Happy Halloween!

Hello everyone!

To be honest, I really can't remember hardly anything from this week.

It was a good week though! We found several new people to teach! We began teaching a 9 year old girl. Her family has sadly become less active and now that she is 9, she needs the missionary lessons. She is absolutely darling though. She knows so much and really wants to be baptized. We just have to help the rest of her family catch that same flame and come back to church.

In my studies of the Book of Mormon this week, I was right in the deep war chapters with Captain Moroni. These chapters get me so pumped! The world we live in now is ugly. There is a lot of wickedness and corruption. The freedoms we enjoy are getting harder and harder to keep. I admire the values of Captain Moroni and how he leads his people. His focus is on edifying and protecting his people and their cities. That should be our goal as well. What are we fighting for?

What are we fighting against? What would we write on our title of Liberty? I truly love the Book of Mormon. It is written for our day so we know just how to navigate through the rough times that are currently upon us and soon to come. READ IT!

I love you all and hope you have a safe and Happy Halloween!

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

Selfie

Ward Halloween party. A member gave us ears 

so I guess I was a cat..... also Elder (Parker) Zollinger

 is in the back. It's been fun serving around a friend from home!

New Beginnings for Buena Ventura

Helloooo!!!!!!! 

Wow. There is just so many good things to talk about this week. First off, Buena Ventura (my current area) upgraded this week! Buena Ventura is a branch that has a good 200+ people attending. Super huge. But this week WE BECAME A WARD!!!! I'm honestly so excited. The members are too. We have known something big was coming for a few weeks but didn't know what. The missionaries before me did some amazing things to help Buena Ventura become strong enough to make this step. 

We had some really incredible lessons this week! I'm not really sure what was in my cereal every morning, but I was pretty bold with people this week. I'm just kinda over putting up with people's laziness and excuses so I just straight up taught Repentance this week. To be honest, I regret nothing. It was actually pretty exhilarating to be so bold. I think I'm going to keep it up. 

Sunday after church we stopped by Armando. He is an investigator we met a few weeks ago. He seemed so sad and lost. Defiantly prepared. But then he became difficult to contact. So Sunday we'd had enough and just decided to stop by. He opened the door and we talked to him about how Important our message is and that he needs to hear it. He told us how he wasn't happy. And I told him that we could help him. I told him to give our message a try for 4 weeks. To do everything we tell him, and if by 4 weeks he doesn't feel any happier then we will go on our way and never bother him again. I have the faith that this is true. I KNOW this gospel blesses our lives and makes us happier than we could be any other way. I issue the same challenge to all of you. If there is some part of your life where you feel sadness, I ask, actually, I Implore you to do the little things. Read, pray, and go to church. Do it sincerely and I promise that you will find joy.  

I love this work with my whole heart. I know it is true. God lives. Jesus is the Christ. The Book of Mormon is the word of God and a HUGE blessing from God. 

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

Visit from Bishop and Sister Lemon

Fiesta en Florida!

First off I want to thank everyone for all the birthday wishes! It was

an AMAZING birthday! I was defiantly spoiled by members, missionaries,

my companion, and loved ones back home. There is no better way to

celebrate than serving the Lord. Also, feels real good to be 20!!!

We boxed food again for Puerto Rico and our group of 8 missionaries

put together  1600 boxes of food in 4 hours. Boom.

In my studies this week I was studying in Joseph Smith History. I

learned something really cool that I wanted to share. These verses

happen right before Joseph smith sees the angel Moroni.

28 the space of time which intervened between the time I had the

vision and the year eighteen hundred and twenty-three--having been

forbidden to join any of the religious sects of the day, and being of

very tender years, and persecuted by those who ought to have been my

friends and to have treated me kindly, and if they supposed me to be

deluded to have endeavored in a proper and affectionate manner to have

reclaimed me--I was left to all kinds of temptations; and, mingling

with all kinds of society, I frequently fell into many foolish errors,

and displayed the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature;

which, I am sorry to say, led me into divers temptations, offensive in

the sight of God. In making this confession, no one need suppose me

guilty of any great or malignant sins. A disposition to commit such

was never in my nature. But I was guilty of levity, and sometimes

associated with jovial company, etc., not consistent with that

character which ought to be maintained by one who was called of God as

I had been. But this will not seem very strange to any one who

recollects my youth, and is acquainted with my native cheery

temperament.

29 In consequence of these things, I often felt condemned for my

weakness and imperfections; when, on the evening of the

above-mentioned twenty-first of September, after I had retired to my

bed for the night, I betook myself to prayer and supplication to

Almighty God for forgiveness of all my sins and follies, and also for

a manifestation to me, that I might know of my state and standing

before him; for I had full confidence in obtaining a divine

manifestation, as I previously had one.

Joseph smith was in the act of repenting before receiving revelation.

HOW COOL IS THAT?! I have such a strong testimony of Repentance. It is

such a blessing. We need to be clean vessels in order to receive

spiritual guidance from the Lord.

I love this work with my whole heart! I am grateful the temperatures

are finally come down. Haha. I hope all is well in each of your lives!

Con amor,

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

Birthday Celebrations

Service!

Celebrating my birthday with the Davila Family

Opening a gift from my dad

Family crest from my dad
(inside joke and he got me good)

Hermana Robbins and I contacting by a cool lake

Dia de Espanidad party.  Super rad Spanish party!

Haz Lo Justo

Another beautiful week in a Florida! The temperatures are definitely cooling down, so bless that! Had some cool experiences this week that really strengthened my testimony of the Restoration and the spirit.  

Sunday during personal study I was pondering about what I wanted my weekly goal to be. I decided that I wanted to work on following all spiritual promptings. Sometimes I still get that fear or talk myself out of a promoting like to knock on a specific house or talk to the person walking by. So this week I decided to improve that. I told the Lord that in my prayers and then we left for our correlation meeting before church. On our way there was a car pulled over on the side of the road. I thought, pull over and see if they need help. But then I started to talk myself out because we were already running late. I kept driving having this internal wrestle with the lord. Then I remembered my goal and turned around. When we got back the car had driven off. I felt better knowing I'd at least tried but guilty that I didn't listen the first time. I told the lord, at least I learned my lesson and proved I would follow the prompting. So flash forward to when we were driving from our appointment with Armando (which I'll get too) to dinner with the rijos family. Again, we were running late but I saw another car pulled over. I didn't even argue this time. I pulled over and asked if they needed help. They said they were in need of ATF and asked if we could go get some. They gave us cash and we drove to the gash station and got some. When we returned we helped them fill up their transmission fluid and they were on their way. Hermana Robbins commented that the reason we saw the car earlier today was to prepare us to stop for this one. The lord was seeing if we (especially me) would heed his prompting to stop. I told him I would follow the spirit and I'm staying true to that. 

Side note- In church they had the primary program and it was amazing. Little niños speaking Spanish is the cutest thing ever. My subject line is the primary theme in Spanish. Choose the right! 

After church we had a lesson with Armando which was amazing! He is so prepared. We both have a good feeling about him. He has so many questions and doubts that actually point him right to our direction. It was a spiritual lesson of the restoration. In his prayer he asked God if what we said was true, if we have a true prophet, if the Book of Mormon was true scripture, and after his prayer said that he felt the spirit so strongly. He felt happy and peaceful. He knew he got an answer. It was so cool!!!! Hermana Robbins and I were so excited and she even teared up. Missionary work is so exciting!

Con amor

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

We got to go to the temple this week and do baptisms with
a recent convert of mind and Hermana Christensen's from Semoran

Exchanges with one of my favorite people, Sister Sorensen

3 zones came together to help with a huge relieve effort
for Puerto Rico.  Packaged over 4.4 million boxes of food

Prophets, Apostles, and New missionaries

Hello friends and family!

This week was pretty wild! My new companion is Hermana Robbins fresh from the MTC in Mexico. She is awesome! She is so eager to work hard and learn all that she can. We have already seen some cool miracles together. It's going to be a good transfer!

Wasn't conference just amazing?! If you didn't watch it, I'm sorry.

You really missed out. However, Repentance is real and Gospel Library is super cool. I loved Elder Anderson's talk! Not only was his tribute to Elder Hales very emotional, but his invitation to read and study the conference talks was very inspiring. Something that was told to me several years ago has stuck with me for every conference is "If Christ himself was speaking, would you listen more intently? Would you re-read, study, and ponder his words?" Well Those who speak at conference are called of God to carry his word unto the hearts of His children. Conference weekend is really amazing, but it is nothing if we do not continue to study the words spoken.

I love Florida! I had some serious Florida pride during conference as the state that holds my heart was mentioned. I was grateful to be part of the yellow angles mentioned! I love you all and hope all is well!

☀️Hermana Kent☀️

This picture is as rare as seeing a four leaf clover. 

All the Hermanas were together in 1 picture. This has not occurred in over a year. 

That's all. Welcome to Hermanaland

My new comp and hijita Hermana Robbins and our investigator friends

Missionary lunch between sessions

Complete in Christ

Hello friends and fam!

I hope you are all staying warm! Things are going great here in the FOM! Another transfer has come and gone! This week we started getting back to normal. Kind of. We still did a ton of service though! We got to go back to Cocoa Beach on Saturday. My heart goes out to all those affected by the recent natural disasters.

My spiritual thought is credited to one of my companions. She shared it during companion study but I continued to ponder over it during the week and it really impacted me.

Moroni 10:32

Yea, come unto Christ, and be PERFECTED in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be PERFECT in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are PERFECT in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.

The word perfect can be defined as being complete. So in fact, we are made COMPLETE in Christ. We all have imperfections. At times we feel like there are pieces missing in our lives. At times we may feel like we are not enough. However, with Christ we are complete. All our imperfections are made perfect, our voids filled, and our inadequacies made whole. God is real. Jesus Christ lives. He is our savior and redeemer. He loves every single one of us. So my invitation to you all is to allow Christ to make you complete. Ultimately it is our decision. He has already paid the debt. It's up to us to allow him to take it.

I hope you all have a wonderful week! I'll send some sunshine your way!

Con Amor,

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

The following are excerpts from emails back and forth between Missionary and Mama~~~

Yeah so transfers. I'm going to be a mommy!!!! I'm staying here in Buena Ventura and will be getting a new missionary tomorrow to train:)

So guess what? Everyone from my MTC district is suffering from a natural disaster right now. My companion is in Washington with all the ash from California, the elders are all in Mexico City with the earth quake. CRAZY!

Yeah so the Tukuafus. Funny story. So I guess they went to the English ward right before me and were talking to the missionaries and they told them they were from Bountiful. The missionaries told them that there was a Sister Kent from Bountiful in the Spanish branch. I guess they put it together so after sacrament they came up to me and asked if I was Sister Kent. I was super confused because of course I didn't recognize them. But then they told me they were from my ward and they had moved in just when I had my farewell. It was pretty cool. I asked who the bishop was but they didn't know yet. They texted a bunch of people but no one responded.  I'm excited about the new bishop. Bishop Wilkinson was my mission prep teacher when I left and the bishop when I get home. :) he will be great.

Baby Genesis

Branch Missionaries

The Tukuafus from my home ward

My companions.  Both are being transferred :(

Irma Brings Blessings of Service

Hello friends and fam!

Wow! I am just beat. This week was full of service and I LOVED it. I forgot what it was like to wear a skirt because the entire week was spent in pants, t-shirts, and sneakers. This email could be a mile long if I told you all about all the service I did. Last night we tried to count how many hours of service we did. Guess how many hours.... just guess.... okay I'll tell you. It was 47. 47 HOURS OF SERVICE! That doesn't include all the driving time to get to those places. Here are a few places we went this week to help clean up debris, fallen trees, etc. 

• Give Kids the World (a place for the kids and families to stay that come to Disney from foundations such as make a wish. Super cool. Look it up.)
• A shelter where a bunch of elderly people were staying because their retirement center was completely wrecked. So we just helped out the Red Cross there. 
• Lots and lots of neighborhoods
• Our churches 
• COCOA BEACH

Yes, after nearly 11 months I FINALLY GOT TO SEE THE BEACH!!!! The Cocoa zone is right next to ours and they had a lot of damage so all the missionaries in our zone went over there and helped out all day Saturday and Sunday. We woke up Saturday at 4:30 to be there by 7 to help Brother Müller from Cocoa drove over an each way  to  pick up all the sister missionaries from our zone. The elders drove in the AP van. We worked until 5:30 Saturday and it was truly amazing. I've got lots of battle wounds from the trees, and muscles that I didn't even know existed ache, but it was all 100% worth it to see the joy in people's face and we cleaned up their devastated yards so quickly. After clean up, Brother Müller drove us to the beach so we could see it. Guys. I got some sand. Don't freak out- we got permission. :) 

Sunday we did the same thing. We got to Cocoa by 9 and had sacrament meeting in our service cloths then headed out to clean again. It was a very cool sacrament meeting. We didn't get to take the sacrament last week because that's the day the hurricane hit so I was pretty excited. That was just the spiritual boost I needed to hit the rest of the day hard.  Our service group was a bunch of people that work on the Church ranch (one family being the CEO of the ranch). It was so cool. I tell you, those people know how to work. We had a good time. 

One more really cool experience that I feel like sums up how incredible this week was. Friday we were looking for places to serve. There was a neighborhood that we had been working in that was...  well.....  now a Lake. It had been flooded pretty bad and tons of huge trees were down. We had done several yards already and were looking for more. So my companions and I drove way far in scouting out places to go before all the other missionaries got there. We passed several yards that needed help but we felt like we needed to keep going. At the end of this very long road we found an older man standing outside and looking at his 5 acre yard. We got out of our car and asked if we could help him. At first he just kind of looked at us. Then he said "well, if you want to.." we told him that about 12 more people were on their way including some men. We talked for a minute longer then got to work. He is the sweetest man. He grew up on a farm in Georgia and has all that southern charm. He had spent the weekend of the hurricane at his fathers funeral and had just arrived home  to see his house for the first time when we pulled up. He didn't even know where to start or how he could do all of it. We spent the next 3 hours cleaning up his yard and by the time we finished, had cleaned up everything that wasn't flooded. He couldn't believe it. He liked the sisters better then the elders. He said we worked harder. Haha. There were tears in his eyes as he expressed sincere gratitude for helping. We came to find out that he loves books about American history. We can hardly wait to go back and give him the worlds greatest American History Book (Book of Mormon). 

Ironically this week my reading in the Book of Mormon was in Mosiah. In Mosiah 2:17 is says "And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God." That pretty much sums up the week. I have never felt more love for the people here in Florida or love my savior and my Heavenly Father than serving so much this week. So go do some service  this week! I promise you will feel all the warm fuzzies. :)

Con mucho amor,

🌴🌊☀️Hermana Kent☀️🌊🌴

Cleaning Andy's yard

Hunters Creek missionaries heading out to serve in Cocoa Beach

First time seeing the ocean in Florida

Flooded street

I caught a frog

Finally got to do the classic "name tag at the beach"

Tree clean-up