Sister Van Buskirk: DelaWHERE?

Aloha my good friends! Last time you heard from me I was leaving the great city of Philadelphia. But I've been a slacker and haven't written an email in a good minute. I apologize for that and I hope this email will make up for it! SO I am now in Dover, DE with the fantastic Sister Shields. She spent the last couple years in Hawaii so she says Aloha a lot. Delaware is very different from Independence South. Let me try and help you visualize how many people are in this area. Let's say Milford has 1 person and Independence has 10. Dover has 3.5-4 people. But we are teaching some fantastic people despite the FREEZING cold!

There is this super awesome family, the Petersons and they have us over for dinner like once a week. Their kids have these super cute missionary tags that they wear and whenever they see us they run over to us to give us a hug and go, "Hi Missionaries!!!!" It's like the highlight of my whole life.

Last week we got the best referral! We stopped by on Wednesday and gave her the bible she ordered and introduced her to the Book of Mormon. We came back on Saturday and she had read all the way to Mosiah!!! We were stunned. We invited her to pray about it and she was like, "oh I already know it's true." We invited her to be baptized and she accepted. The only bummer is we haven't seen her all week. But we know she will be back!

We also had some more special trainings this week which was so fun. They were supposed to be on Tuesday and Thursday but on Thursday we literally had a blizzard. We stayed inside all day because the wind would've killed us. Friday we got up and shoveled our driveway and our neighbors driveway to be nice because we are missionaries you know? Well our neighbor hasn't left since the storm!

We had a really cool experience last night. Every week we make goals for different areas of our missionary work. Sister Shields and I decided we were going to do everything we can to always achieve our new investigator goals this transfer. This week our goal was 3 new investigators. By Sunday evening we had 2. We looked at the list of people that might be interested and decided to stop by some of them. We asked Heavenly Father to help us reach our goal and that we would do everything we could to find someone to teach. Every person we had planned to stop by wasn't home or was too busy at that time. We still had a few hours so we looked at our lists again. We called a few people but still no luck. We finally called a guy named Sidney. The sisters taught him a few weeks ago but they were never able to set up a return appointment. We called and he answered and was super interested in meeting with us again! We were able to reach our goal for the week!

Ether 12:6 - "...faith is things which are hoped for and not seen; wherefore, dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith." I know that Sister Shields and I had our faith tried. I wasn't sure if we were going to reach our goal. But in that moment of doubt I put my faith in God and stopped relying on myself. I know that as we lean on Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ we will be able to do all things. I have had the special opportunity to spend all of 2017 as a representative of Jesus Christ. It has been the greatest adventure I have ever had. The opportunity to devote all my time to serving Him and the people in Milford, Philadelphia, and now Delaware has been so special. I am so excited to continue to serve these next few months.

I love you all and hope you have a fantastic week! Happy New Year!

Lots of Love!

Sister Van Buskirk

Reporting lesson but it's freezing