listening

hello everyone!

   life is good over here in Texas:) one of my goals this week was listening. Listening to the people, listening to the spirit, listening and focusing on things around me! just everything. And if you really know me you would know i have a really hard time with listening..... my mind just goes off to wonderland or something. i don't know? just one second i will be listening, and then the next i'm thinking about something in my head!! it truly is a problem that i am trying to fix. Anyways! i have been striving to not teach the lesson but teach the people. but what i was trying to get at was that last night sister McPherson and I were at Cindy's house because we have to teach ALL of her family the lessons again cause that's what you do once someone is baptized. So we are sitting down trying to teach the first lesson with Cindy, and i feel like its going no where..... i have this thought come into my head to have Cindy watch "you never know" its a Mormon message that i have been dying for Cindy to watch. obviously i followed my impression and had her watch it. by the end of the video sister McPherson, Cindy and I were all tearing up. Cindy reviled her "ice berg" or in other words what was worrying her at the bottom of her heart! it was such a spiritual experience! i truly felt like i had helped Cindy for the better instead of just trying to get a lesson in with her. After we left sister McPherson said, "sister Turpin do you not realize what you just did!? you followed the promptings of the spirit and you listened to her!! that was amazing!!" hahaha it really was amazing! it felt so good to know that the spirit truly did just work through me and help a love child of God.

    women's conference was amazing!! that hour and a half went way to fast!! Cindy sat next to me and would lean over and just ask little questions here and there, and at the end of it she turned and looked at me and said. "i need to get my temple recommend" with her eyes tearing up. and for all of you who watched the women's conference you would understand why she said that. because almost all of the talks given that night were about the temple and what it can do for us here on this earth. i loved it when the little Asians sang a song. it made my eyes just tear up seeing how the gospel is practically all over the world. That anyone and everyone can learn about the truth of this wonderful gospel. 

    i love the blessing and miracles that i see in this gospel everyday. because i'm a missionary i look for them now, and i wish i would have been looking for them even before i became a missionary because i know that those blessing are surrounding us all we have to do now is look for them. Its like elder Dieter F. Uchdorf  said "our heavenly father constantly rains his blessings down upon us. we now need to close our umbrella and receive those blessings." i challenge all of you this week to look for those blessing and miracles and to look for the good in others. i am so excited for general conference this week end! and i am so excited to hear all the wonderful things that you all have learned from it. remember that when the prophet speaks its really God that is speaking to us. i love you all and i hope you are all doing good and striving to be a great example to those around you. remember who you are. you are all sons and daughters of our loving heavenly father that loves each and every one of us. 

love, sister Turpin

September 22, 2014

well this week was an eventful week! sister McPherson and I had a baptism for Ali Morgan she is Cindy's youngest daughter who is 9 years old, she is the sweetest little girl with a big heart for her savior. She was baptized by Brother Misbach who is bailey Misbachs uncle. small world huh!? 

 Kaitlyn Carter will not be getting baptized this saturday because her family is flying in from utah for her baptism so we will now be holding her baptism on oct. 11 so stay tuned for that one!:) (a little bit of back ground on kaitlyn) kaitlyn is 11 years old her grandma is a member and that is who takes her to church each week and she has been coming for the past two years but she has never been baptized because her mom wants kaitlyn to know what promises she will be making when she is baptized. sooooo Sister McPherson and i asked her mom who is not a member if we could teach kaitlyn the lessons, her mom said yes and we told her that she should join in on the lessons as well so that she can know what Kaitlyn is learning. she agreed and we have been teaching Kaitlyn since. Kaitlyns step dad is who Kaitlyns mom is now married too. He is a less active so Sister McPherson and I's goal is to reactive kaitlyns dad, and baptize kaitlyn and her mom:) we will see!!! they came to church yesterday because it was the primary program so now all we have to do is make them come every week!! hahaha 

a couple of weeks ago sister McPherson and i found this lady named sarah Hight, she is a less active and non of her family are members she told us we could stop by and teach them so on monday we went over and taught her family and they cooked dinner for us! they are the cutest family ever!! they loved the lesson and they said we could come back so we should be seeing them this week!:) i will update you on how everything goes:)

 sorry this is a short letter!! i love you all so much! remember who you are! stand for truth and righteousness!!! and return with honor:)

love, sister Turpin

the weeks are going faster and faster

people here REALLY love texas!

this is a picture of texas at a bar..... yep it ws really funny that we took a picture at a bar....

hello everyone!!

    here is some great news!! ali (Cindys 9 year old daughter) is getting baptized this saturday the 20th! and then here is some more great news!! kaitlyn Carter (11 years old) is getting baptized the 27th! which is in two weeks!! Sister Mcpherson and I have been seeing miracles and blessing everyday! you just have to look for them! and everyday we try to search for those things.

    some crazy things happened this week! sister McPhersons GPS got stolen out of our car! the crazy thing about it was the car was locked! we ALWAYS lock our car, but everything looked the same, nothing else was taken except her GPS and the GPS was put away in the side console so that means that someone had to have known that we had that! we were a little freaked out because it happened while we were at our apartment so we are going to talk to a guy that is over all of this and see what he will do. we dont feel comfortable knowing that someone might be watching. so dont be suprised if we have to move to different apartments.

    other than that Cindy came out with us to teach on thursday and we took her to a less actives home. The less actives name is Tony Tallent (thats a girls name just so you know) Tony's niece who is 20 just moved into her home and she is not a member. i guess she had been taking some discussions from the missionaries where she last lived and then went to church and got offended because the bishop didnt like her tatoos or something so she stoped the discussions. isnt that just awful!? so we go over with Cindy and if you remember the pictures of her she is covered in tattoos from head to toe!! we go over and Cindy and Tony hit things off right away!! finally Tony's niece comes in and the first thing she says to Cindy is "hey i like your tatts!" haha Cindy then when off to tell her about her story how she didnt want to come to church at first because she though people would judge her with all of her tattoos but on the contrary, the first thing that happened to Cindy the first time she came to church was the bishop came up to her and told her how much he loved her tatoos. Cindy then told Tony's niece that she should give it another try and have us sister teach her. Tonys niece agreed she would so we are going back this week to start the lessons!! it was amazing!! Cindy was bearing her testimony left and right! wow to talk about golden investigators that would be cindy right there!! after the lesson and we were in the car taking Cindy home Cindy was like "i dont get it, if she knows its true then why cant she just come!?" hahha its exactly right!! we then told her, thats what missionaries think all the time!! 

   well i dont really have anymore time to tell you anything else this week but be looking forward to seeing some baptism pictures in the next couple for weeks!! i love you all so much! i hope your staying safe and being a good example to everyone remembering that when you were baptized you promised you would take the lords name upon you, meaning that you are representatives of Christ so live your life accordingly and heavenly father will bless you:) remember who you are, stand for truth and righteousness, return with honor, the church is true tell your friends!! i love you all!! hahahha 

love, Sister Turpin

no time

hello everybody!!

     this week was.... hmmm it was REALLY TIRING! lets just put it that way. it was an amazing week full of amazing miracles and blessing. to start out the week we had no one who had signed up to feed us. we were really bummed out but that quickly turned into a blessing in disguise. our week was so full that we had no time for our selves. we would make a lunch and a dinner and eat it in the car because we had so many appointments... ISNT THAT JUST AWESOME!! and we have two little girls that have decided that they want the get baptized!! one is Ali, she is cindys youngest daughter who is 9 years old we are planing for her to be baptized on the 20th of september which is in two weeks but we have to see what Ali's dad thinks about it because she goes to see him every other week end so he is in the picture for her which means he hast to approve of it. so pray for Ali and her dad! the next little girls name is Kaitlyn. She is 11 years old, and comes with her grandma to church! she has been coming to church for the past 2 years but she has never been baptized. soooo! sister mcpherson and i went and talked to her mom to see if it would be alright if we could teach Kaitlyn the lessons! her mom said yes and said that she just wants kaitlyn to understand the covenants that she will be making when she gets baptized! now mind you kaitlyns mom isnt a member so we were being really sneaky and told her that she should also join in on the lessons so that she will know what kaitlyn is learning!! do you see what we just did?;) hahah yep so hopefully we will get her whole family baptized!:) we have been teaching kaitlyn for two weeks now and we invited her to be baptized on september 27th. that is is three weeks! they were a little suprised of how fast that would be and we told them to talk about it and we will get back to them in a couple of days. so Kaitlyn will be getting baptized we just dont know when for sure! ill keep you up dated with that though:)

     during hour of power this week we were knocking on doors and like usual i have to go to the bathroom! oh a little thing, i have to go to the bathroom so much down here!! i dont know if its because of the humdity or because i carry a water bottle with me everywhere so i am constantly drinking water BUT! back to the story. so we knock on this door and this lady comes to the door! i ask her if it would be ok if i used her bathroom which obviously she said yes and while i was in the bathroom sister McPerson was talking to her! it was a perfect sneaky little plan:) because you could tell she wasnt interested at first. I come out of the bathroom and we start talking to the wife and her husband their names are, debbie and charles. debbie is a baptist and charles is a catholic. they were telling us about how they are planing on moving sometime next year so they are re doing alot of their house and right now they are focusing on taking off all their wall paper and painting!! it was perfect! sister McPerson and i jump in as fast as we could and asked them if we could help! finally after begging them if we could help they said yes and they told us we could come by Saturday morning. Saturday morning comes and at 11 am we were over there taking off wall paper and trying to get to know debbie and charles so more. debbie made some blue berry muffins for breakfast and then she also made us lunch!! now guess what i had for lunch! FISH!!! it was so gross! but i sat there and pretended like i liked it and every time i would taste a little bit of fishiness i would just eat some banana pepper with it so that i wouldn't have to taste the fish.... after we finished the wall paper which was really fun!! but like really, it was REALLY fun!! we taught them lesson one which they both seemed very interested in! they told us they would look into it more and we asked if we could come back and help them paint their walls, they said yes so we should be seeing them sometime this week:) the best thing about them though was debbie said near the end, "if we both cant be baptist, and we both cant be catholics we could always be mormon!!" hahah it was the funnest thing ever! but i guess you just had to be there.

    sunday came and it was fast and testimony meeting! sister McPerson and i were sitting by cindy and her kids and all of a sudden the bishop gets up and he says, "before we begin i would like all the missionaries to come up and bare their testimonies" it caught me by suprise so much!! so we go up their and im like ok sister McPerson your going first!! nope! i guess i had to go first which scared me to death because i didnt even know what i was going to talk about but i went up there and talked about service and and charity. i was so scared i dont even know remember what i said!! hahah but yep those were some of the high lights of this week!! sorry there are no pictures we dodnt really have time to take any!! hopefully this week i will get some pictures to send next week though. i love you all! stay safe! have fun! be positive and look at all the blessings around you. because i promise you, you will find them:)

love. sister turpin

ps. the church is true tell your friends!!

labor day!

in these pictures its these two girls name Brooklyn, and Paisley, and then there little brother named Charley there last name is the stewarts which is awesome, but yesterday we had dinner with them and the two little girls came running out when we got there and they were all dressed up as sister missionaries so of course we had to take a picture with them!! 



this is my old district, and then this is sister mcpherson and i doing the masks! oh also i held a frog last week and i recorded it but i dont think im aloud to send recordings so one day you will have to see it, its pretty dang funny!!
hello!

    well as most of you know, yesterday was labor day so i didnt get to email but! i get to today! so hooray!! 

    not that many things happened this week but i feel like i saw so many miracles!! one of them being, we got a referral from the porter sisters and her name was ashley so the next day we went to go contact ALL of our referrals since all of our appointments seemed to fall through which was kind of disappointing, but we went to go see all of our referrals andnothing was coming out of it, so we decided to go see this lady we meet during hour of power named sarah hights, i guess she used to be a member so we went to her house and we knocked on her door and NOTHING! so we knock again and still... NOTHING! finally were about to leave and all of a sudden sarah pulls up in her car! it was a miracle!! then we decided to go see ashley, we go to her house and knock like usual but no one answers so were leaving and were trying to figure out how we get out of where ever we are and i see this guy sitting on his porch so i say "lets go talk to that man!" we start heading over to him and this girl comes out of the house and comes over to us and start talking to us, she said "i knew you guys were coming but i didnt know when!, i thought you guys were going to call first" (oh when we got the referral they said for us to call her first but we decided to just drop in:) ) anyways sister mcphersonsays "wait whats your name?" the girl says " ashley" !!!!!!!!!! wow like WOW! it was the referral girl that the potter sisters gave us!! i guess somehow we got the wrong address or something but the amazing thing is that god was looking after us and lead us straight to her:) i love this gospel and the miracles that i get to see everyday:) 

    nothing else really happened this week because most of our appointments fell through but the good thing is that we got 6 new investigators, and our goal this transfer is to have 10 baptisms!! so we will see how close we get to that goal:)

    yesterday i got a greenie break fast from the scannells, brother scannell is the ward mission leader, who i love and i call him uncle bob:) so if you ever here me say uncle bob you will know its the ward mission leader:) 

    i love being a missionary so much! it is so fun and very rewarding, i love seeing the simple miracles and blessings that come with being a missionary and i hope that i will be able to help others see those blessings come to them as they follow the savoir and his teachings. i love you all and i hope you have a wonderful week!! go tell someone about our church and the happiness that it can bring them!!

                                                                                     love, sister Turpin