Week 8 in the Great Lakes State!

Okay, AMAZING week.

Bruce and Yifan are such solid recent converts. Everyone in the ward is so impressed by them and their testimonies are so inspiring. They are rekindling everyone's excitement about the gospel!

So we keep track every time we talk to someone new (on the bus, on the street, on campus, etc.) and get to know more about them and invite them to learn more about the church. We added it up this week and since getting to Michigan I have talked to 475 people! I love talking to strangers. You meet people who are at all sorts of different places in their lives. I love also being able to see how the gospel relates to every single person I meet. It's amazing.

This week we sang in church with the ward choir and it was actually such an incredible experience! I can't sing at all, but I was luckily drowned out by the beautiful voices surrounding me. I might be biased, but holy cow it sounded amazing. It was so cool to look out at the people sitting in the congregation and watching their reactions to our voices. Yifan got so excited and had a huge smile on his face the whole time! 

This week our miracle was Dennis! He has been taking the lessons from the missionaries for almost a year but has never committed to be baptized. This week, we got to know him better which was a blessing. He is from Uganda! So I got to talk to him about how I used to tutor girls in Uganda over Skype. He got really excited about that and started telling us all about Africa. It was such a tender mercy because he finally started opening up to us as missionaries. And get this - HE COMMITTED TO A BAPTISM DATE! I was so grateful to be able to apply my past experiences to my missionary work here. Another blessing of tutoring those girls is that my companions have never been able to understand Dennis's thick Ugandan accent on the phone, but I have a lot of practice with that! So now they just make me answer every time he calls, haha. We love Dennis.

Overall, it's been an incredible week and an incredible mission. I am learning so much and at such an accelerated rate! There's no place I'd rather be right now. I love Michigan!

For this week's spiritual message, I want all of you to check out this AWESOME article from the August Ensign. IT TALKS ABOUT SPACE! I was freaking out when I saw it. Here's the link! http://www.lds.org/ensign/2013/08/worlds-without-number?lang=eng

Have an amazing week!

<3 Sister Christiansen