Mormon.org is hitting the PHX area!

Hello one and all. I hope your week has been treating you well. I have had a pretty busy week. Most of it has been at the Visitor's Center and that has been an interesting thing in and of itself. As I have said before there has been a lot of disharmony in the VC about being dedicated to doing our jobs, where ever they may be. I have been talking to various sisters about it and we all have decided that mianly it comes from us, the leaders, and that we are the ones who have to lead by example and help the other sisters stay on task. If we really want the VC to grow and be the tool that it is supposed to be, then we are going to have to work harder and be more dedicated.   We had a prep meeting on Friday and we talked about how we are the salt that helps other people with their savor. It started with us talking about Ice Cream and what type of ice cream we are (ben and jerry's half baked - just so you all know) and then talked about salt and ice and the chemical story of that. It was pretty funny. But it was true that we have to be the salt to help others be better.   As for our beloved Liahona 4th ward, we are working hard. A lady from chruch came up to us and asked us to start meeting with her husband who has no desires to come back to chruch. She is an awesome lady that wants the best for her family. We started teaching them the member presentations and alked about how important the family is. We had a really good lesson with them. And he ligit just told us that he doesn't want to come to chruch because he wants to watch Football. American Football. Strange for a mexican... but we have started working with Familia Alvarez!   Maria is still progressing. We've worked on bringing some members to lessons with us so she can get to know more preople. We had a really good talk about tithing, mainly because she needs $400 for her divorce. So we invited her to pay her tithing and that god would bless her with the way to pay for the divorce so she can get married and then baptized. She has known about tithing but didn't know that she could pay it before she was a member. yep yep.   We had a lesson with a lady named Eva. She is a basket case. We talked about why we had trials. We go in with a game plan about what we need to teach but it never happens. Right now all she want to do is complain about her life and how horrid her kids are and her husband is. Midway thru the lesson I was thinking, why are we teaching you? So odds are, if she dosen't start doing anything, we will stop visiting with her. It's really sad to me, because we really do want to help this family, but we can't unless they are willing to do things to improve their life. I can't do anything for them but teach the things that the need to do.   We finally found Myra again. I guess she did not go up to vegas like we had heard, but just to phx. Tha'ts all good. We too had a discussion with her about tithing. She ligit has no way to pay, because she does not get money, but we talked about how important it is to be willing to serve in whatever way. We also talked about what ward she would like to go to. She likes both the english and spanish ward and so it's hard to figure out what she wants. She likes the people in the english ward but understands more in the spanish. Imagine that. But we went and watched the Joseph Smith movie with her with a member from the english ward and she really like that. I think. She was crying anyway.   Friday and Saturday we had Hermana Arias with us for exchanges. We kept busy and work hard with a lot of the LA people that we have in our ward. We visited Ivonne, who has the 4 boys, one with down, and talked how she needs to help her kids learn about God because they know Squat! we really did get down to it and her problem is that she just doesn't have the energy too. I can understand that. 4 boys under the age of 8. I would be exhausted too. But hopefully we can get some people to help her. Friends. She needs them.   On saturday we had our useless stake correlation. Really, all it is is breakfast (For which I am greatful) but lets not call it a meeting and not discuss anything. We know that the stake is pretty limited in being able to help us but really, there is more to life than how many people we have with a baptismial date. And I was on day 4 of my headache that day so i was moody anyway. But life goes on.   Sunday was completley crazy. The english wareds were getting trainin on Mormon.org and that messed up everyones schedule for the spanish ward. my poor ward. but we had morning sheft in the VC (i take laps in the art exhibit when no one is around. good exercise. and we showed the special presentation of music and the spoken work for 9/11. pretty cool). Correlation was with bishop this week. and he just want to shove us off to the 'ward mission leader'. So that is getting frustrating. WE have a meeting set up with him to hopefully get on his agenda and figure out what he wants us to do. For the rest of the night we just went out and visited people. Our numbers are getting better, but we've been working hard at it.   So, for Mormon.org. What's going to happen si that october 3, the phx mesa area is going to get hit with back to back 10 second tv spots, billboards, and advertisments all over the area for the 6 months after that. It's going to be awesome. They have already done this in 9 citis and they tested it out there, but now they are doing this for reals and warning the members (something they forgot to do last time). but the purpose of doing this is to help pleople learn that mormons and lds are the same, to dispell myths and help members do missionary work and take iniative. so that's what district meeting and the chruch meetings have been all about. it's pretty exciting. so on saturday, we had time to go to the library and update our profile or create on if we didn't have one. So we are working on helping the members get ready for that. I'm pretty excited. Saddly it wont be in spanish until february but we can work around that. lots of hispanics speak english too. Anyway, that's the newest big thing. We've been talking about it a lot with the members and people that come into the VC. I was talking to a lady in the exhibit that hadn't heard about it and was super super excited and was pretty grateful that i talked to her about it. so there you go. it was awesome.   So that's my life this week. I love you a lot and hope you all have a good week. emily