Kendrick, Meghan

¡Feliz Navidad! I hope that you are all doing well and had a wonderful Christmas!  We have had some crazy weather here these last few days. We hit a record for the warmest day in December then spent the next day biking in the rain. Today, it was back to sunny and blue skies for Christmas.  We had a bunch of lessons with our friends and started teaching a man named Carlos who was taught by missionaries in the past. He changed his phone number and got a new phone, so the missionaries lost contact with him. He works for our branch president, President Valle, and asked him last week why we hadn’t reached out to him in a while. President Valle figured out that Carlos had changed his phone number, and he got his new number. We were able to have a lesson with both of them that night! On Wednesday, we had our mission Christmas party. We have been waiting to receive physical copies of the new Preach My Gospel book since it came out during the summer. We've been using the digital versio...

Hola a todos! It has been quite the week! We got some surprise transfer news, and I'm now in Mesa in the Vineyard and Río Salado area. On Monday night, Hermana Rosales and I got a call from President Fisk. He said that because there were so many missionaries going home early for Christmas, he had to do some transfers early. He then asked me to transfer to the Vineyard and Río Salado area. He said that the missionaries there had been seeing lots of miracles and that missionary work has been taking off in the area. On Thursday, we did the transfer. My new companion is Hermana Shefchik! She is absolutely amazing! She is finishing up her second transfer of training and is already a great missionary. There really is so much going on in this area and I feel so blessed to get to be a part of it. Vineyard is the english ward that we cover, and Río Salado is the spanish branch. The branch was just barely started in June, so its pretty small. Our area only covers a few streets, so we are on ...

Hola hola! I hope that you are all doing well and having a great holiday season! We had our Chaparral Ward Christmas party last week, and we have been helping some of the ward members decorate their Christmas trees and wrap presents. This is such a wonderful time of year and its amazing to be a missionary during it!  We had two exchanges last week. For the first one, I went with Sister Loertscher and Sister Reck to their area in the Maricopa Indian Community. The houses are pretty spread out and there aren't many people that live there. We had a few visits with members of the ward and it was so fun to meet them. The people in that area have a pretty different lifestyle from the people in my area in Scottsdale, and it was cool to experience it. For our second exchange, I went with Sister Allred to her area in Glendale. Her area is the young single adult ward. It overlaps with Solano, the spanish ward. Solano is the first area that I served in, and it was so fun to be back there. Sis...

Hola a todos! Last week seemed to fly by as we were preparing for Zone Conference and our mission leadership meeting. Zone Conference was powerful! President Fisk was inspired to change things up. We usually spend most of Zone Conference listening to speakers, then we break up into groups to practice certain parts of missionary work. This time, there were five groups and we all rotated as we went to different worshops. We focused on topics including working with members, working with ward leaders, physical and mental health, and effective planning. In each workshop, we had time to talk with our companions about how we were going to apply what we learned. It was amazing to see the immediate impact of these workshops and how each companiship left with something they could start implementing in their area that very night. After Zone Conference, we had our mission leadership meeting. It was so cool to hear about all of the miracles happening in each zone of the mission and the plans that a...