Lesson from this week: Send your doubts to Duitsland

This is Nikki's second email that she sent this past Wednesday to us, no pictures this week!

Dierbare Familie! (Dear family)

THANK YOU so so much for all of the dear elders, letters and emails--each note lifts me up and helps me to keep going each day. I send tons of love to all of you and hope that you are all having a blast at the beach. I miss you all, but the Lord blesses me each day with the ability to focus and to want to be here and to work hard. I feel blessed to be able to work with God as His missionary.

To explain the subject, we learned this week that the Dutch word for Germany is "Duitsland" and it is pernounced like "doubtsland" so just send your doubts to Duitsland ;) I have learned that we need to put aside our fears, self-doubts, etc. and completely rely on God. He can and will provide for us.

 This past week was so great, even with its challenges. We started teaching a new
"investigator" this week--it was our teacher, Broeder Klippel, acting like someone he taught on his mission. He does a good job at not sugarcoating things and giving us a "real deal" experience. We started teaching our second lesson with him and he was pretty obvious that he wasn't interested, so we followed the spiritual promptings we had and it turned out to be a great lesson. He said that he feels hope for himself now--hope that he can believe in God and be freed from the anger and guilt he has in his life. We taught him how to pray, and it was awesome! Not perfect, but great.

This week we have really learned a lot about how to teach people and not lessons. Our teacher pulled up videos from NY Times, each clip had someone telling their story. After we watched a clip, he would assign two missionaries to teach something to that person (he would pretend to be the person in the clip). It was such a cool experience.

We got another permanent teacher, Broeder Lewis, who turned out to be "Pascal"--the first person we taught. He is really good at teaching! Yesterday Sister Oscarson spoke at our devotional and it was so great! She shared mission stories from her family and shared the lessons that her family members learned from their missions. We sang "Precious Savior, Dear Redeemer" and it was so wonderful. That night made me more devoted to giving my mission my all. It is a little frustrating because, even though I love my district and zone, they socialize way too much. If I could, I would just go somewhere really quiet and study, but since we are to stay with out companions, I've been trying to figure things out. 

My companion is great--it can be hard at times, but we are learning a lot from each other. We are total opposites, but when we both listen to each other and especially when we pray and study together, we work really well as a companionship. She is super social and loves people, which is helpful in lessons and can be tricky during study time. I love her so much though!

Although there are a lot of hard things we do every day here, there is so much peace, guidance and joy in this work. I feel like the MTC has got the perfect formula for spiritual growth here. I feel closer to my Heavenly Father and I feel the reality of the Gospel more and more each day. Thank you so much for your support and love! I love you SO much. 

met heel veel liefde,

Zuster Thomas


You can email Nikki at nicole.thomas@myldsmail.net where she will read and respond on Wednesdays or send her an email on DearElder.com that she will get that day as a printed off letter, where you will have to click on "Write a Missionary" and fill out information for Sister Nikki Thomas Unit #87 and SEP16 under the estimated departure date!