Family,

           

The weather here is amazing! It’s getting a lot cooler and nights are perfect! Its only 80! Ha-ha we are on bikes now too and its scary riding bikes here because in the neighborhoods there is no street lights!! I guess Miami is cheap. It’s annoying but thank goodness for bike lights right?

            This week was like a roller-coaster. It had its ups and downs for sure! We got to teach Mathew the 9 year old and his sister. We have been getting pretty creative and have been making puzzles for them. They love it! Their grandma got them a Book of Mormon for kids and they love it!! They are amazing and there are changing. Now they want to pray all the time and read and they remember things so well!! Their testimony is super strong already! We just need to meet with their parents! And try and get them more involved. We met the mom a couple times and she is starting to warm up to us but we want to get there whole family activated and to the temple!! So that's going really good. We love them so much! Makes me miss my primary kids. That calling prepared me for this!

We got to also teach Mary, the member who has dementia. She is so sweet. We were talking about the scriptures and Sister Burdett said "Yeah the scriptures can bring lots of peace" and Mary said "Yeah I like pizza too and hot dogs" So funny. We love her. She always makes us laugh! Her daughter invited us over for dinner today so we are excited for that! Should be good.

 We had interviews with president and they went super good! They always leave me spiritually recharged and pumped up. He said that this won’t be my last time training and that I will train a couple more times. Yay! It’s scary but I am excited! I love president so much!!! He is amazing and really cares and loves this work so much! He is like our mission dad :)

This week okay another funny experience. We were harvesting and knocked on this guy’s door and this 19 year old answered. He had Asperger’s but was sure nice and agreed to pray with us. We asked what we could include in the prayer for him and he said world peace and less people because he doesn’t like to be surrounded by idiots. Apparently there is too much in the world. The whole time I was like oh boy and it’s my turn to pray. This is going to be interesting. I started praying and he would add in his own comments.  I would say please pray that Hersin (that's his name) will have strength and peace and he would say "oh that's nice" and I would say please bless him that he will strive to make a difference in the world and he would say “I will try but there are too many idiots". I would say please bless his family and he would say “my semi normal family” and just stuff like that. It was sure funny.  The whole time I was trying not to laugh because it was so random and that has never happened to me so it was a weird experience. But he liked the prayer and felt the spirit so I guess it worked.

We had another experience while knocking doors. This one is kind of scary. We were knocking doors and we knocked this door and it looked like a nice house. This girl about 22 answered the door with this a knife like a 12” long knife and said “can you please step away from the door, and who are you?” We said "We are missionaries. We just wanted to pray with you" (while baking away) and she was like “oh okay! Can i put my knife down?” We said "uh yeah that would be nice" It was scary and weird. She was super cool though and loved the prayer. Hopefully that's the last time a person tries to kill us.

This week we got to see Christina, the one who we had an amazing lesson with a couple weeks ago and asked her pray for baptism and if it was right. She felt the answer was not right now, but she still loves when we come over and teach her so we went last night and taught her and she said that she has been praying for light and happiness for her kids. The whole time we wanted to say, “The light you are looking for is the gospel and its sitting on your couch!” It was frustrating but it was good spiritually. We decided we are going to teach about temples and families and invite her again to be baptized. Hopefully this time she will listen more carefully to the spirit because we know she needs to be baptized.

This week was slow in finding people. Our teaching pool is really small right now. During language study I was studying conjugations for the word esperanza, which means hope. I saw the verb for hope is esperar, which means to wait. I realized that hope and wait are jointed together. Sometimes we have to wait for the things we hope for. We need to have faith and trust in our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ and realize that good things comes to those that wait. And that Jesus won’t forsake us. He and Heavenly Father know we are having trials and tribulations, but he is right there next to wait.  New investigators will come as we continue to work hard and be obedient. It was a really cool spiritual experience during language study

  

I love you guys so much!! I have a new commitment for you guys too, will you guys say gratitude prayers as a family very night? i know it will be hard but i promise that you guys will be blessed and this week will go smoothly for you!! I love you guys so much!! Thanks for all you do!!! :)) I miss you!!! :))))

Love,

Herman Briaunna

Hola!! 

Glad you liked Meet the Mormon’s!! Yeah I wish we could go see it!! I am so jealous but I cannot wait to see it when I get home! Super glad the church put it out!! Heard they did an amazing job!! Thanks for the song book also! I love it so much!! Learning primary songs in Spanish is the best and helps me learn new words and helps me with my pronunciation

So this week we are teaching this member’s grandkids. Their dad is an inactive member and their mom isn’t a member. There is Mathew and Amanda. Mathew is 9 and Amanda is five. We have had to get pretty creative on lessons with them and it’s hard because we can’t use google or anything so it’s been a challenge but super good! We love them to death and their testimonies are strong! They remember so much!! It’s incredible. We are hoping they come to church this week! 

​this is Alison and Andrew. kids from a less active family! :) they are the best!

We got to teach Karl this week. We taught the plan of salvation and at the end he set himself with his own baptism date and is reading and doing super good the only hard part is the word of wisdom. He won’t give up coffee or wine. And says he isn’t addicted to them and Jesus drank wine. So we are praying hard for him and his son is trying to help him. We will see but Nov. 2nd is the goal!! Its progress for sure!! And that’s all really for this week. We just strengthened our relationship with the ward and visited a lot members and tried to find people to teach. It was kind of slow but we tried really hard! I and sister Burdett get a long great and its super fun! Heavenly Father has really been blessing us. It’s been a great challenging experience. Sorry this letter is going to be short. I don’t have a lot of time. I love you lots!! 

             I hope you all have a good week i will send letters! Since this email was so short!! You all are the best!!! Pray for you every day!! :) 

Hermana Heacock

Mi Familia!!

 Let’s start with the questions:

            What is your ward like?

I love our ward!! It’s an actual family ward!! In Hialeah it was just a bunch of old people and we had 2 families with little kids but this one is amazing. It is bi lingual so they switch off with Spanish and English. The ward mission leader is amazing. He is the best ever!! I just feel so at home in our ward. We get fed a little less because it’s not a full on Latin ward but they are still good about it. The bishop is awesome as well! Best ward council i have ever been too. In Hialeah we rarely had ward council. This ward is so gung ho about missionary work.

Can you go see Meet the Mormons movie? No, we are not allowed to go see Meet the Mormons, which was super hard because we all wanted to. The answer was no and if we went he said we would be sent home right away.HAHA

So good that you are taking friends to go see Meet the Mormons. I have heard that it is super good!

Thanks so much for that story, dad, about your mission. I feel like I follow your stories. How you said you were senor comp at 4 months to someone who has been out 3 and going from a ghetto area to a rich area. It makes me laugh but I love how we can relate to things as well.

This week was a roller coaster week for sure! So Sharon an awesome lady we were teaching who I mentioned about last week, the Jewish one. She just dropped us out of the blue. We brought a member with us and it was going to be a super powerful lesson, we had been studying so much about the questions and concerns she had but right at the door she dropped us like a hot potato. It was like a bad break up. And it was kind of embarrassing because the member was with us but she was understanding and just uplifted us. So that was hard. That started off our week. But the next day on Tuesday of last week or so we went and visited a guy named Manny who we found while harvesting during our first week. We had been trying to get a return appointment with him and finally after playing phone tag we got to see him. He was super cool and is practically Mormon. He has all the same standards as us. We taught him the restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon. He said he was going out of town in two days so give him that time to read the Book of Mormon and then when he gets back we can talk about it. He just got back today so hopefully will see him tomorrow. He is super cool and was super uplifting and encouraging of missionary work and what we were doing. So that got us pumped after what happened with Sharon.

Funny quick story. We go and see this less active in our ward named Mary. She is 82 and has dementia. We visit her every week and the other day when we were over there her daughter made us some banana bread. While we were eating it we asked her if she liked her bread. She said "What? Do I wet the bed? Why yes i do" HAHA It was so funny! Me and Sister Burdett laughed so hard. It was great. She is super cute and funny.

 Anyways on to the next story. We have been teaching this girl Christina. Sister Calvo and Sister Burdett had been teaching her for quite a while. This week we set up an appointment to go teach her. Before that we were harvesting and we weren’t having much luck. We saw this guy walking his dogs and he had a husky and that’s what got my attention. I said we should go talk to this guy. We did and he said he was atheist. He is a big scientist guy and that’s why but he said he wanted to ask us some questions which turned into a lot of questions. We were with him for 40 min and we are proud to say that we answered all of them but it was sad because he is so confused but it was a good conversation and we left with a stronger testimony of the church.

Anyway, we were running late to go see Christina so we booked it and when we got there she was “oh just on time I just got home 15 min ago”. It was such an amazing blessing that we talked to that atheist guy for 40 min or we could have missed her. We taught her about the gospel of Jesus Christ and it was a super powerful lesson. So spiritual. Sister Burdett bore a powerful testimony and then asked her to be baptized which was a shock to me because we had planned just to get her to come to church but as she asked her I felt goose bumps and knew that that was what she needed to ask. At first Christina was hesitant, but then I bore testimony to back her up and she said that she would pray about it. She said that she was unsure because she has already been baptized twice but she wanted to know for herself if this is what she needed to do. We were so happy and as she said the closing prayer she asked and it was so powerful. Hearing your investigators pray for answers is just amazing! We are going to go see her tomorrow to find out her answer. We walked out of that lesson on a spiritual high. Sister Burdett said that was the most powerful lesson she has ever had. The Lord blessed us.

Another day while we were harvesting, we found this super cool family and gave the mom a pass along card. She was the most interested. She gave us her number and information and told us to give her a call tomorrow so we could set up a time to come over. Score! We called her and set up a time and got her address and found out that she doesn’t live in our area and when we found her she was visiting her mom but we got permission to go with the elders in that area to teach her and do a pass lesson. So we set everything up and went over excited to teach her and her family. When we got there with the elders there was like 30 people there, all family and friends. We were like, cool. We are going to have an awesome lesson and just baptize the world. We went in she was excited to see us and we sat down and got to know everyone had a good discussion and shared a prayer with them that was powerful but right after the prayer they were all like let’s get down to business. They bring out a white board and we are like what? We looked at the elders and they were as confused as us. Turns out the only reason they invited us, was to try and sell products to us. Like shampoo and face wash and get us to join their business. It was like a Pampered Chef thing.  We listened to their speech watched a video and everything. They didn’t get the fact that we are missionaries and we are poor. So we were there for an hour and a half just doing this. We felt so bad because the elders were there. The people were super nice and fed us. It was just a weird experience. Like they set this whole sha bang up for us. It was crazy and it was all in Spanish and they talked super-fast and we had to pay attention because we didn’t want to agree to anything. It was just crazy!!

OK, last story of the week. We are teaching this guy named Karl. His son is named Trevor and just got back from his mission in Italy. He is the only member in his family. One day his dad just came up to him and said “you know what, I want to take the discussions and get baptized.” I guess he noticed a big change in Trevor and wanted to know more so now we are teaching him. But get this. When I found out that Trevor served in Italy, I remembered that Francesca did (remember old family friend)  and so i asked if he knew her and he said yes! He was her first zone leader! So you need to go on Facebook for me, i am friends with her and tell her for me that I am teaching Trevor Florentino’s dad. So on Sunday, Karl came to church! It was super amazing and he brought his mom and sister which was awesome!! Then they invited us over for dinner. It was so good! We had grilled honey chicken with corn on the cob and salad so good. Trevor’s whole family likes us and Karl is super awesome and is really interested and asks a lot of good questions. He hopefully will be getting baptized this week or next.

I have this awesome story that was in the ensign that I wanted to share with you. Read it here. https://www.lds.org/ensign/2014/10/the-jadeite-cabbage?lang=eng   It is called the Jadeite Cabbage. Please read it.

      Super amazing!!! It really put into perspective my worth. this transfer has been hard because i have been felling inadequate about training and just not seeing myself as special but this story was an answer to my prayers. Heavenly Father loves me for me with all my cracks and imperfections, he is making me into something amazing and I am so grateful for that. I love my Heavenly Father so much! He is my best friend for sure :) 

      Today we went to the Miami zoo! A member has season passes for up to 8 people so our whole district got to go for free! So much fun!! I will send pics!! :) 

Thanks for being the best family ever!! :) have a good week!!

Hermana Briaunna

Dino Babies

At the Miami Zoo

Do not want to meet this guy while knocking on doors!

Made me think of Emperor's New Groove

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 [HMJ1]