Happy Holidays

Dear Friends and Family,



I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas full of remembrance as to why we really celebrate it and also remember to not just think of Christ during Christmas but all year round. The best part was we got to sleep in clear til 8:00. Of course my internal clock still had to wake me up at 6:30, but it was nice just to lay there and do nothing. We opened our presents the night before, which actually turned out being good because that's when the other Hispanics open their gifts.



We taught a lesson using 3 Nephi 18, to teach "OLA" translated is CPR (church, prayer, read your scriptures) It's when Christ is instituting the Sacrament amongst the Nephites, basically I love it because it talks about why it's so important to go to church in verse 22. It says to meet together oft, why? To partake of the Sacrament. Prayer: Verse 20-21. How do we learn these things? Through reading the scriptures! We also shared some cool scriptures about going to church. Moroni 6:5-6, 9 and Mosiah 18-25. Read them :)



On Wednesday we were feeling really discouraged because all of the people we were talking to weren't interested and lots of our appointments fell through, but we felt like we should go to these certain apartments to check up on an old investigator. We discovered that he had moved and there was a lady fro El Salvador living there. She had received a copy of the Book of Mormon before but never learned. We were so stinkin happy after that cause we knew that it didn't happen just by accident. And there's more....as we were leaving we sat an appointment with this guy outside. We showed up on Christmas Eve to teach him but he's not home, we start talking to this guy in the hall and randomly decide to sing him a Christmas song. His roommate hears and comes out and tells us that he was just reading the Bible and he's so confused about why there are so many churches. Enter: Missionaries. We taught him a little bit and sat a return appointment. It's a long story but the point is there were a long string of events that had to take place to get us to that situation and I know that none of them were by accident.



When I first got on my mission, I was afraid to talk to everyone I saw, but now there is no fear because I know that if I talk to every single person that I can, Heavenly Father will trust me to put the people who are ready to accept the gospel in my path because He knows I'll talk to them. I may not be perfect at it but I'm willing. It's so hard but I love it so much and I've learned so much!!!!!



Our Zone Leaders are really fun and we went Zone Christmas Caroling. Basically on the 23rd we went out from 7-9 and there were about 12 of us. We knocked on the door and started singing and not to toot my own horn, but we sounded really GOOD! When the people would open their door, they had great big smiles on their faces. After we were done we would offer them a Book of Mormon because the Zone Leaders want to flood Des Moines with the Book of Mormon. One lady had just come home from the hospital, her daughter has some rare disease with her chromosomes and is having weird kinds of seizures. It's sad but the lady was crying and was really touched by our singing/the spirit. One of my favorite Christmas memories probably, Well, that's all for now. Thank you for all the love and support you give me!

Love Hermana Hepworth



This is Jilyn's mom. She sent some pictures that I am going to attempt to post. I am not very good at this but I do my best.

Some of the pictures of of Jose, who is a recent convert that just moved back to Mexico to be with his wife and children for the rest of the winter. One of these pictures are of Hermana Hepworth cutting Jose's hair outside in the rain. One is a couple of less active that are being reactivated. One is of Jilyn and her two companions Hermana Hancock and Hermana McGuire. One of Hector and Jilyn. He is a recent convert And a picture of Jilyn Carlos and Martin at the Thanksgiving party. They are investigators. Enjoy the pictures, that is if I can get them posted.

Feliz Navidad

We had our Christmas Zone Conference, which included a talent show and decorated cookies. It was lots of fun!
We also had to say goodbye to Jose, our recent convert who mostly just drove us crazy because he would tell us that he didn't believe the Book of Mormon was true even though he really did. He told us that on Friday and the next Sunday was Fast Sunday, during Sacrement meeting I wondered "Where's Jose?" Well I didn't have to wonder for very long because he appeared on the stand and bore his testimony. I'm not gonna lie, I was freaking out a little because he was BEARING his TESTIMONY. He said that he knew that the Book of Mormon was true. Honestly though I'm really going to miss him, he sent us a million texts a day saying things like "Watcha doin?" (he knows some English) we'd always think..."What are we doing????? Missionary work, like always Jose" Oh and at night we'd get ones that said "You're the best!" He called me Hermana Gatuvela, which means Catwoman, like from Batman. He knows that I like cats a lot. So now he is in Mexico until the Spring but it's good because his wife and 2 children are there and they need him. I really really really hope he finds his ward there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had a Branch Christmas party on Saturday. It was soooooo much fun. Gladis and Eder (investigators) came. I love them soooo much! Eder has changed a lot since the missionaries started teaching him. In the beginning he didn't even want to talk to us, but now he listens and sincerely wants to know if it's true. He asked us to give him homework about the topic we were going to teach on our next visit (which is what we've been doing all along, he just didn't realize it!) Okay Eder I guess we can give you homework if you really want it, sheesh, JK. So back to the party. I was dancing with the members and it was really fun.
But it wasn't apostate because I was dancing with the women and singing hymn lyrics to the music. I also cut Esmereld's hair that morning. I'm getting lots of business here. I'm going to be cutting the Zone Leaders hair later today.

I translated for the first time in chruch and it was kinda a tramatic experience...no not really But it was really hard. Me and Hermana McGuire tooks turns. And when I got flustered she wouldn't even save me. This is one of the lines I said "something about prayer." It's hard cause you got to listen and talk and translate it in your brain at the same time.

Well, I hope I didn't bore you and I hope everyone has a super fun Christmas and remembers the true meaning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The birth of our Saviour Jesus Christ Mas means more so I like to say Christ (MAS)
Love
Hermana Hepworth

Yes, I'm Still Alive!

Dear Family and Friends,

So much has happened since I last sent a blog message to my mother! We had our Thanksgiving Party, that was super fun. It was a pretty random group of people who showed up. Investigators and Less actives came, recent converts and of course members who don't have much family living close by. It was the strangest food I've had for a Thanksgiving dinner. Of course these was turkey, potatoes, yams, rolls, ham and pie, but I'll bet none of you have ever had rice, beans or tortillas at your Thanksgiving party. It was fun to see everyone interacting with each other and after we had all eaten we played a game of musical chairs. Whenever someone got out they had to say what they were grateful for. People started aplauding after each person, it was so cute!

Missionary work has been pretty good. We started teaching the daughter of a less active wo has MS. We helped her bathe and I braided her hair. She's 32 but she can't do anything for herself. We want to keep seeing her and helping her but her mom makes excuses to not let us in. For this transfere we need lots of miracles. We're teaching lots of really cool couples who have children but aren't married so we're going to need to have lots of weddings. Esmerelda is like the mose amazing member missionary who ever was! She helps us out so much when we need a woman to come with us to a single mans house. She came with us to Ana and Aldo's lesson and became their best friend and even started planning their wedding! We've also started teaching a less active man named Jesus, he hadn't been to church for about 8 months so we stopped by on Saturday and invited him to church and the next day he was there with his (nonmember) wife.........turns out all he needed was an invitation. So we've started teacher her too! (Marta) She's awesome, in a week she has already read the first 7 chapters in the Book of Mormon.

Hermana Murphy went home so I have a new companion now.....well kind of. I'm still in Des Moines with Hermana Hancock and my trainer (Hermana McGuire) is here now. So I'm still in a trio.

It finally snowed yesterday so I got to break out my boots, even though the snow is annoying I'm kinda glad it's here now. I mean c'mon, it would't be winter/Christmas without snow. Yesterday the weather got to single digits and soon it will be below 0. They cancelled our ward yesterday but we were able to go to a later ward and it was in English....weird!

Oh, and I tried shrimp for the first time. I's good! It was a really strange visit, our first lesson with a referral from the English Elders named Fransisco (who reminds me EXACTLY) of Kendall (Empey) the laugh and facial features and everything. you should tell him that if you ever see him. Once again Esmerelda helped us with the appointment, we had to teach him in his bedroom, which had knives laying around everywhere. (It really scared Hermana Hancock) We ate shrimp and this tasty fruit that lokks like a tomato. But we're not going to teach him again because he likes to worship his Saints and doesn't want to change. That's a problem we run into a lot with the Spanish people, they're mostly all Catholic and like to worship the Saints and don't understand why it's not okay.

til next time,

Hermana Hepworth

Pictures from Iowa

Hi Everyone,
So Guess what? We have a car now....I guess they felt sorry for us. They're going to sell it once they get the new one that we're supposed to get. We are still going to try to use our bikes a lot though because we don't have very many miles.
Like I said I was going to do, I cut some hair, it was fun. I'm going to dye some hair tonight. Hmmmmmm, I think the hardest thing about being out here is when we teach people the gospel and feel the spirit with them and they aren't willing to do anything about it, they aren't willing to change their lives to accept it. We were listening to a talk by Elder Holland in the car yesterday that he gave recently to the new mission presidents who were called. He was talking about why missions aren't easier. We think, "The gospel is true, we believe in miracles" Why aren't people flocking to hear our message. He said, "the only fear we should have is the risk of getting pheumonia from being in the water too long from baptizing so many people". (for Elders obviously). But his answer was that "Salvation was never easy!" "Nothing about the gospel is easy, not missionary work, not retention. People don't want to do things that are hard. And the things that they need to change their lives in order to live the standards of the church are hard.
We had a funny experience with this lady who prayed for Hermana Hancock's body to be healed. She was just really really passionate when she was praying. Man, she was really getting into it. And after her prayer she asked if any of us were hurt and Hermana Hancock said she had a headache earlier so she threw her hands up to Hermana Hancock and started praying again for "every muscle, ever tissue, every joint, every fiber of her being"
...I wonder if it helped. Probable, that lady had a lot of faith. (She's American)
We were teaching this couple that's in the trailer park and after a couple of lessons the wife didn't seem to be really interested but her husband did so one of the times we taught him on the patio at night. A couple of days later we were walking on the street near there and somebody was "ppsssssss"ing us. I guess he had been in his car looking for us because he was afraid we would go by his house and his wife would yell at us. She tore up the Book of Mormon we gave them and all of the pamplets and that night we taught him she didn't let him into the house until 5 in the morning. She hasn't been making him any food or talking to him or anything. It's really sad, I guess she thinks we're out looking for husbands. But her husband is like 60. I hope she didn't hear anything about polygamy cause there are 3 of us...uhhhh, yeah. He's really spiritually in tune and he told us that he prayed about it and he knows it's true but if he were to be baptized his wife would tell all of his kids not to talk to him and they all listen to her. I think we're going to give him to the Elders here because we know she has a problem with us being women, but if the Elders go then we can find out if that's the only problem or if it has to do with the church as well.
This work is really hard but really awesome at the same time. I just want everyone to know how wonderful it is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We are having a Sisters Conference in Nauvoo this Thursday. It's going to be really fun. I'm excited because we get to go to the temple too! It's cool, the last time I was inside of it was for the open house 10 years ago. I don't know any of the English sisters very well so it will be fun to get to know them better.
Hermana Hepworth
PS it snowed for the first time here on Sunday. It was only for like 30 seconds nut still. I guess they usually have a lot of snow here by now.

Hermana Hepworth and new companion Hermana Hancock in Des Moines Iowa. Hermana Hepworth on her bike ready to go out and share the gospel.

Celebrating my birthday in July in Iowa

Service

Hi Everyone,
Not much time today, we've just been super busy spreading the gospel :) There are a lot more people walking around on the street here so it's really easy to talk to a lot of people during the day. It's kinda fun just talking to every single person you see and telling them about our unique message to the world.

Hermana Murphy has been telling EVERYONE that I cut hair and we're supposed to do 4 hours of service every week so our service is going to be me cutting hair. It's a good thing I like to do it!

We have a theme for this transfer, we're going to have faith in order for miracles to occur (cause we need a lot of miracles for certain things to happen) I looked in the index for the scriptures and it doesn't ever talk about miracles happening without speaking about faith in order to achieve them. I like this scripture in Mosiah 8:18 that says "God has provided a means that man (woman), through faith, might work mighty miracles; therefore (s)he becometh a great benefit to his/her fellow beings." It's a good one for missionary work because through our faith, miracles are geing brought to pass for the benefit of our fellow beings to come unto Christ. Also in my personal study I have found a really good scripture in Alma 48:8-9, When Amalickiah is preparing to go to war against the Nephities and this is what Moroni was doing to prepare the Nephites. They were "building walls of stone to encircle them about their cities and the borders of their lands; yea, all around about the land. And in their weakest fortifications he did place the greater number of men; and thus he did fortify and strengthen the land which was possessed by the Nephites.' The reason why I really like that scriputre is because this is what we need to be doing to ourselves to protect ourselves against Satan. He's going to attack the weakest parts and so we should strengthen those parts. There's so much symbolism in the Book of Mormon, I love it!

Well there's a lot more that needs to be said but not enought time. There's a giant trailer park here that is probably 97% Hispanic so we spend a lot of time there. There are some investigators that are trying to quit smoking and they're having a really hard time. There's a program we have in order to stop which includes using grapefruit juice, cinnimon toothpaste, mouthwash, and vitamin C tablets. I'm not really sure how they do it, it has something to do with changing the tastes in your mouth a lot. They haven't started it yet because they don't have all the stuff but they really want to quit. We decided to try to quite doing some habit that we have too. Hermanas Murphy and Hancock bit their nails, so they're going to stop that. I didn't really know what to do. I said I was going to stop popping my zits, which I now know how to say in Spanish. Well, on that note, I'm goinna to close.

Hermana Hepworth

PS How was Halloween? We didn't see any trick or treaters because we had to be indoors by 6 on Saturday.

Transfers

Well, it hasn't been very long since I was able to write but a lot has happened. I was really sad to leave Hampton, because I didn't really have anytime to say goodbye to people. But it has been pretty fun here in Des Moines. We have lots of people to teach, there are more people here. So I went with Hermana Murphy to an investigators hous that night. (This is Herhana Murphy's last transfer. She's a REALLY good missionary, super friendly and she really knows how to get poeple to trust here. I'm trying to learn a lot from here. She really, really, really reminds me of Deborah Thompson, mom. Like a lot, especially when she makes a certain face. One day I'm going to take her picture , sneak attack style, when I see her making the face.)
Thursday, we went to Iowa City to pick up our new greenie, her name is Hermana (Christine) Hancock. She's fun and really, really good at Spanish. She was a teacher before in Colorado and she taugut 2nd grade. We tried to be all secretive so she wouldn't know we were her companions so we took off our tags that say Hermana on it, cause thats Spanish. But Hermana Murphy went into a meeting for the trainers and I was standing right by her and it was super awkward because missionaries kept coming up and asking me aboutSpanish stuff.....ha ha, but I don't think that she connected the dots until later which was good. So then we came back to Des Moines and started to work. AND we don't have a car, we have BIKES. But we haven't ridden them yet. One of them is at a members house. We've been geting rides everywhere. It's been pretty fun. We've started singing hyms to them while they're driving us.

We had a funny lesson this week. We were teaching Maria, who has a 27 year old autistic son named Miguel and he really, really wanted our bottles of drinks so during the lesson he kiped one of the water bottles and started pouring it into different cups and then drinking out of them. Then he did it again later with someone elses bottle. Then at the end of the lesson during the prayer he steals Gatorade out of one of our backpacks. He's really cool, he started dancing in the kitchen.

Two of our lessons fell through one day after we had been dropped off at their house, so we knocked on a house where they were making tamales and we started making them with them, then we started teaching them and they gave us food to eat, which ended up being really good because the brand new investigators that we had just taught dropped us off at our dinner appointment (which also fell through). So we're wondering where we're going to go when all of the sudden a member drives by and tells us to get in and they'll take us to their house. It's crazy, we fly by the seat of our pants and a lot of the times it's been 8:30 and we're not really sure where we're going to get a a ride until we ask the investigators if they drive and can give us a ride or I don't know, we just have to go places and we're not sure how we're going to do it but then things just work out.

Yesterday we had a baptism. Yeah! Jose got baptized. I kinda already knew him from a day when I was a brand new greenie with Hermana Guthrie in Des Moines. At that time he was telling us how he didn't like the Book of Mormon....but now 3 months later he likes it. He showed a lot of faith by being baptized because his wife and children live in Mexico and his wife has been threatening to divorce him if he did join the church. He was really, really nervous and they had to do it 3 times because he didn't give them his full name the first 2 times. We got a text from him this morning telling us how he felt different. It's really coolI

I bought Jesus the Christ when I was at the MTC but I haven't started reading it yet because its a really intimidating book. I think the day I bought it I read the first page with all of it's big words and decided to stop. But I keep hearing about how good it is and Hermana Murphy suggested to me to just read particular chapters in it that would help me individually. I'm really excited to read more about the life of Christ because I don't feel like I know enough about Him. I wish it could all just be jammed into my brain.

I think it would be really cool to hear from everybody about things they've been studying about the scriptures or spiritual thoughts/insights, favorite scriptures. (why). Stuff like that. I'd like to hear them in a letter :)

8515 Douglas Ave. #19
Urbandale, IA 50322

Well that's how my week has been since Wednesday.
I look forward to hearing from all of you. I love you all very much.

Hermana Hepworth

FALL! WOW

Well this Week Hermana McGuire kinda abondoned us. She had a training in Des Moines because she has a new greenie (Hermana Dalton) So we drove down and spent the day working with Hermana Guthrie (it was fun, but a lady yelled at us a lot and the spirit definately left. Hermana Guthrie said that happens quite a bit...I'm glad I'm not there) while they were training that day and that night we drove the car back up to Hampton without Hermana McGuire (it was weird to be the one driving and I was the Senior Companion for the 3 days she wasn't with us) It was so nice to be able to spread my wings out to see if I could fly and be successful. So it was fun to be in charge of making decisions, kinda stressful. I got to know Hermana Dalton better and most of our appointments didn't fall through. Honestly, I didn't really understand most of what the investigators were saying in our lessons. I feel like I was guided as to what to say back even though I didn't really understand what they had just said, like I've said before, it's hard to understand a native speakers Spanish.

So transfers are next week and we're receiving another Hermana. Right now there are 5 Spanish speaking Sisters in the mission, 2 in Des Moines and the 3 of us in Hampton so when this Hermana comes we could have 2 trios or 3 companionships. But the thing is that this next transfer is Hermana Murphy's (Hermana Guthrie"s trainer) last one so she's only had Hermana Murphy for 1 transfer and then Hermana Guthrie or I will finish training her. I probably did a really bad job of explaining that. So I'll either stay in Hampton another transfer or go whitewash another area with Hermana Guthrie and we'll Greenbust each other. Either way I know that President Jergensen has the Lord's guidance so I'll go where ever I need to be. The reason I thought about telling you that is because in November Elder Nelson is coming to speak for this Stake Conference...big deal! So I may or may not be here for that. Also in November we're having a Sisters Conference in Nauvoo, and we get to go to the temple!!! It's exciting!
I love you all!
Hermana Hepworth
PS PLEASE WRITE TO ME!