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Life’s Value

Have you ever had a goal that you so desperately dreamed of achieving, yet the closer you got to that goal it began to seem impossible? Somehow your body, life situation, or others around you seemed to be giving up or not supporting your goal that made achieving this goal seem much more difficult? My ultimate goal for high school was to speak at graduation, so my grades were one of the most important deciding factors as to whether I could achieve that goal or not. At the end of every quarter, I remember feeling high levels of stress about whether I was going to make an “A” in each of my classes or not. My mind felt like it was stretched to its limits. I was stressed beyond stressed (which is not something new for me and my life). Somehow, miracles (they were definite miracles) happened and I was still on track to achieve my goal. However, when the stress levels and uncertainty would rise, I never even considered giving up. Giving up was just… not an option. Because I never gave u...
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Society at its Finest

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*Ding* the classic iPhone text message default tone “note” goes off, and just like that our hand reaches out, picks up our phone and before we know it we are once again controlled. We have been conditioned by our technological devices to respond when they want us to respond rather than when we want to respond. We are becoming a society that behaves just like Pavlov’s dogs who were trained to salivate when the bell sounds rather than when they actually saw the food- or the good stuff. We are losing our ability to reason and act for ourselves, as we allow the world to train us to automate our actions, our opinions, and even our very morals and beliefs. Before I go on, I must say that I do in fact use social media and I love my smart phone! However, I’ve recently begun seeing the flaws of them and I want to point out some of the pitfalls that we can easily be trapped by through their usage. I’m not promoting the absolute abandonment of either technology or social media, rather I’m pr...
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Merry Christmas Eve! Last Email!! December 24, 2016

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President Mansell is too efficient! Because I'm not trunky, I wanted to do key indicators for my last time and guess what? I can't! I'm already kicked out of my area on Missionary Portal. This past week has been CRAZY! We had Hermana St. Clair with us on Tuesday, Christmas Conference Wednesday, weekly planning on Thursday and we're started to clean our house to move yesterday! Like I'm kind of bummed that all of these other necessary things (moving and cleaning) are happening this week! I just want to teach and feel like I'm still working hard as a missionary, but I am doing my best and trying to not get down on myself even when I feel like we have done nothing all day. Hermana Tucker has been a huge help to me helping me to see the positive- she's the greatest! For example, last night all of our appointments fell through, the back-ups we had were not interested or home and it was after a day of planning (for our new area and finishing weekly planning) and...
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Freezing Miracles! December 19, 2017

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Well it's been a great week to say the least! I always get to emailing and I can't remember anything we did since last week, but I know it was good! Let's see... Our companionship is great! I am realizing more and more how much better I need to be at serving those around me continually. If I'm not looking for ways to serve or just doing the normal small simple acts of service, it's not enough. Just like any other principle of the gospel, to improve I must be seeking out ways to improve. Miracles  definitely happened this week- lots of them! So some of the highlights from this weekend- this  freezing  cold weekend (like 2*F cold)! A less-active father and son, that the Bishop has asked us to focus on, they came to Karen's missionary farewell party and then the father came to church for all three hours! Wow, greatest day of my life! So we've been seeing them every weekend for the past 8 or so weeks inviting them and the last month, month and a halfish, t...
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Bringing in December with Christmas Miracles! December 6, 2016

Before anything else, the lovely Hermana Tucker and I are making Christmas cards today! I would LOVE to send one to all of you! Could you send me your address this week please? And I will send one next Tuesday when we email! (We have interviews with President Mansell on Monday, so we might be needing to move preparation day to Tuesday again!) So... I'm pretty much just forwarding my letter from President Mansell for this week... and adding maybe a few extra things... Maybe. haha This week has been splendid! So we are finding a lot of people to teach! (<-MIRACLES!) for the English missionaries!! It's great- I'm only a little sad because they are super awesome children of God and I don't get to see their testimonies grow, but the main point is that this is the same great work done through the Spirit no matter what missionaries are involved! However, with the amount of referrals that we gave out, we were even more blessed Sunday as we went to the 2nd ward with a ne...
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A Blessed Week! Novermber 29, 2016

Hi you all! Hermana Tucker is awesome! We are seeing SO many miracles together and it is so nice being able to work so much in our area together! I love it!  So this past Sunday I was just having one of those days that I thought might lead to another round of just really hard days and I was worried. I didn't want that to happen yet again. After a long day of meetings and church and just feeling down on myself because of errors that I had made this past week, my Spanish was doing awful and I was struggling to understand, and then realizing that my self confidence was in the pits too, so I finally opened up to Hermana Tucker who had already noticed I was struggling and she had already let me play piano after church for a moment to de-stress even though she was probably starving for lunch. And guess what? After I had opened up to Hermana Tucker and explained what I was struggling with, everything else went well! I began feeling so much better and that evening I realized that alth...
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Happy Day of Action of Thanks! November 22, 2016

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Hermana Tucker! The  mormon.org  pillow that I made in Wal-mart  this morning (: haha! First thing, Stillwater is the greatest! Second, Hermana Tucker is awesome! She's from San Diego, California. She's 19 and has been out 7 months as of 2 days ago! She went to BYU-H to play soccer her freshman year of college and she's super great! This is her 2nd area, her first being the Spanish branch in the North side of OKC! And she's the youngest of 4! And guess what? You wouldn't guess it, but she's 1/4 Mexican! It's been a great week to say the least! We dropped most of our investigators over the last two weeks and we have been blessed beyond blessed with new people to teach and referrals galore for the English missionaries in Stillwater! We have been out tracking, OYMing like crazy and contacting bunches and bunches of formers, potentials and referrals and guess what? We have seen success!  Yesterday we had set up a return appointment for 8pm to pass off to...
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