HELLO!!!

 Well I'm sure you all saw the pictures of Linds visiting. It was SO fun. Seriously. I hadn't seen her in 12 whole months and not one single thing had changed.

Thursday was my birfffday. We woke up and tried to go fly kites at the park... But we got downstairs and it was POURING so we ditched the kites and jogged in the rain. It was perdy fun. Then sister Campbell made me breakfast! She made waffles for everyone and it ended up taking way longer than we thought so we did interviews with our roommates while we ate and pushed our studies back an hour.

We weekly planned and then went to meet Nick. He straight up juked us on my birthday!! It's okay though. We were waiting at the Harlem chapel and there was a bunch of missionaries there. Sister Campbell told everyone it was my birthday and they didn't even miss a beat, they just started singing to me :) we went to go see why Nick didn't show up and he thought it was Wednesday and not Thursday. He is so cute... He felt so bad for getting them confused!

After Nicks house we went to see Karen. She is seriously the funniest black lady I have ever met. I need to send you some videos of her making racist jokes. She made us a pineapple upside down cake that was actually pretty good. She is so funny and so amazing. Gosh, I love her so much! We talked about our divine nature and how we were born to be queens.

Then we went to dinner at a members house. They live in a studio with
3 kids. They've lived there since they got married. So... I'll just let you think about that one for a quick minute. They were so sweet!
They made cupcakes and sang to me. We talked to them about prayer and family prayer. The kids are so cute! They talk SO much. We didn't even get to talk to the mom at all... And the mom had to tell the kids to take two bites before they could talk again. It was so funny.

After dinner we did some lookups and did some tracting. We went to a building that only had buzzers and no doorman. I asked sister Campbell how we get into doors like that and she said just watch. We walked up to the buzzer pad and she pushed like 15 different apartments and we waited a few seconds and the door buzzed open! Magic. We didn't have any birthday miracles though :(

while we were walking to the lookups we were taking about the work in our area and how not a lot of things are happening. Nick needs a LOT of help to overcome his addictions, Lilianna is not progressing at all... And we don't really know what to do. We decided to fast for those people and for a stronger desire to do missionary work. I think we have kind of gotten into a missionary rut, it has been really hard to be motivated to go out and do things. I've never really been like that until I came to south man. I think the work here is just SO tough.

Friday we had a special training by the zone leaders on working with the ward. It was really good! It made me excited to work with our ward, so that's good. :) then we stopped by Nicks house because Friday was his birthday. We took him a cupcake! :) he was so excited. Then we went to mcdonalds so we could teach him the word of wisdom. Nick didn't really love it. He understood all of it except the coffee thing. Halfway through he told us he was really tired and he was having some really strong gut reactions to what we were saying so we wrapped up the lesson as soon as we could. Then he told us we didn't need to walk him home. It felt like we were getting broken up with!

We tried to do some lookups after that but no one was home, so we went to dinner to break our fast. After dinner we stopped by Breenas house.
She is our recent convert. We talked to her about Joseph Smith history. :) I am pretty sure she is getting engaged soon! She doesn't know that, though. After dinner we had correlation with our ward mission leader. Did I mention it rained ALL day? We were soaked. On our way to the Havrrenes it started pouring rain. We were dripping when we got there! He is such an awesome ward mission leader though.
Together we prayed about people to call as ward missionaries and he gave us some great advice about the people we were working with.

Saturday was the street fair at the 87 street chapel. Nick and Lilianna were supposed to go, so we headed down there after our studies. We spent most of our day there. Nick loved it and got to meet some more ward members. Lilianna never showed up. :/ we went to her house later to teach her Lehis dream. Her dad made us some nasty Dominican food.... Not my favorite. She loved the tree of life though, so that was good.

Sunday was awesome. We went to church and we were expecting a lot of people to come. Sacrament meeting started and there was no one. We had some investigators text us and tell us they were coming and they weren't there either. We sat in the back just waiting. Right before the sacrament, in walks 1 less active and his investigator girlfriend AND his investigator sister, her boyfriend, and their little brother!
We were so excited. We still didn't see nick and we were really bummed because we had just had that not so great lesson with him. As they were passing the sacrament sister Campbell hit me and told me nick was there! We were SO excited!

We also has this weird guy walk into church so we invited him to gospel principles. He sat next to me and kept looking at me all through the lesson. I think he is a little crazy. After the class our WML's wife said something to me about it. Sister Campbell asked what we were talking about and she said "oh, that man was just eating her with his eyes!" She is so funny. She worries so much about us!

After church we did our studies and went to dinner. After dinner we had an errand to run and then we went to the park to contact. We took a minute to just sit on a bench like the Jay-Dubs. These guys walked past us so I said hi to them. A couple minutes later one of them walked back to us to ask us if we had a light. We said no... And then he asked about our tags. We talked to him for a while, turns out he almost lived in Salt Lake and he has seen the movie at temple square.
He seemed pretty interested in what we were saying, so we gave him our number. It was 830 so we needed to start heading home. We needed one more lesson to hit the standard of excellence for the week so we told ourselves we would do everything we could to teach one more lesson before we went home.

On the train our phone rang. Nick always calls us from random numbers so my companion answered it. Turns out it wasn't nick at all.... It was that guy and his friend. Turns out they were much less interested in what we were saying and more interested in who was saying it. They invited us out because we had worked hard and needed to relax. Gag me.
Sister Campbell hung up after she was sufficiently creeped out.

We were almost home when we passed a security guard. We said hi and kept walking across the street. We were about to walk across when he yelled "watch the light!" Jeez. I know I am white but come on. I am not that stupid. We talked to him for a few minutes. The lesson was going pretty well until he said he would come all of the way from queens to go to church with us. :/ the good news was that we got our goal for total lessons taught!!!!

Monday we went on a split. I stayed in the area with sister skinner.
We taught Lilianna... She really isn't progressing and she has no idea what the priesthood is. :/


Tuesday we taught seminary!! We had to wake up super early... But it was pretty fun :) then we did our studies and taught Nick. Everyone that meets nick and talks with him about the gospel is so amazed by him. The people who don't talk about the gospel with him think he is pretty crazy and kind of scary... :) the elders met us at the church before our lesson yesterday and after meeting nick they told us they would hang out at the church until our lesson was over. :) he really isn't dangerous though. Just mentally unstable.

Anyways. That was my week! I'm 21, and I've been wearing a tag for a whole year. I guess that's kind of a big deal. :) this week I've been thinking a lot about the things I have done in the last year and the person I have become. I hope some things have changed about me. I hope I have let the gospel and the atonement change me like I've seen it change so many people.

Love you all!!