February 23, 2015

Again, with Sister Vanderhoff
"We made sock puppets for a yw/relief society activity. And... bamboo!"

I don't have too much time today because the library computers here kick us off after a little while.

But I'm doing really well, this area is great! Everyone still treats us like celebrities, it's really weird haha. Our ward mission leader tells us every few days how grateful he is for the revelation President Cusick received to send us here. And the assistant ward mission leader said it's like a breath of fresh air has blown through the ward. This elderly lady at church yesterday hugged me and started crying and said "I'm sorry for getting all emotional, but when I see an angel I just start crying!"  And just so I hopefully don't sound super arrogant, we deserve zero of this. Seriously. But I'm grateful that we got sent here too.

We've made a lot of people cry this week, I've lost track. Hopefully tears of joy... It makes me feel really bad sometimes haha. Especially when it's grown men. We said a prayer with this one family, and after I finished the less-active husband was crying and he said "Well, that was a first. Thank you so much." We still don't know what he meant, like if it was really the first time he ever felt the Spirit or what. But it was really neat.

And we have 2 investigators who are hopefully getting baptized soon! Their names are C. and G., they're twins. C. has been meeting with the missionaries for awhile, and he's super excited to get baptized. He actually spoke in sacrament meeting like a month ago, and he's not even a member yet. His sister has been a little harder though, she's been coming to young women's for awhile, but the ward and the missionaries couldn't get her to do much else. They said she was only interested in the fun part of church. But the other night we invited her to be baptized and she said yes! But they didn't come to church yesterday, so we had to push C's date back to the 14th, so they'll hopefully both get baptized on that day. It was really cute, they're only 13 and when G said she'd get baptized C was like "It's a really good church G, you should do it! That's why I'm joining it!" :)

We had a really neat conference with our whole mission with Elder Zwick of the Seventy and Brother Hemingway who is like the director of proselyting for the whole church. They talked about purifying our hearts and about our iPads and how they can be a very powerful tool for either good or evil, depending on how they use them. And we found out that they're giving them to more missions now, we're one of only like 38 missions that have them right now, and that we get brand new ones, which is good since Mom and Dad had to pay for them ;) Elder Zwick had every single missionary go up and shake their hands, it was cool. 

To all of you who sent me that giant Valentine's Day card, thank you, I loved it!! :) I saw one like that in the store the other day and I was like I would die if somebody gave me one of those ! How'd y'all know? :)

Sisters Coleman and Vanderhoff
This is her past companion, but she just got the photos.