Aug 4, 2014: Alligator

Sisters Rowland and Coleman

I don't even know where to begin, this week has been kinda crazy. We did exchanges with the Sister Training Leaders, and we were really nervous, but it wasn't bad at all, it was fun. And it was just a mini exchange, one of the sisters came with us instead of us splitting up. We were on bikes all day, and at one point this man yelled at us from his car to get out of the road and shared some other colorful words with us. We were crossing a really busy street, which is already scary enough because cars don't watch for us, and we were in the crosswalk while the walk signal was on. But, as Sister Rowland said afterwards, Jesus loves him too :)

We went to see Sister Wyman, the really old Catholic lady, and she gave us juice, even though she could barely walk to the fridge. Sister Burton, the STL, mouthed to us not to drink it, so as we were leaving Sister Wyman was like "do you not like it?" and we were like "oh no, we love it, we're going to take it with us!" and she said "oh good, I was afraid you didn't like it." Then we dumped it outside, I felt so bad, but Sister Burton told us she saw ants crawling it.

We've also had some great little miracles this week. We dropped one of our investigators, Gio, because he got really depressed and said he didn't know his purpose in life and wasn't ready to be baptized. The other day we went back over there and he was super happy and in his prayer at the end he asked God to help him prepare to be baptized, because that's what he wanted. Then he asked us if he could be baptized in 3 weeks, we didn't even have to say anything, it was so incredible :) Then, later that day, I went up to a lady on the street and all I asked was if she went to a church and she said "hey, do you guys do baptisms?" We were so surprised, were like uh... yeah! That's only the reason we're here! It was pretty awesome :)

Even though we're not allowed to eat dinner with members, people feed us SO MUCH. They are allowed to take us out for dinner, and this one family did, and later that evening they brought us a whole ice cream cake. Like what in the world? I'm not complaining :)

On Sunday we were supposed to have all 4 of our investigators with baptismal dates at church and we were so excited, but none of them showed up! We were so upset. That's how missionary work goes though I guess. And we did get another date set that night, so that was good.

First alligator spotting - her dream come true.

I  saw an alligator today! Like 4 actually, and 3 dolphins! I think I've seen more cool animals today than the rest of my mission combined. This morning we studied on the dock behind our apartment complex and there were all these dolphins that kept swimming by and jumping out of the water and all that dolphin stuff, it was so cool! Sister Rowland had a manatee swim right under her feet, it scared her so badly haha. But I didn't see it, I was so upset!  Then, after that, this older couple who are serving as missionaries in our ward took us out to this place called Lettuce Lake. It has this boardwalk that you can walk around on all over the lake, for like miles. And that's where we saw the alligators, they were awesome! There were several baby ones really close to us, and we saw a really big one farther away, Elder Severinsen thought it was about 10 feet long. My dream came true! :)

Can you spot the alligator?

I'm out of time now, but I love you guys! :) Sorry if that was really random and crazy :)



***Jordan has not sent home any photos yet.  But I stole these off her companion's blog.