Blessings!

Hello! 

I feel like I just was writing last weeks e-mail....time is a crazy thing. 

Elder Teh visited our mission this past week. We are just getting blessed right and left here! The conference was wonderful! I have never had more excitement or motivation to do more as a missionary and help the work move forward. I am so blessed to be a part of this mission at this time. It's such a testimony to me that God knows each and every one of His children and He guides us to where we need to be if we follow Him. It's amazing. When I look back over my life and especially the last year and a half, I can see God's hand in everything and I can see how it all led up to me serving here at this time. 

I don't know how many of you know why I'm serving....quick story. I knew a mission was always an option, but I never felt like I should or that I even had a desire to leave everything behind and go. So...Graduation came and went and my life went on, too. It wasn't exactly going in any direction I thought it would or that I wanted it to go. (Marriage...nope. Funny how God has a better and bigger plan than we do for ourselves). As I thought about life over the last year, I would pray to have a desire to go and nothing would ever come from it, so I just ignored the mission thing and found other ways to grow in the gospel. As I continued on in life I had the strongest desire to go through the temple...so I did. Best place in the world. Everyone should go. Because of the temple I felt so much closer to Heavenly Father and the Spirit (vital for life). One night (I wasn't even thinking about a mission) the Spirit hit me so strong and I KNEW that I had to go. Through every fiber of my being, I knew I needed to. I still didn't want to, but I knew that if I followed Christ and gave up my life to serve Him, my desires for my life would come back to me even better than I could ever imagine. That's how God works. =) So, now I'm here and I can see that God leads us to places we never thought possible. I could have stayed at home and been perfectly fine. There would have been amazing things that would have happened and God still would have been there...He's always there. But I know that because I'm following the plan He so powerfully showed that I should follow, I will and currently am being blessed.

 

This is how Heavenly Father works in all of our lives. We are all at different stages, we all need different things, and our stories are not all the same. But there is one underlying theme to all of our stories...as we follow Heavenly Father and strive to do our best, we can look back and see God's hands in our lives. It might take years to see...things that happened while I was a teenager and younger are playing into me serving...but we can ALWAYS see His hand. He loves each and every one of us. That is His entire reason for sending us here. He wants to help us be happy and He wants to pour out blessings to us...He is always pouring blessings out and we can always see them if we open our eyes and hearts and look. (Read President Uchtdorf's talk from last Saturday's Women's Conference. Illustrates exactly what I'm talking about)  

Okay, massive tangent. Pretty much, I just realized again that I'm supposed to be here and God will place people in our lives to help us see His plan. Elder Teh helped me see that again. I can't wait to see what happens over the next...few ish....months.      

On a happy note, Alexandria and Kayla (they were baptized the Sunday before I got to the area) finally got confirmed on Sunday. I love seeing the difference already! There were so many bad things that happened over the last month and they were having such a hard time, so church didn't happen. As they walked through the doors on Sunday you could feel a difference. They received the Holy Ghost and already there are so many blessings from that. Medical things that are not as bad as they thought, happiness in their home, peace on their street (they live in a not-so-great part of town). I love seeing the blessings all around us. Alexandria and Kayla see it too. They're going on the ward temple trip on the 18th and I can't wait to hear how it goes. If only we could go with them.... oh well. 

Okay, that was not what I was planning to writing this week, but there you go. 

I love you all! 

Sister Burns

(Ps, The leaves are amazing here! I will be taking pictures when there isn't as much green left. Gorgeous!)