Back at the Square

Hello From Temple Square! It is wonderful to be on Temple Square with all of the tulips in bloom (I just made it in time to see them) and a TON of new sisters to get to know. My new companion is Sister Bat-Ulzii from Mongolia! This is her first transfer (that means I'm training) and we're doing our best to find people that want to be baptized. Sister Bat-Ulzii has been learning English for about 10 weeks (plus a little bit of studying in Mongolia) and her English is much better than my Mongolian would be if I were in her situation. Sister Bat-Ulzii brought family names with her to bring to the temple. Obviously there is no temple in Mongolia, the temple they attend is the Hong Kong temple, so she went to the temple for the first time in Provo. She hasn't seen a baptistry yet either, just what is in the temple model. She'll get to do those family names while she is here. She is super excited about it. I'm sure that her family is excited too. Sister Bat-Ulzii and I took our first tour with a family from Las Vegas and it went really well. It was a mother, father, and their two-year-old daughter and they had a wonderful friend that invited them to learn more. The family came out to Utah so that the mother could go to woman's conference at BYU and I asked her what she liked about it. She told me that the part that impressed her the most was how families interacted there with so much love and care for each other. She really wants to raise her daughter in a good home and she has seen that people who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have something good that she wants. We showed them the Temple Model and explained to them about eternal families and of course they liked that. We went to the Seagull Monument and talked about prayer and how God answers prayers. She told me that she had been praying about what to do for her family and she received an answer that this is what Heavenly Father wants for her family. I was surprised to hear that she prayed AND received an answer. When I first met her at the Temple Construction area  you could feel the Spirit around her, she was just such a good person, so thinking back on it I'm not too surprised that she has such a relationship with God. At the end of the tour we took the family through God's Plan for His Family to help her see how having the restored gospel in her life will give her what she is looking for in her family. The Spirit was there the whole time and it bore witness to this family that this is what they are looking for. So naturally they referred for missionaries.  We also had another tender mercy yesterday. We went up to the Christus to see if anyone was there that we could talk to, and there was a woman, probably in her 60s, sitting on one of the couches, who we approached. It turns out that she was a returned missionary from Western Samoa and understood Sister Bat-Ulzii's difficulty with learning a language. I asked her what suggestions she had for learning English and she told us "children's books". I thought that was a neat idea and something that I hadn't thought about. We parted ways and later in the morning we were walking back across the square and we saw this woman again walking towards us and she handed Sister Bat-Ulzii a Deseret Book bag with children's books in it. Her act of kindness completely took me by surprise! She was the kind of person, just like the mother that we showed around, that you could just feel their goodness when you were around them. This is something that I've been learning about the gospel--it's not about the list of things you do, but it's about the person that you become. I want to be the kind of person that lives their testimony all the time so that people can feel the love that their Father has for them. I really love Alma 5:14-- "And now behold, I ask of you, my brethren of the church, have ye spiritually been born of God? Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?" That's conversion.