Week Twelve - Filipinos!

Bom Dias!

I hope everyone was able to watch Conference this past weekend! Can we all agree that Conference is so uplifting? 

The last few days that led up to Conference and the weekend of conference was insane. We were emailing about calling everyone in our online area book and reminded them that conference was that weekend. We challenged all of our investigators to watch conference and majority of them did! As a zone we were able to attend the Saturday morning session on conference. We got the the square and started to contact all of the members that were standing in the standby line at 7:30 am but got to the square at about 7. Talking with the members before the session started was great! I met so many members that where willing to do missionary work back at their homes. It was really easy to commit them to do missionary work but they all were so prepared to share the gospel! I love members that are like that. :) We weren't allowed to watch conference because there were so many people on the square and so many people to uplift. The only talks that I was able to watch were the ones that were speaking on Saturday and two others during personal study on Monday. I unfortunately have no time to really sit down and read them. 

We had a lot of miracles this past weekend. 

Sister Fisher and I made a goal to receive 38 quality member referrals this weekend. It was actually a huge struggle for the mission to get referrals from members because they were already talking/teaching with the people that weren't members of the church. So a lot of the members said "Oh we are working with this one family and are already meeting with the missionaries." Which is great because the members are doing missionary work, but not so great for us because we set this goal and  it was a really small goal to reach compared to other sisters. At the end of every meal we counted all of our referrals and by the end of the weekend we were able to receive 41 member referrals. The number of the member referrals the whole mission received was over 3,000! 3,000 precious souls that need to be saved! It just gives me goosebumps of all the teaching that we will be able to do in the next several months! Ah I'm so excited! 

So remember Amber Sellers? The girl that stayed with us when I was in middle school? Im sure you remember because you were all there too...Ha Anyways I thought about her the other day. It was actually a really random thought. I was in one of the theaters in the mission and all of a sudden I thought "Man, I wonder how Amber is doing. Where is she is even at? I really want to share the gospel with her but I don't even know how I could, or even how the family could even get her number." So after that random thought it just left me. Okay so on Sunday I went on exchanges with Sister Asuncion (she is from the Philippines), the reason why we were on exchanges was because we were going to the Filipino fireside later that evening to get more member referrals. All the Filipino sisters went so that was really cool. So while we were walking to the North Visitor center we ran into GOBS of Filipinos. I knew they were Filipino because they kept on saying "HOY!" and I could understand what they were saying. Sister Asuncion and I stopped to say hi. While we were introducing ourselves, all of the Filipinos said "Hoy! Do you know a Roel Opeda?" Then I said "Yeah that is my Dad." They all started to freak out because apparently the whole group of Filipinos knows Tatay and Nanay! They would say "I know your Dad, we went to school together.", "Or your Grandpa gave me my Patriarchal Blessing."," You're dad and I were missionary companions.", "You're mom and I were best friends when we were kids." Anyways it was cool to see all of these connections. The coolest part was when this lady came up to me and said "Do you remember me? I'm Amber Sellers mom. The girl that lived with you for a couple of months?" I was floored. I started to talk to her about Amber and I asked how she was doing and then her mom gave me her number so I can call her! Crazy right? I thought about calling her but had no way in doing so, then all of a sudden Heavenly Father says "Here you go Sister Opeda! Time to share the gospel with Amber!" Heavenly Father puts people in your life for a reason! The hardest part is to really know the reason why he did. I'm lucky because all of the people I met are meant to hear the gospel. 

So President Gillette really likes to give surprises to mission and on Monday night he surprised us big time! I guess as a reward for all the hard work that we did over the weekend and because President love all of us, he got Jon Schmidt to come and play for us! If you don't know who is he is the piano player that is in the piano guys. Youtube him. He is an incredible piano player. So we had a mini concert with him and we were able to do a questions and answers session with him. Someone asked him "What made you decided to do this as a career?" And he told us of this quote from President Benson that said "Men and women who turn their lives over to God will discover that he can make a lot more out of our lives than they can."  He told us of some stories on how he gave his whole life to the Lord and never thought that he would be doing something that he loved so much. It made me think about how sometimes when we plan out our lives or sometimes when we need to make decisions. All of the decisions that we make, rarely are counseled with Heavenly Father. Sometimes I think we get so catch up of doing things our way than to really asking Heavenly Father what he thinks about them. He wants to be involved with the details of our life. When we have confidence and faith in knowing that Heavenly Father has a plan for us, a lot of the worry and struggle that we have are then relieved. Heavenly Father wants us to be happy and he knows how we can be happy. I hope you all turn your lives to God because it is true, He can make a lot more out of our lives than we can. 

I love you all.

Sister Opeda 

Alma 5:26 

Here are some photos that people with Sister Opeda during the conference weekend. If anyone happened to see here please send us your pictures! Mahalo -Kariza

Sister Opeda and Sister Asuncion with Tita Nedy, Tito Joey, and Tita Geny

Tito Lamber and Tita Geny
These are Kariza's (Sister Opeda little sister) roommate, Gee's parents!

Sister Opeda with ,Kariza's workmate in Hawaii, Amanda Vela!