Week 30 - Merry Christmas!

Where do I even begin?  It’s been quite the 2 weeks with Christmas and the Holidays. It’s been so much fun. Being here for Christmas has been an amazing experience.

Splits with Sister Williams

Love this! (notice no bike lanes😓)

Some exciting news. Lazara is getting baptized!!!  We were on exchanges (meaning I go with one of the OU sisters and the other OU Sister goes with Sister Kresge) I was with Sister Williams this week and we did a 2 day exchange, we did Wednesday and Thursday. Exchanges bring miracles, its crazy how cool exchanges can be. I love exchanges and Sister Williams has taught me so much. First of all, it was bike week, and for those who don’t know what bike week is, our Mission President decided that once a transfer we have a week we can’t touch our cars. And since Sis. Kresge can’t bike that means that we are either walking or asking members for rides.  We accomplished that and we saw so many miracles it was so cool! Sister Williams and I were on our way to see Lazara and hopped on our bikes. (Note: I hadn’t been on a bike for a really long time because I haven’t been in biking areas for the past 4 transfers) Our apartment is in Norman which is just outside of Noble and this bike ride is literally a hill down and a hill up and a hill back down . . . and I thought I was going to die.  Sis. Williams assured me we could do it. There’s a bike lane for as far as you could see but you get to the bottom of the hill and there’s no more bike lane.  Luckily it’s a highway and the cars would just pass us quickly but it was the craziest bike ride of my life!  So I get down the first hill, piece of cake and I get up the second hill and I’m dying and hurting. I can’t move anymore and I can’t understand why it’s so hard to pedal. So I get off my bike and Sis. Williams is way ahead of me and she looks back and says I had this face that said, “I am going to kill you for making us ride this route.” I really wasn’t mad I was just trying to focus and see how much farther I had. So she comes back down and discovers that I had the gears set at a 1 and a 7. She said “You’re not supposed to ride a bike up a hill with a 1 gear and a 7. That is the hardest besides an 8.” So I switched the gears and it made such a difference and I got up that hill, piece of cake. On the way we got another call from Lazara who said she had another appointment but she would be at the library soon, so we headed to the library, locked them up, and walked around that neighborhood. After we went inside to get warm, because this week was freezing cold! There were signs everywhere that said “Freeze warnings. Take Precautions.”  But they don’t tell you what the precautions are.  It’s been down to about 6 degrees, with humidity.  We were in the gym one day and saw the news and it said it was 95% humidity and 5 degrees. It was really cold this week and we still biked and it brought so many miracles!

Love these Sisters!

One of those miracles was when we met with Lazara at the library. There were a bunch of skate boarders in the library keeping warm and they were pointing at us and making comments, so we decided to go talk to them. They were young kids and we were having a friendly conversation with them.

Sis. Kresge & Walker 

One of the kids told his story about being kicked out of home after home after home, just living a rough life. Sis. Williams bore testimony to him and whether he wanted to hear it or not it was super cool, and then they started asking us why we were out on bikes, “you biked up Classen from Norman? That’s crazy!” We responded, “Yea, it’s the best thing ever.” One of them asked our names and we identified ourselves as Sis. Williams and Sis. Walker. Another asked, “What’s with this Sister business?”  “OK I’m going to be brother Frog,”  because that’s what everyone calls him. LOL Awesome kids, hope we run into them again.

Christmas Morning at OU Institute (sisters Lewis, Walker, Williams, Kresge)

So we finally have our lesson with Lazara and it took patience and diligence to have that lesson. So she met us again and it was pretty cool. She is now moving because she’s in a really bad living situation and we are really excited for her. Someone in the ward is helping her move. I love the Noble ward so much because they’re amazing at fellowshipping and they make sure everyone of our investigators is taken care of. They always ask, “What do your investigators need?  We want to help strengthen their testimony.”  That just makes us so happy when we hear that and it makes our investigators happy that they feel welcome into the ward not just as a newby and what do I do next?  Our lesson with Lazara was 3 hours long and I was so sad Sister Kresge wasn’t there to experience it but it was incredible. We talked a lot about faith and she said she was having a hard time at home living with her nieces and nephews, and her sister and her brother in law.  hey mistreat her all the time and don’t treat her like family so she wants to get out. We reminded her that Christ loves everyone and asked her how much love He has for her family she’s living with right now?  So we talked about that for awhile and it was hard for her to comprehend that because she’s grown up with them not being the greatest of kids. They’ve had a rough life. It finally got quiet in the room and the Spirit filled the room and she realized that Christ does love them even though they’re difficult. We were talking to her a lot about faith and how faith just comes. Then we shared personal experiences on how we were converted to the gospel, because Sis. Williams and I weren’t converted like the flip of a switch. It was a process.  Christ said line upon line, precept upon precept. There was one point in my life when I did not like reading the Book of Mormon. I thought it was boring and I’d rather be listening to music or something else. So I bore testimony of my conversion point in my life and how the atonement strengthened me.  Sis. Williams bore testimony of how she came closer to Christ. 

Christmas Dinner with
Eric & Kimberly Olesen Family
Noble, OK

Something Sis. Williams said hit Lazara so hard that she stopped us and acknowledged that she needed to have faith and she needed to be baptized. WE just sat there with the biggest smiles on our faces. We were getting worried that Lazara wasn’t progressing toward baptism and then we heard her words of, “this is what I want to do.” We were so excited and we didn’t quite know what to do. The Spirit was in the room. The room was like 100 degrees and we were dying but it was amazing and she’s sitting there and then she said, “Did I just say that?”  We were like, “Yeh, you’re getting baptized girl.” And she was seriously glowing with an aura around her. She proceeded to set a date of January 14, 2018, right before transfers. So we immediately called Sis. Kresge and she freaked out and everyone in the church is so excited for her. We have 3 baptism dates. Stephanie is progressing real well. In all humility, we have the most ready people who want to learn, who want to grow, who want to change. Sometimes that’s hard. 

Sister Kresge & Walker
Dinner with Bishop & Sis. Nabors
Noble, OK

When we met with Stephanie we knew something was going on and she told us she smoked another cigarette (like 2 or 3 in a week). She said that she felt so ashamed that she threw the cigarettes out her sister’s window. We reminded her that she did something hard - in a week – seven days. But she kept saying that she messed up. We told her she doesn’t understand the atonement, that what she needs to do is get on her knees and pray for help because she had succeeded for one week with the Lord’s help and she came closer to Christ than she realized. We reminded her of the three things she needed to be doing so as to not fall back into those habits and that’s C P R.  Church, Pray, Read.  CPR is vital for life especially if you stop breathing so in this situation where Stephanie has this urge to smoke, CPR is going to save her life and allow her to not smoke. Because when you’re going to church every Sunday, when you’re reading your scriptures everyday, and when you’re praying to your Heavenly Father everyday Satan is not going to be able to get in. So she set a goal to not smoke all the way up to her baptism and then they would set another goal to not smoke for a month, & so we just kept setting goals with her and it was real cool to see her progression. She’s getting baptized on Saturday and we’re ecstatic. There are so many people who want to be there for her.

Chelsey is also getting baptized, her little daughter. She is so cute. I love her. She is a truth seeker. We helped her with her baptismal interview questions and she is just excited.

We are so excited for them.

Challenge: CPR daily

Love ya'll,
Sister Walker

Zone P-day Winter Olympics - It was so much fun!!!