You want to see miracles? You just have to look!

[From Amanda's message Aug 26, 2013]


Hello!

This has been a wonderful week in Solvang. The Lord is blessing us with so much success. It's crazy. We are seeing miracles every day.

Okay here's a MILAGRO. There is this elderly woman from Mexico we've been teaching named Domitila. She has tuberculosis and is super sick and practically dying. She is so sweet but she's been really sad and lonely because she can't have visitors or leave the house because she's super contagious and has to wear a mask. We teach her outside her door while she's inside. Last week we brought some brothers from the ward to give her a blessing. We went by this week to see how she's doing and she didn't have her mask on. We were like, Domitila, where's your mask? She told us she was TUBERCULOSIS FREE. The doctor did a test and told her so. She was COMPLETELY HEALED. Can you believe it? We were freaking out. The sad part is, she didn't even realize the significance of the priesthood blessing. She was just like, yeah lots of people have been praying for me and God decided to heal me. She is so set in Catholicism. We ended up asking her what she would do if God told her there was a different church that was His church, if she had to choose between Jesus Christ and the Catholic church what she would do. She said she would stick with what her parents taught her. -_-  It made me think of when Jesus healed people. I wonder if they would have said it's because a lot of other people had been praying for them and they were going to be healed anyway. There's a verse in the Book of Mormon that says there were many miracles for those who were willing to look. Miracles have not ceased. Are we choosing to see the miracles in our everyday lives? If we do, we will find them.

Anyway. Things are going great here. The Bishop is awesome and getting all fired up about missionary work. He said in ward council to the auxiliary leaders that they have to get moving to keep up with the sisters. Haha. It's so funny because we know it's not us. The Lord is giving us success to help the members in this area have faith and make change. We've already gotten 3 awesome member referrals this past week. The Lord has really been preparing this area for all these changes. I love it.

The members here are so great and willing to help, there's just one problem. Carl, Dawn and Woody came to church on Sunday (oh P.S. they're doing great now and we're still teaching them) and lots of people said hi to them but nobody invited them to sit with them. In Relief Society we introduced Dawn to several sisters and they just said hi and ran away to go sit somewhere else. She ended up just sitting with us. We need to help the members see that there is plenty of missionary work to do right in front of them. Often times members think they need to go out and bring people in. The most important thing they can do is to take care of the people we already have, that's when the Lord blesses us with more.

We had a great YW/YM missionary activity on Wednesday! We've been planning it for about 3 weeks and it went really well. We gave them mission calls on Sunday and they all came dressed as missionaries and we gave them nametags. They separated to their classes where they were "called" to, and had a mini MTC experience. Then we had a TRC where they went with their companions and got to teach "investigators." It was super fun.

I love you!!!!! Thank you so much for your letters and kind words. Your support really helps and means so much.

Onward ever onward!
Hna. Cannon