Leaving Monday morning for Tucson

Hello my lovely family and friends!

I love you all so much!!! First of all, thank you for all of the support, letters, prayers, and everything else you have done, are doing, or are going to do for me. I can definitely feel the love from this end of Provo :). Also Thank you to Jessica Collyer, Sarah, Uncle Russ, Dad, Mom, Heather Johnson, Emma, Lauren, Emily, Audrie, Aunt Michelle, Justin and everyone else who wrote me letters! I tried to send you a picture, but it didn’t work, so I will try again next week when I am in TUCSON!!!!!!!! I am so excited to get out there! I have learned so much, and have tried to apply it to my teaching. I am so grateful to have a few more days to try to soak and apply the rest of what I have learned, and am especially glad that we have the Lord on our side. I know I wont be ready, but the Lord and the enabling power of His Atonement will make me ready because, I am called to be ready to serve, and I am pumped! That is one of the big lessons I learned this week, is that the Lord will strengthen us to do what he wants us to do because he has called us to be his representatives and to share the gospel with His children.

Another awesome thing I have learned is to have faith, and what faith really means. I don’t know how I missed what faith really is, but I did, no offense to anyone who has ever taught me about faith. Faith is to not know what, or why, or when, something is going to happen to you, but to hope for the best, and to hope for true things. Also faith is power. To have faith means that I believe that the Lord is preparing the people I will teach, He is preparing me to teach them, He will give me His spirit if I am worthy and asking, He will have me be and say and do what he wants, and He will put me in the right place at the right time. This is SOOOOO awesome! I have really been trying to have more faith, especially faith and trust in the Lord. It is ok that I am probably not the best teacher ever, because if I have faith and the spirit I can and will be.

Something else that has really hit me this week is the power of the Atonement, I already mentioned the enabling power. Now I am going to talk about the cleansing power. To repent means to become a new creature, not just to fix what is wrong with you. I never realized this, also no offense to anyone who taught me about repentance, I was just not ready to learn. So I have found thing I needed to repent of and I am working on becoming a new creature. I hope to be able to be more like Christ, obviously. I want to do this by always thinking of others, doing everything for others, and having all my desires be for others. I know, I really know that I cannot do this alone, so I need Christ's enabling power to do this. I also want to have more faith, like it said above. Then I also want to be more positive, enthusiastic, and optimistic. I know you think I am all these things, but I have room to improve and I am going to do so, it will be way fun to do it too!!! Sister Hendricks and I set a goal to talk to more people, especially in our zone and to get to know them and then some how help and invite them to come to Christ.

Today I got to go to the temple, which made me miss you guys more than ever because it reminds me of you, that will be one nice thing of getting out of Provo because I wont constantly be reminded of my past life by the bells, or the temple or all the random people I see. Which has been great, but hard. So I was thinking and realized that it is going to be apart from all of you for 18 months +, but that the Savior is my friend, and maybe he can help fill the void in my heart that you all left. Also I realized how we must miss Him. We haven't seen Him for a long time now! I don’t even realize how much I miss being with Him, but I am starting to realize how much He really must miss us. Luckily we can come to Him by having accepting the restored gospel, having faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repenting, keeping covenants, enduring to the end. Then I realized how much He must miss his children that are not with Him, and how much they miss Him, even if they don’t realize it. So I am going to turn my heart ache into a positive thing by letting it motivate me to find people and teach them about what they are missing, which is God! Sorry if that didn’t make sense, it does to me. So I have now felt the healing power of the Atonement also, it really has been a crazy few days!!!

Life is great and super crazy at the MTC. I love seeing people I know, and have seen a lot of them, but there are too many to mention so I wont! I still drink chocolate milk every meal, but am looking forward to being hungry again, I am always so full! Fortunately the Lord teaches us how to grow and learn through hard experiences. We had a really rough lesson, it was bad. But this set me up to receive so much person revelation and inspiration and blessings. It was so amazing and felt Gods love for me SOOO strong! I guess I will just have to pray for that poor investigator that we taught, that she can have a positive experience with the gospel. Luckily we are still learning and applying. I really have learned a lot about the Doctrine of Christ and how to teach it. I have learned that I need to teach by the spirit, but still do my part. Also our "lessons" should have us helping them come unto Christ, which is not done by just yakking at them. We need to help them have their own experiences and learn themselves. Which is a huge relief because I am awful at talking for too long, despite what my super long farewell talk might have hinted at. Anyway, I love you all so much and I got to go keep being a missionary! Oh one last thing, I have taken on myself Christ name- nametag, and in the heart. Christ’s life was really hard, so mine should be too, but it was also amazing, and mine will be too, especially since Christ is on our team, the winning team! I love you all!!! 

Love, Sister Barnes