lots of direction this wednesday. We will also be having Zone Leader Training that day so hopefully we can excite the missionaries with this new goal and break this trend! Exciting stuff to be apart of!

There are 10 STLs and we realized that half of them are the same generation. There are four other sisters who came out at the same time as me. It's crazy to think that 15 months ago, we were all on the plane heading to St. Louis and now we are all STLs. That is the picture of all of us.

Saturday we prayed a lot to know where the Lord wanted us and who we needed to see. We decided to stay out and contact a referral rather than to stay in and work on our training. It was good because we found John! Members who live across the hallway from him referred us to him and when we showed up John told us that our timing couldn't have been better. I love those moments. We just talked to him outside because he was embarrassed of his messy house. He is a single dad with three boys and two different ex wives so he gets his kids a few days every other week. But he definitely feel that his relationship with God is distancing. We talked about how God has a plan for us and that for a time the understanding of this plan was lost but has been restored through a prophet called of God... so on and so on. He was very open but he told us that he is not going to believe so easy. We gave him a restoration pamphlet and a book of mormon and we set up a time to meet with him the next day. When we went back the next day his house was clean haha! and He was expecting us. We had the members with us and when we asked him if he got a chance to read the pamphlet he said that he did and that he read 20 pages of the book of mormon! Yaya! The thing with him is that he believes in all religions and that all things are true and it is hard to pin point just one true church. He said that he has never thought of just one. We were able to go over the restoration a little more and really lay out what we want and he was willing to take the lessons, read the book of mormon and pray to know if it is true. And he wants to meet with us again on thursday! It is exciting! And it is beautifully perfect because his fellow shippers live right across the hall from him! So awesome :) 

I am reading the Book of Mormon again before general conference with the mission. I am in Mosiah 21 right now :)  And I am also doing the D&C count down but I am behind haha only by a couple sections though. I will try and catch up! 

Thank you for the LOVE! Hope you all have a great week! 

Sister Fisher