Sister Kofford in Tahiti: Ca fait deja AHURU AVA'E!

7/14/15

Iaorana friends and family!

I love you! I cannot believe that it has been ten months already since telling the world goodbye and entering this great work for our Heavenly Father! I love our Heavenly Father! I love the knowledge that we have that we are His children, that we chose to come and live our life on earth, and that we have the chance to return and live with Him one day after our life here in mortality. In the scriptures we learn that eternal life is coming to know God. I am also thankful for the opportunity that we have each and every day to come to know Him more and more through our actions, thoughts, choices, and decisions. Like I said in my letter last week, we need to be obedient because we love Him. As I have been coming to know our Heavenly Father at extensive measures over the last ten months, I have learned a little bit of how He works. I love the scripture in Alma chapter eight verse ten. It talks about Alma when he preached the gospel he worked a lot with the spirit and stayed with God in his fervent prayers. And through these things He was able to find success with the people of Melek. He helped them to repent and be baptized. So we have been trying to do the same thing in our lives as missionaries. We carefully invite the spirit and try to keep a prayer in our hearts and with God we know we can do His will. It was another great week! We still have our baptisms for Frere Tapena and with Mihiau! They have both completely changed and are so happy to be getting baptized but are both going through really hard trials and temptations. Yesterday after church we had a cool experience! We went to a members house and helped them prepare the food and ate swordfish with them! It was so good and we had a great time! We then took the brother with us to come to one of our lessons. We soon found that our lesson was not there but taking advantage of the situation I knew there was someone else we needed to go see. So we headed to Frere Tapenas house. When we got there all he could do was smile and ask us how we knew he needed help. He had fallen back into smoking and had hit a low. We shared a message with him and left him with a blessing and he was feeling better than ever by the time we left. I truly do know that everything happens for a reason in life. God puts things together in such perfectness and I still am amazed sometimes at His love for each and every one of us. We truly can learn to do the things that God would have us do, become the people that God would have us become, and find our true potential and the true happiness of life if we will just listen to Him through His spirit! This week I challenge you all to do the things necessary to invite the spirit into your lives. He will lead and direct your paths and help you find the true happiness that only God can help you acquire! This church is so true! God lives and knows us and loves us individually! I love you all and am so thankful for each and every relationship that has been formed in my life! Keep enjoying life! Happiness is a choice! Choose today! Thanks again for everything! Have a fantastic week!

Love, Sœur Heather Kofford

We love our mission!

First time fishing on a boat in Tahiti!

Our team was so thankful to have athletic Soeur Kofford help them win at soccer and basketball... Life goal is to become athletic haha! but it was fun! Love our Papeari ward!