April 1st 2013

Hello and Happy Easter!!!! :]
This week was good, I had my first baptism! Her name is Alez, she is a very cute little girl and she wrote the Easter Bunny a note on the day of her baptism, it said “today is my baptism 30 of Mach and I am very excited about it because I have chosen to follow God in his footsteps and when I die I want to be a prophet because what I have learned from the sisters missionary’s, I have chosen this path because it is the right path for me right now and I LOVE doing the right thing.” She is so sweet.

This week I have been on a chocolate fast. We are teaching a mother, Erin and she has a coffee issue, so we told her if she would go a week without coffee, we would go a week without chocolate and that we would give her our chocolate as well, so we got lots of treats for Easter and we saved some for when we can eat them, but we also set up an Easter egg hunt for Erin’s family after church Sunday, it was really fun and she is doing well with no coffee and said she won’t buy any more after Wednesday! So yay!!! :]

We have two “golden gators” they are Liz and Andrea, we found them this week and they are committed to baptism, so hopefully everything continues to go well with them! I’m sure it will though, they love when we come over and they have accepted everything really well so far!

Easter here was good, we had a great Sacrament meeting and I sung in the choir that was nice. The choir is very little here, so they needed our support! Haha we had lunch with a Sis. Laughman after that and we colored eggs with her two kids, it was really fun! She gave me a hot wheels car for Easter because she knows I love cars. Haha then we went to go tracting, not very fruitful on a holiday, but we did it anyways. Then we went to the park to do companionship study, it was really nice outside and a good breath of fresh air. After that we had dinner at the Elliott’s, I’m pretty sure I ate my weight in food yesterday! Hahah but it was really yummy and they are an awesome family! It was a little hard being away from home on my first legitimate holiday, but I managed and the work is doing well and progressing! I thought with it being the season of Easter that I might share my feeling of the Atonement with you, so I have typed up a little something :]

My, Sister Falkner’s feelings of Jesus Christ and His Atoning sacrifice are immense and in fact overwhelming. The atonement was such an incredibly huge sacrifice, and the blessings it has brought to us are without number. I literally cannot think of my life without the atonement, I have read about it since I was a child, I have been taught of Christ my whole life, and I have been taught to follow him. What better example to follow than one who gave his life for me. Jesus sacrificed and suffered sins that not one of them belonged to him. One time I was with a friend, we were hanging out and we decided we wanted pizza. I like pizza but I HATE pepperoni. He didn’t know this, so we got a pepperoni pizza, this has happened a lot in my life, so I simply take each pepperoni off as I eat. I had a little pile of pepperoni on my plate by the time I was done, and there was one slice of pizza left. His little sister came in and asked if she could have the last piece, I told her she could but since I didn’t purchase the pizza I wasn’t really in charge of that. He, being a bit of a punk(and a boy) said she could have the last slice of pizza if I ate my pepperoni. She looked at me and I could just see in her eyes how badly she wanted that piece of pizza and I knew I had to eat that gross pepperoni… so I asked for a tall glass of water and I swallowed them like pills, it was AWFUL!!! Needless to say, I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t want her to go hungry. This simple experience has caused my appreciation for the Atonement to grow. I had to “sacrifice” for someone else and I didn’t want to, but I had to do it. As I have reflected on this, I know that Jesus Christ is much much stronger than I, and his sacrifice was so much more than eating pepperoni, but the point of the story is that he did it for us, and it was not by any means a quick “swallow it down” kind of a thing, my redeemer suffered, he bled, and bled and bled, and then he died for me. We as the natural man are so selfish, I questioned eating that pepperoni, such a simple thing and I didn’t want to do it. That is what we need to learn from the Atonement, like I said, the blessings are without number, but one thing that we can take away from it is that our savior volunteered to die for our sins, and he not only did it willingly, he did it without sin. I am eternally grateful for that and the way it has helped me personally to stay on the path back to my Heavenly Father. I also LOVE the song Amazing Grace. It is probably the most accurate way of expressing how I feel about the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

I hope you all had a great holiday season! I love you!

Love, Sister Falkner. :]