Week 35 - Today you speak Portuguese

Hermana Cuevas and myself.  -1 in Kansas today!!

Hey family and friends!  Another great week in the mission field, as always! We had some pretty exciting adventures this week though!  One of the most interesting was we had a lesson in Portuguese...in case any one forgot I'm actually called Spanish speaking but something I've learned on my mission is you learn to be versatile and do anything you're asked to do!  So he speaks a little bit of English and can understand Spanish because Spanish and Portuguese are super similar and then we took a member from the ward who went to Brazil on his mission...20 years ago...haha so he said it was pretty rough bringing it back!  But I can say it was probably the most interesting lessonI've ever taught!Sister Cuevas spoke Spanish to him, Brother Giles spoke Portuguese, I spoke Spanish and English and he spoke Portuguese to us.  I can testify that the gift of tongues is so real because I've never spokePortuguese in my life and have only heard it a couple times but I could understand the jest of what he was saying.  Of course it wasn't perfect, but the fact that I could follow the conversation and be apart of the lesson is a miracle of it's own!  Unfortunately he isn't willing to accept the Book of Mormon as scripture:(  so we left him with our testimonies of the restored gospel and we aren't going to continue teaching him.  But we used the gifts that God has given us to give him the opportunity to accept the gospel and that's the best we could do!Another miracle that has been over the span of a couple weeks!  One of the first days I was in this area we were trying to contact a less active member to see if we could help her come back to church. We knocked on the door of the house of the address that we have on our records and a man opened the door.  We introduced ourselves and said that we were trying to get to know all the members in the area so we were wondering if we could talk to him and his family.  He look kind of confused but let us in so we assumed he was a less active too because he didn't ask questions, just let us in!  Come to find out the member we were looking for doesn't actually live there, and we're still not quite sure why he let us in that first day, but he said that we could come back and teach him.  We've been teaching him for about 5weeks now and he is going to get baptized on Saturday!:)Out of finding him in a way that sounded like a mistake, we know what we were being guided by the Spirit to find him because he was so ready to accept the gospel into his life! What if we had decided to not listen to the prompting we got to visit that one less active and went to visit someone else?  We may have never found him.  But because of one simple thing, this man is changing his life and loves it! I am so excited for his baptism this weekend and am so grateful to be a part of this work!  Amazing things happen like this all the time because people truly are being prepared to accept the gospel:)The family of 3 that was supposed to get baptized on that same day weren't able to come to church because someone in their family was really sick so they went to be with them so they won't be able to get baptized this weekend.  Investigators need to go to church at least twice before baptism, so we're just going to move it to next week.They are still excited to be baptized though!:)These are just two of the examples of miracles that we saw this week but there are always little ones along the way too!  As I've been on my mission I have become so much more aware of the Lord's hand in my life.  I know he was always there helping me along the way, but I always looked at it as chance, luck or coincidence.  I am here to testify today that there are no coincidences.  Our Heavenly Father has a perfect plan personalized for each of us, and if we are willing to follow his commandments and listen to the spirit, he will guide us to being more that we ever imagined we could become.A challenge for all of you this week is to be more aware of the Lord's hand in your life.  I know that he's helping us, we just need to be looking for Him!  And then when you see his hand, tell someone else about it!  We can gain a stronger testimony of Christ being in our lives and spread the message the message to make the world a brighter place!I love you all as always and hope you all have a great week:)  All is well and God is good!Love Hermana/Sister Courtney Baggett

From a couple of weeks ago when we went to a devotional at the Visitors' Center with our recent convert and I got to see some of my favorite sisters.





And some cute kiddos from the Ramirez family (the family with the huge baptism a few weeks ago).  I talk about them all the time because they're the best!






This was Courtney's Christmas Tree Countdown.

This was a darling Christmas Countdown from the young women in our ward at home.