I love this stuff‏

From:	Callie Horton (callie.horton@myldsmail.net)
Sent:	Mon 2/24/14 9:23 AM

Hey family and friends!

 

WOW! That's how I feel about missionary work. I love this stuff. My heart is just so full of love for missionary work! How is the world did I get so lucky to be a part of this amazing work? This is definitely something that I want in my life for forever. More and more every week I realize how extremely lucky I am to be a missionary, and I also realize how much I love this work. There is no greater joy than what comes from sharing this important message with people. When we are knocking doors or talking to people I always am sure that I say like 5 times that this message is SO important. Because it is! I am so proud of my family for praying for opportunities to share the gospel with others. It honestly brought tears to my eyes throughout the whole week whenever I would think about it. Keep up the good work you crazy fools!

 

Our stake had a women’s conference on Saturday about hastening the work and it was so awesome! We got the opportunity to sing the song "As Sisters in Zion/We'll Bring the World His Truth". The best part was that all of the sister missionaries in the stake got to sing the part that the boys usually sing. When we went up on the stand to sing and our part was coming where we started singing "We'll Bring the World His Truth", both me and my companion just about lost it. The Spirit in the room was just so strong and singing that song is like singing my testimony. It was just such a cool experience. We also got to teach the Spanish sisters about sharing the gospel in simple ways every day. It went pretty good! But oh man I made a way funny Spanish mistake. We were talking about how even we as missionaries have to pray to have a desire to share the gospel sometimes. And so I was saying how sometimes we're just really tired, and then instead of saying how we might have hunger, I said that we might have men! In my defense, the words are SO similar! But it was funny. The room full of Hispanic women got a really good kick out of it and then continued to bring it up a couple other times during our presentation haha. It was great.

 

I love doing less active work! I haven't had a ton of experience with it since we didn't really do that in Mechanicsville, but we do a lot here and its great. We had one of the most amazing lessons with this less active lady this week. We were visiting with her and talking about the Book of Mormon. We read the introduction of it and we were just able to bare really strong testimony of it. We asked her what she was thinking. She just started to talk about how it just really touched her heart and made her feel that she needed to return back to the gospel. She said that when she very first saw us she just felt inside that she needed to return to church. She was just crying so much and she was just so so grateful for everything that we had said to her. She said that she would find her BOM and start reading it again and that she would return to church. She also talked about how she will never forget the sister missionaries that very first shared the gospel with her and she said that now she will never forget us because we helped her come back to church. The Spirit was so strong and Hermana McRae and I were both filled with the love that God has for her. It was so amazing. Helping people come back to church is just as rewarding as sharing it with them the first time.

 

I hope that you will all have such an amazing week! I love you all and I am so grateful for your support. Have a great week!

 

And now I close mine epistle. I am Hermana Horton.

 

Welcome to Woodbridge!‏

Callie's mission email

From:	Callie Horton (callie.horton@myldsmail.net)
Sent:	Tue 2/18/14 12:53 PM

Hey all you out there reading this lovely email!

 

I am officially in Woodbridge! I am like 25 miles from DC. It secretly kills me inside knowing how close I am to that great city, but it is so cool at the same time! It is really so beautiful here. My area is called Potomac River. How cool is that?! And I am serving in the Potomac River Spanish ward with the beautiful Hermana McRae. She is from Tooele. She's fabulous! I love her so much already. We're having lots of fun and working hard! It’s wonderful. I actually really wanted to serve here at some point in my mission. I had heard how amazing the ward is here and I don't know! I just had this draw to serve in Woodbridge. So I was SO excited when I found out where I was going! But the goodbyes in Mechanicsville were HARD. Especially saying goodbye to people that we've been teaching for most of my time there like Filiberto and Veronica. We went to dinner with Filiberto one of my last nights there and while we were there he was like, "I have a question for you... How do you feel knowing that you have brought someone into this church and into the path of God?" I was speechless. First off because that is such a profound question to hear and I wasn't expecting it. And second, I literally feel speechless when I think about that. There aren't words to describe the happiness and peace that it brings me. But I also had to remind him that it wasn't just me. None of that would have happened if it wasn't for the Spirit and the help of the Lord. Saying goodbye to Veronica was pretty sad too. She was pretty sad when we told her and then when we were leaving I said, "Adios!" And she said, "No. Hasta leugo." Which means like "see you later." I literally burst in to tears when she said that ha-ha. But it’s alright. I will see her again one day!

 

I had the coolest experience at church on Sunday. We were sitting in sacrament meeting and the weirdest/greatest thing happened. We were sitting towards the front and I just kept looking back at all of the people there, and I was just filled with this overwhelming feeling of love and compassion for every single one of them. I was seriously fighting back tears! I have never felt that so overwhelmingly before, and especially not on the first Sunday. I just love all of those people so much already!! I love Hispanics! They are just loving people. That is one thing that is great about being back in a Spanish ward; you get endless amounts of hugs and kisses! That ward really is so great. They just have an awesome ward mission plan and they are so missionary minded and ready to bring everyone into the gospel. They have no fear when it comes to sharing the gospel with their friends.

 

I am really excited for all of the adventures that lie ahead! And I am excited to be back in a Spanish ward. But I have to do a lot of things in Spanish that I haven't had to do before. Like yesterday, we led a family home evening with a couple of families. And tomorrow we are teaching a class to members of the ward. And on Saturday, our stake has a women's conference and we have to teach the class for the Spanish members. I'm excited for my Spanish to blossom even more! This is going to be a great transfer.

 

Well I hope you all have the best week ever! I love you!

 

And now I close mine epistle. I am Hermana Horton.

Adios Mechanicsville‏

From:	Callie Horton (callie.horton@myldsmail.net)
Sent:	Mon 2/10/14 9:17 AM

HOLA!!!

So the time has finally come where I have to say goodbye to the lovely Mechanicsville. What a wonderful time I have had here! I will miss it dearly, but it is time to move on to another land where the Lord needs me. I am excited for the adventures that lie ahead! I will be finishing the training of a Hermana. I'll find out on Thursday where I will be going and who I will be with and then off I'll go! But I will definitely miss Mechanicsville so much. I have been here for so long I just thought about moving my records there! Not really, but I wouldn't mind! The people here are amazing. The ward basically had guessed that I was going to leave so I kind of said some goodbyes yesterday, and it just made me realize even more how much I love the people of that ward. It is really such an amazing ward! Even though we are the Spanish missionaries awkwardly in an English ward, they show so much love and support to us. I am so sure that I was so meant to be in that ward. There was a time when I was just thinking about how much better my Spanish would be if I was in a Spanish ward, but then I just had the strongest feeling that the Lord has some work for me to do after my mission and so I needed to learn how to share the gospel better in English. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I know that my time in an English ward was definitely for my benefit after my mission too. I have learned so much here and will be forever grateful for the many people that I met here.

 

We had an amazing miracle this week! So there was this lady that we had taught once at this trailer and when we went back for our second lesson she wasn't there and we didn't have a phone number for her. So we went back like a week later to see her, and the person that answers the door said that she moved. But they were Hispanic so we asked if they would be interested! It was this young boy and he didn't really seem too interested, but he set an appointment with us. We weren't really expecting a whole lot to come out of it. When we went back for our lesson his mom was there too. We asked her if she had ever heard of our church before. We come to find out that 3 years ago she was meeting with the missionaries! She had a Book of Mormon, some DVDs, she had been to church before, and she had even been to the temple grounds! The thought seriously crossed my mind to ask her if she was baptized... She said that she works now on Sundays, and we think that that may be the reason that she stopped meeting with them. We were reviewing the restoration with her, and when we asked her if she thought it was true, she just talked about how she already knew that it was true because she felt the Spirit when the other missionaries shared it too! She wouldn't agree to baptism right now because she doesn't feel like she can stop working on Sundays. Hopefully she will soon though! She is so so cute and so amazing!

 

Josue is doing so amazing! He has been keeping all of his commitments lately and he went to church with Filiberto yesterday and stayed for the baptism that they had after! We were teaching him the law of chastity the other day and we just got a reaction that we weren't expecting. It just made so much sense to him that Satan would be attacking it because of how sacred it is. We didn't even say that to him! He just figured that out on his own! He is already trying to live it in his life. But the greatest was at the end. We asked him if there was anything that we could do for him. Usually he says no, but this time he asked if we could pray for him to help to be able to continue onward with strength because when someone starts walking in the path of God the Devil just jumps on you and holds you down so that you can't get back up! Ha-ha. He's great. But he just has so much faith! It amazes me. And Filiberto is just being the best little fellow shipper. Speaking of Filiberto, he is such a fabulous human being. He is preparing right now to get his temple recommend so that he can go with the ward to the temple on the 22nd!

 

This week was just really great. I don't even have enough time to write about all of the great miracles that we saw, but the Lord definitely blessed us. I am so grateful for this amazing work and the opportunity to be a part of it. Being a part of it has helped to shape me into a better person. Oh how grateful I am! This gospel is amazing. How lucky are we to have the knowledge of it? The Church is true! I love you all! Have a grrrrrrrrreat week!!

 

And now I close mine epistle. I am Hermana Horton. 

Mmmmmm bear meat!

                                                                                Callie eating bear meat.

Una Obra Maravillosa

From:	Callie Horton (callie.horton@myldsmail.net)
Sent:	Mon 2/03/14 9:02 AM

 

My dearest friends and family!

 

I hope that everyone is well and wonderful! How is the weather in Utah? It’s been pretty cold here lately. I'm ready for Spring. But yesterday we got a bright sunny 65 degree day! I was very grateful for it! Such a tender mercy from the Lord. It was only one day, but hey, I'll take what I can get! I'm glad to hear that everything is still wonderful with baby Elijah! I can't wait to meet the handsome fella.

 

Well I basically love being a missionary! I am sitting here right now trying to remember last week and I can't remember what happened haha but I just remember that my love for being a missionary grew!! Have I talked about Roxana and Ashley and Jonathon before? They are some kids that we are teaching and they are SO awesome!! I love teaching them. They remember so much from what we teach them and they just have such great questions and desire to understand the things that we are teaching. Sometimes they are pretty rambunctious, but it’s been a huge learning experience because we have had to get super creative with our teaching methods. I’ts been a lot of fun! Last week we taught them about following the prophet and we played "Simon Says" but instead it was "The Prophet Says." They are so cute! Kids are so much more on my level of maturity haha. It’s hard though because their mom is learning from another church and she only wants us to teach her kids. She'll kind of listen sometimes but not really too much. So we're just trying to figure out how to get her more on board because they have some serious potential!

 

We had yet again another amazing lesson with Veronica! We planned again to watch that talk by Elder Holland with her, and we get all of the way to Ashland before we realize that we forgot it! So we were kind of freaking out and we weren't really sure what to teach her and I was just praying so hard that we would know what to teach her. Then the thought to review the plan of salvation came to my mind. So we started teaching that and I asked her what she thought that her purpose in this life was. And she started talking about how when we taught this to her a while ago, she didn't have an answer to that question, but now she felt like she knew the answer. And she just gave such a sincere answer about how her purpose is to follow and love God and to serve others. Even though the decision to be baptized will probably take a while for her to make, I just realized in that moment how far she has come since we began teaching her, and I was so extremely happy that I could be a part of her learning experience.

 

So something really cool about Spanish is that the meaning of some of the words has helped me to gain a deeper understanding of certain scriptures or things in the gospel. I was reading in the Spanish Book of Mormon the other day and I didn't realize that I was reading from the chapter where one of my favorite scriptures is. The verse is Mosiah 14:5. There were a couple of words that I didn't understand and so I looked them up and that's when I realized what verse I had just read. So in English, the end of the verse says, "and with His stripes we are healed." And the word in Spanish that they use for 'stripes' is 'llagas'. I looked up that word to see the exact meaning and it means, "sore, grief, sorrow." That just made me love the verse even more. Through all of Christ's sores and grieves and sorrows, we can be healed of everything that is hard in our lives. We are only healed through Christ. There is no other way to be forgiven of our sins. And there is no other way to have the help that we need with the burdens in our lives except through Christ. This life is impossible without Him. It is only with his llagas that we are healed. I feel so comforted to know that we CAN be healed.

 

I love you all so so much! I hope you have a wonderful week! Remember to choose Christ is all you do!

 

And now I close mine epistle. I am Hermana Horton.

 

Pictures!

 

 

There are some us in the snow, us eating bear with the Ward Mission Leader and his wife (they are some of my favorite people ever. Sister Murrell is the one that helps us a lot.) He caught the bear himself! It was delicious :) and the other pictures are of the Sunday night struggles that we sometimes have.

 

 

 

 

 

This is my district this transfer! If you zoom up close its really funny

Dedicated to the babe Elijah‏

From:	Callie Horton (callie.horton@myldsmail.net)
Sent:	Mon 1/27/14 9:24 AM

Aloha! 

Congrats to Mike and Sashana on cute little baby Elijah!! He's pretty stinkin adorable. Be sure you tell him all the glorious legends of his favorite aunt so that he will know me by the time I return from my journey.

 

It snowed!!!!!!! There was a tiny snowfall a couple week ago but it was melted by like noon, but it snowed last Tuesday a lot! A lot for Virginia. Would be more like a light snow covering in Utah. But it was great! We were super excited about it! I never thought I would miss the snow, but I have. There is still a little on the ground, but it is mostly melted now. Virginians are funny. I love them. They freak out about snow and go and clear out all of the grocery stores of their milk and bread when they hear word that there might be a storm haha. Bless their hearts.

 

My poor companion had strep throat this past week so we were inside for most of the week, so not a whole lot happened, but that's alright. I was able to study a lot which was great and I just honestly learned a lot. We grew a lot as a companionship. I learned to serve her and love her more, which was something that I needed to learn to do. At first I was getting so caught up in that fact that we weren't out working, but then I decided to take a step back and see what I need to learn from what was happening. My eyes were definitely open. There are a lot of times in situations where I think we get caught up in what is happening that we don't see the real meaning for the thing that is happening. If we can just step back and see what God is trying to teach us, we will usually learn so much. We were able to go and teach Veronica on Saturday night and it was just so fabulous. We wanted to show her the talk by Elder Holland about the Book of Mormon, but after we tried for forever to get her DVD player working, we had to accept the fact that it just wasn't going to work. So I'm just kind of freaking out inside because we didn't know what we were going to teach her, and I'm just praying and praying that Heavenly Father will bless us with the words that we need to say. And He most definitely did! I just decided that I would go to my scriptures and share Moroni 10:3-5, but right as I'm about to open to it, I remember a scripture in Jacob chapter 4 about how one of the reasons for the writing of the Book of Mormon was so that their children can know their testimonies of Christ. We have talked so so much about the BOM with Veronica, but this was a different way to look at it. The amazing prophets that wrote the Book of Mormon were real people with real families, just like us. They wrote that book so that their children, and everybody after them, could know that they knew Christ and that they had a testimony of Him. And how great were their testimonies! Then we start to talk about how we can receive answers to the questions in our lives through the BOM. She had expressed to us a lot that she feels like she is not getting answers to her prayers. So then Hermana Pratt just whips out Moroni 7:12-13 where it talks about that every good thing comes from God and how if it inspires to do good, then it is of God. Veronica then started talking about how she felt differently when she talked to us then she did when she talked to people from other Church's. Slowly and surely she is starting to grasp the things that we are teaching a little bit better. We just hope and pray that she will be able to receive and witness that the things that we are teaching are true!

 

Enrique went to church yesterday for the first time!! He went to the Spanish branch/]. We had a lesson with Filiberto last night and he said that he met him and that he seemed to really like it! Speaking of Filiberto, he is doing so so great. We were talking about what we need to do to build a strong foundation in Christ. He told us how in church every week they pray for the people that didn't come. It did not make any sense to him why people wouldn't come to church! He just already knew that we need to make that decision before hand that when Sunday comes, we go to church. He also said that he is studying a lot about the priesthood so that he can be prepared to receive it. He's pretty stinkin great.

 

I hope you all have a super duper week!! Remember that I love you. I pray for you every day. Stay cool.

 

And now I close mine epistle. I am Hermana Horton.