Happy English Mother's Day!

Well everybody, I hope you had a fantastic week! It was Mother's day across the pond, so all you Mums out there, I hope you know YOU ROCK, and WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR YOU! "Motherhood is the noblest and greatest of all callings." L. Tom Perry. I'll end there since you'll hear more about it in May. But we love ya!

Picture of the zone... sorry, that's all I've got right now!

So this week has been another blur, but there have been some great highlights so let's get right to those! We had an exchange last week with the Watford Sister Training Leaders, and I think I mentioned that the way they do it now we both stay in Watford overnight and spend the day with them. I was on an exchange with Sister Mussman and it was so fun to get to know her! We discovered that both of our dads served missions in Tokyo Japan. WAHOO, GO TOKYO! And we both have little nieces with the surname of Anderson (not THAT crazy of a coincidence... but hey, it's cool!) and she also went to BYU before the mish! It was loads of fun even though it was POURING rain and we were both soaked through all of our clothes. I always learn so much when we go on exchange, and it's a great time to set some good goals!

Another wonderful highlight from the week was an AMAZING lesson that we had with Andrew! WOW, he is just so prepared for the gospel! We were able to teach him along with our Bishop who bore such a powerful testimony. We taught him about temples and eternal families, and he really loved the fact that he can be sealed to his wife for time and all eternity. He is shooting for the 19th of March to be baptised, so PLEASE keep him in your prayers!

It has been a bit of a rough week in the finding department, and as the days rolled on we were just not having any luck with finding anyone who would even give us two seconds to talk. On Saturday as we were making our way through town, we met this guy from Albania who was like "do you want to go sit somewhere so we can talk some more?" and so we went to a cafe and he was very attentive as we taught him a bit more about the Book of Mormon AND he was way nice and bought us these giant hot chocolates (did I mention it's been freezing this week?). AND the greatest part of this story is that he wants to meet with us again! I constantly have it reiterated to me, but it's a wonderful reminder that Heavenly Father is mindful of the effort each and every one of us puts in, and He will bless us with prepared people in our path!

I thought you might enjoy reading about the different ways people try to avoid us when we meet them:

1. Pull the phone out of the pocket and put it up to the ear and talk to an imaginary person. Like seriously, dude, it's obvious that you're faking it.

2. Cross to the opposite side of the road... and then proceed to cross back as soon as we have passed.

3. Blatantly ignore the fact that we said hello and very obviously completely avoid any sort of eye contact.

4. One of Sister Smith and my favourites of the week was when a woman admired a dead hedge very intently. "Wow, what a beautiful heap of leafless sticks!" But ya know, who could blame her? Dead plants are just so beautiful, am I right?

5. When we knock on a door and they respond "Dangit! I thought you were the pizza man. But yeah, no thanks."

6. *Knock on door* *person answers* Them: "Oh sorry, it's just really not a good time right now, we are just eating dinner." Us: "Oh, would there be a better time we could come stop by?" Them: "Well, no... we aren't interested." Thank you for making that message clear from the beginning haha.

Nonetheless, sometimes people just take a little more time to be ready to hear the message of the gospel, and that is okay! I still love sharing something that is so special to me with others, and they have their agency of whether to listen or not! And I always know that there are prepared people, it's just a matter of following the Spirit and being diligent in finding them!

Sunday we also had a very cool experience while we were tracting. A woman answered the door and she said that she was not interested, so we asked her if she knew anyone that would need a message at the time. She was like, "oh let me check! HEY MOM DO YOU WANT TO HEAR A MESSAGE FROM SOME MISSIONARIES?" (the caps represent the yelling to another room) and her mom said yes! So we went into the home and met an amazing woman from Zimbabwe, and she told us she had been praying that day that someone would come to share a message about Jesus Christ with her. And there we were! We had a very Spirit-filled lesson with her. She was going through some great trials and she still had such a strong faith. It was amazing. Unfortunately she was only visiting and going back to Zimbabwe in a couple of days, but we left her with a copy of the Book of Mormon and she told us she was just so happy we met her and that she would love to read it. It was such a wonderful example of a time when Heavenly Father uses others to answer people's prayers. It was not a coincidence that we ended up there that day!

I hope the week ahead holds many great things for each of you! Love you all!

Love,
Sister Syddall