Cause when you fifteeeeeen (months out)

I hope all of you remembered that good ol' Taylor Swift classic CAUSE LITERALLY NO ONE IN MY ZONE REMEMBERS IT! 

But you heard it right yall. Your little girl has hit her 15-month mark. Craziness. It still feels like I just got out here. 

So here are 15 fun facts from your favorite sister missionary

1)  Did you know that water is wet - Elder Wiltbank 

2)  Polar bears gain 500 to 600lbs when they are pregnant - Sister Thetford 

3)  Call of Duty is actually a terrible game -Elder Bruce

4)  Cars have 4 wheels -Elder Ginther 

5)  Lefties are better than everyone -Elder Broderick

6)  Lefties statistically have a shorter life span -Elder Wiltbank 

7)  On a 100-octane pump gas the Dodge Challenger Demon it makes 850 WHP (wheel horse power) - Elder Wahere 

8)  The moto on the 1st official Us coin was "mind your business -Sister Ellett 

9)  Dogs have tails - Elder Thomason 

10) Star Wars is better than Star Trek - Elder Wahere and Elder Bruce 

11)  You don’t eat bugs in your sleep -Sister Ellett

12)  South Carolina is the best state in the nation - Elder Wahere 

13)  Sister Maschinos favorite animal is a dolphin - Sister Maschino 

14)  President Sorenson was a nursery leader before being called as a mission president. -Sister Aase 

15) The book is blue the church is true. -The Nampa South District 

I love you all and I hope you have amazing weeks. 

Pictures 

- We went on exchanges this week and it was so fun. 

- At our mission-wide meeting, I got to see all my friends! Here is a picture of my MTC companion Sister Bentley, all the sisters in the MTC with me (Sister Temple, Sister Pace and Sister Bentley), and lastly a picture of everyone who came out with me. We are all FIFTEEEEEEN (months out) 

The Mission is Dying!

Hey everyone.

Sorry for the really late email. I am getting pretty bad at this emailing stuff! This week has been pretty amazing though, so I wanted to tell you about it. 

Let’s start with PANTS. So, for those of you who have not heard, sister missionaries are allowed to wear pants now. Some sisters bought pants the next day while other sisters, like me, were a bit more hesitant. 

Here are my reasons

1.) I have been out here for quite some time and am very comfortable doing missionary work in a dress

2.) I have never worn "business clothes" ever, but have grown up wearing dresses.

3.) I hate shopping!

But today Sister Ellett and I decided to go shopping to just see what we could find. And let me tell ya, we found some really cool pants haha. So, I now own 3 pairs of pants - black, brown and grey. AND I DIDNT EVEN CRY ONCE! You want to know what the trick was? We prayed right before going into each store and BOOM pants just appeared right before us! God loves his Sister Missionaries... and possibly pants. 

So another thing some of you might not have heard is our mission is dissolving! The funniest part of all of this is ALL the missionaries found out because of Facebook! It felt like finding out your boyfriend cheated on you ...but only because you see his wedding pictures on FB haha. Crazy! We were supposed to find out tomorrow at this huge mission-wide meeting (which by the way never happens - like you have to get approval from the Seventy to do this) but LDS Newsroom leaked the info before it was supposed to be released. LDS Newsroom! Ha! So, we found this out and President a few hours later sends us all a frantic email explaining the situation. The good part of this is we still get to have a meeting tomorrow and see all our friends! Yay. 

Last story. So, this week we went to teach our first lesson to this guy named Caleb. Caleb was found by the Relief Society. They were out doing visits and Caleb basically came out and started talking to them and then said, "so how can I be part of this thing?" Haha wow. So, we went over and started teaching him and the Spirit was so strong! It started off with us talking about God and we explained the Godhead and he just looked at us with amazement and said that brings him so much enlightment. Then we continued and he just loved everything we were saying, then he stopped us mid-sentence and said "okay I have something to say but it's a little crazy. When you guys talk, especially *pointing to me* when you talk... you glow. I can see a light come out of you and my heart feels relief with every word you say." It was amazing. So powerful and such an answer to both of our prayers. Caleb wasn't able to come to church on Sunday, but we have another lesson with him this week and hope to see him next Sunday. 

Well, that’s all I have for you. I love all you guys and I'm so grateful for the support I receive from you in letters, emails, and prayers. They mean a lot to me. 

Sister Aase 

Have a mentioned how much I love Nampa!

Oh my goodness. I LOVE NAMPA! It is seriously just the place to be...but don’t actually move here because too many people are moving here and it’s making the campsites rather upset. When people find out I came out from Arkansas they usually say "oh I’ve never seen Arkansas" and I typically respond "yeah it’s the hidden gem of the south"... because #arkansaspride. But let me tell you Idaho's treasure valley is a hidden gem that has just been found! Did you know it is one of the top growing places in the country? Little crazy. And to top it off Nampa's city logo is "the heart of the treasure valley". So yes, Nampa’s gone crazy Martha. But I LOVE IT! 

This week was jammed packed with teaching lessons, finding others, and inviting people to our special Christmas sacrament meeting. So many people open their doors here! It’s amazing. Also, our bishops and wards are just wonderful and very missionary minded.

We received two very solid referrals this week and we are so hopeful for both of them. We also got a car this week... to share... but still we are so grateful. This area really needed that car. Unlike my other areas, although still crummy in winter, were designed to be walking areas, this area NOT. Like this area is huge... like two hours to walk to from one end to the other. The mission is really short on cars though so we are all just sacrificing what we can. 

Christmas sacrament meeting was amazing! We invited so many people this week and so many people came. The mission usually has about 110 people not of our faith come to church, and so for Christmas this year, we were hoping to get 200 mission-wide – almost double what we normally get. Everyone was a little skeptical, but promised to pray for it and work really hard. You know what God does when you have a bunch of kids working hard and praying? He provides miracles. As a mission we had OVER 500 PEOPLE COME! What the what?!?! It was so crazy. God is so good. Everyone is ecstatic and so excited to work with these amazing souls who decided to come and worship with us. 

Well, my friends, I want to thank you all for keeping the missionaries in your prayers and taking care of the missionaries in your home wards. Christmas is hard sometimes as a missionary but it also tends to be the most rewarding part of the year. God really showers blessing down on those who sacrifice their time for Him. He truly does love all of His children and wants them to return to Him someday. That is why He gave us His son. That is why we celebrate Christmas. Jesus Christ truly did come to the earth. He talked to the outcast. He healed the sick. He established God's church. He felt our pain. He carried our sorrows. He bore our sins. He died for us and rose again. He is our reason for the season. I love Him and I love my Heavenly Father. I know them and I know they know me. I am so grateful to be a missionary and have an opportunity to serve them and be an instrument in Their hands every day. 

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. 

Sister Aase 

I'll be Home for Christmas !!

So surprise! Transfers came and although we were assured many times that no one would be leaving right before Christmas here I am.... leaving.... right before Christmas. Wild. But I'm going back to Nampa. MY HOME! I've missed Nampa so much and I'm so happy to be back. It's honestly the greatest Christmas gift President could ever give me. So yes I am in Nampa now and will be covering 3 wards. I'm with Sister Ellett. She is pretty new (this will be her 4th transfer) and she is from AZ! I love my AZ sisters! 

So this past week was a really fun one. We had our Christmas Zone Conference. Man o' Man it was a blast. I got to sing a song with my dear pal Sister Ray. It was a song we created together in Meridian titled "The Life of a Sister" and it goes into all the ways that we are better than Elders haha. It's pretty fantastic and had a lot of the Elders baffled. My favorite haha. Then we also performed a Hula number with a bunch of sisters from the mission. Hula is so fun! I loved learning how to do it and laughing with my friends while doing it. 

We were finally able to teach Emily this week which made me oh so happy. She has been through a ton and her religious journey is super crazy. The amazing thing that is happening though is that she feels prompted to take these lessons now and so she is putting her WHOLE SOUL into it. She has these crazy journals and highlighters and is treating these discussions as a college course. It's pretty grand. Yesterday when Sister Anderson and I went over to see Emily we talked a lot about testimonies and how we can't gain a testimony on knowledge alone. It is just not possible. We expressed to her that she was going to, at one point, have to start praying and putting just as much work towards her relationship with God as she is with these discussions. It was an awakening moment for her and she realized the big piece of the puzzle she was missing.

We had this huge stake nativity activity this week. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The whole church was filled with Nativities from different countries. Some super modern, some over a thousand years old. It was so neat and so many people from the community came. ( I vaguely remember our stake in Minneapolis doing something like this when I was a kid. So it was cool to see and have little deja-vu moments here and there.) 

We also got to go back to the old folks home on Saturday and I got to talk to some of my favorite people for the last time. It was so great. 

So other than that I had a lot of goodbyes that I had to say these past couple of days. Goodbyes are the hardest. But it's amazing that I can love people so much... literally in the matter of weeks... that saying goodbye is so tough. 

I love you all and miss you like crazy.

Sister Aase

  

Saying bye to my pal Ray, Low-quality picture with high-quality Emily, saying bye to the Brushes (we wrote in our journals with them every Sunday night), and my goodbye to the Browns (Judy said she was doing her vogue face🤣 what a hoot) 

And Here to Stay...

Welp, it snowed this week! Like a lot. So my green beast is here to stay and now it has some friends, the yellow monsters (aka my crazy snow boots). Haha. The snow is honestly beautiful and I'm so grateful that I have warm clothes so I don’t have to die out here in cold Idaho. 

Not much happened this week. Lots of walking in the dark, some cool street contracting, and getting to share Christmas messages with families. Those are basically all the highlights. 

Man luckily the letter you got "last week" *wink wink* hopefully kept you entertained today. 

Love y'all 

Sister Aase 

Abby posing w/Michael Pope, who served

with me in my Canada Montreal Mission a 

few years ago (ok, like 32) - We were never

companions, but I was fortunate enough

to serve with him in many districts and zones.

He's been so great to send photos of Abby

when he sees her.

This is Abby's companion, Sister Anderson

Abby and other Sister Missionaries

out providing service as part of the 

Light the World project.

I'm guessing this was at a district meeting

The Green Beast is Back!

Okay y'all, so last pday was a little crazy so I didn't get to send an email to tell y’all about my week. So today you get two emails! Yay! 

So burrrrrr. It got super cold this week. You know what that means. My green beast of a coat has officially come out of the closet. So get ready for pictures all season long that will look like I'm wearing the same exact thing. 

Lots of highlights this week. To start I got to go to the temple with Shanell this week. Man alive I love that girl. Even though we had to give her over to Boise and couldn't see her baptism, it made me so happy that we could at least see her in the temple. Also, I got to see my number one Sister Maschino again so that was a plus.

We had an amazing lesson with my friend Sarah this week. Whenever you get a new companion it takes you a second to get into your groove and teach well together. ANDERSON AND I FOUND OUR GROOVE! It made me so happy. We both walked out of their just elated. 

I got to volunteer at the Meridian's Winter Parade (which is basically just as big of a deal as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade so I'm not even upset anymore that I couldn't see that *said through tears). It was so fun! We got to be the ones that would tell the kids *cough adults* to step back so the parade could come through. In Idaho, missionaries are basically famous, so there were definitely times where I felt like I was part of the parade because these kids would just yell "missionary missionary". It was funny and great. 

Last highlight. Saturday, Dec 1st, was the kick off to “Light the World” with the day of service. And serve we did. We started by going to one of our wards breakfast parties and helped take things down afterward. Then we went to a retirement home and served them lunch and talked to them for a while... scratch that... really long time. They really like to talk. They said the funniest things to us. So Sister Hansen (another sister missionary in our apartment) has dwarfism and seriously the number of confused faces and funny comments we got from these people was just hysterical. Sister Hansen was cracking up. I think when you’re old, you can pretty much say whatever you want and everyone will just find it funny or endearing. We ended the day of service at Sarah's house decluttering the heck out of it. It was so much fun. She's a hoot. 

Welp I think that is all. Hope you have a good week and continue to light the world in small ways!

Sister Aase 

Thanksgiving 2.0

Hello Friends and Happy Thanksgiving! 

I hope everyone got the chance to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade for me. Just like last year, it was the one thing- besides family- that I missed the most. So for those of you that watched it please share with me some comments about it haha.

So I'll be honest holiday weeks are always pretty hard for missionaries. You miss home, your investigators go out of town so you don't have that many appointments, people get very irritated when you knock on their doors, and members get caught up in all their craziness so you usually don't have dinners. BUT all the craziness of the week makes the actual Holiday 10x better. 

Thanksgiving was really fun. We started the day with a Turkey Bowl with some of my favorite missionaries. It was a blast. We then hung out with a lot of different members and we played... wait for it... ♣️♦️CARD GAMES ♥️♠️!!!! Uno, Golf, Phase 10 ahhhhhh it was the best. Oh, and the food was good too. Haha.  It was actually low key amazing and I was contently stuffed. I did not go into a food coma. I did not feel like I needed to throw up. I just was content. So 1 point for Sister Aase. 

So this week was a hard one but this upcoming week looks like it is going to be amazing. Even with the hard weeks, I am so grateful that I get the chance to be a missionary. I had a person ask me the day before Thanksgiving while we were tracting at night in the rain "why are you out here? It's too cold and wet for anyone to be outside!" And I looked at her and said "We do this every day because we have an important message to share. A true message that brings us happiness and we want to share it with everyone who is willing to listen". At that time she didn't want to listen BUT maybe she will down the road. Even when people don't want to listen, I'm grateful I get to give them a chance to exercise their agency.

 I'm grateful that I myself am changing and coming closer to Christ during this process. I'm so grateful for my Savior and for a wonderful family who introduced me to Him. I'm grateful for the love and support of all of you. But most of all I'm grateful for my knowledge of this true and restored gospel and the peace it brings to my life.

Love you all, 

Sister Aase 

Pictures 

°Fun sister pictures at the Turkey Bowl

°We found some old Christmas stuff in our apartment and decked out!