8.23.2015

Week 27: Miracles, Pregnancy, and Sickness

Dear Family and Friends,

Dont have much time.... as usual. Sorry! but here´s just a few things that happened this week!

We finally marked a date with one of our investigators and she accepted, but she just needs to get married now! Her names Paula, and I think you´ll be hearing more about her in the coming weeks.

We have some girls who are trying to help us find a house because we have to move. We decided to talk to them one day and ended up being  about to have the first lesson with them and they were amazing! super interested and honestly wanted to know more. They are active members of the church next to ours, but they are open to experimenting, which is always good!

Then on Wednesday, one of our investigators, who we had planned to teach her the law of chastity that visit, told us that she was pregnant. She was just crying because she doesn´t want another kid, and her boyfriend lives in Portugal, so the baby isnt his. She has a 5 year old already, and she is out of work. we had a change of lesson plan real quick. We decided to do something a little crazy with her and had her say a personal prayer and then open to a random page in the Book of Mormon. I was just praying that she wouldn´t open to the war chapters and that it would be somewhere that we could at least realate something to her. And those of you who know the Book of Mormon well know what we read when she opened to Alma 36. We read alma´s take on his repentance process. It was perfect and beautiful. She may not have gotten much out of it, but me and Síster Friaça sure did. Even though this wasn´t something that she planned for her life, I think that it is a trial that will bring her a lot closer to her Heavenly Father if she lets it. 

So the week was going so well up till this point, almost too well. Then that night, it crashed. We were down with the flu for three days. And now its monday. and the new week has begun.

Till next week,
Sister Kohlert

p.s. we gave a chinese boy a book of mormon in chinese and he only has 30 pages left now! What?!?! so we try to communicate with him, but he only understands and speaks kriolu. so fun. We´re gonna come out on top though and teach him!

No pics this week... sorry

Week 26: Just a Little Thought About Families

This week was a blurr! I have officially passed my 6 months mark. One more year to go. 358 days to be exact. Not like I´m counting or anything... because I love it here! The work has been hard lately, but we have been blessed. 


Families have just been showing up everywhere this week! We have an investigator who wants to get married so bad, but her boyfriend doesnt and she has like 5 kids who are so adorable. We gave her A Proclamation to the World: The Family. She loved it. I really hope it will touch her and she will agree to be baptized and we hope that we can work with her boyfriend and hopefully he will want to get married! Oh the Spirit can do great things! Then we got the August Liahona, and everyone needs to read the article on the family proclamation. seriously amazing. It really is crazy how the prophets receive revelation for our time. 



They know much better than we do, and a lot earlier too. Just seeing the different dimensions of families here really helped me see how important family is. We can´t do everyhint on our own. At times, I definitely think i can, but then I find out real fast that i can´t. Here´s a snipit from the article, but you have to read the whole thing too!

​``​
The joys of human love and family belonging give us
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hope, purpose, and a desire to live better. They make
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us long for the day when we will take the hands that
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have held ours and together enter the Lord’s presence.There we will embrace our loved ones and stay with
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them always, to “go no more out” (Revelation 3:12).

For many years society generally supported this inborn

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longing to belong. Of course, families had problems,but most people still believed that “tying the knot” of
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marriage created a relatively permanent family unit.And those knots held the fabric of society together, with
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“hearts knit together in unity and in love” (Mosiah18:21).

In recent generations, however, the fabric has

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increasingly frayed as we have experienced what some
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writers call “the collapse of marriage.”4 Many people
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outside the Church no longer see marriage as a source
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of long-term commitments. Rather, they now see
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marriage and even childbearing as temporary personal
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options. Yet permanent commitments to marriage and
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parenthood are like two anchor threads running
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through the design of our social tapestry. When those
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threads fray, the tapestry can unravel and we can lose
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the plot of the universal love story.
​``​



The family unit truly is of God. We are much happier with a family to support us, to have parents who are legally married, with a commitment to work things out when times get rough. I had a really hard time explaining why marriage was important when I first came out. I never really had thought about it, but now I see it. The knowledge that we have as members, that our families can be together forever, is something special. A gift much more precious than anything else. Me and Sister Friaça are going to switch up our focus a bit, and really concentrate on families. Bringing the joy that comes from having a family centered on the gospel, with a vision of the temple.



I love you all! Thanks for all the support you guys give me in your emails every week!




Síster Kohlert

Week 25: Just the Usual Swarm of Bees

Dear Friends and Family,

Okay so my bad, apparently I cant write kriolu very well. Its actually txeu from last week, my bad. Im just learning a lot lately!

So this week, to get the crazy stories in, we rescued a kitten from under/inside a car. We were just walking home one night and we heard a meow from under a police van, so we decided that we needed to save it because if they turned on the car it would die. So sister friaça was under the car trying to get it out when a police man comes and is like `what are you doing!´ super funny. just trying to save a life! So after about 30 minutes with phone lights, we got him out and he booked it, so i dont have any evidnece... but I swear its true. And sister Friaça was COVERED in dirt. super funny. it was all over her face too. priceless. 



So then, the next day, we were chillin doing our studies, when a bee flies in, and sister friaça shoos it out. then two more come in a few minutes later, and we get those out too, and of course we were not screaming at all. Then a few minutes later, there is a huge swarm on our balcony, so we close the doors and all the windows in the house. Then we tried to discover were they came from. were so smart. We found out. and took some super funny videos, which you all will have to wait for till i get home. Sorry about it. So i sent the picture of the bees on the side of our apartment complex. Oh and we found out that our contract had ended for our apartment, so now we´re working on finding another one. Its been real fun!



Okay so, to end this weeks email, we did have an interesting experience with one of our investigatorsRosa. Her sister is a Jehovahs Witness and she showed her some stuff on the internet about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and she had quite a few questions for us. She wasn´t exactly very open to hear what we had to say, which was a little frustrating. She was very confused and we really tried to help, but she won´t read the Book of Mormon or ask Heavenly Father anything in her prayers. It was definitely hard to see. All we could do was bear our testimonies to her and just hope that she would feel the Spirit. When I was bearing my testimony, I found out how true the quote is about how you find our testimony in the bearing of it. I felt like I always had a testimony of the Restauration, but I felt like it wasn´t as strong as it needed to be. As I testified of Joseph Smith, I truely realized that I knew it was true, that he was a prophet called of God and that the church was restored though him. It was a really special experience for me, and an answer to my prayers. Through the trials that God sends us, we really do become stronger and realize how great out potencial really is. I love you all!

Have a great week!

Síster Kohlert