Transfers

Today is transfers so naturally this week has been NUTS. This email will probably be mostly pictures. :)

Just an update. I am still STL and I am training a new STL who has never served in the city before. We will have 8 companionships of sisters to interview in 6 weeks... And we don't do anything the first or last week so.... It's gonna be CRAZZZYYYYY. here is my week:




Wow guys
This is too much
Obviously me and technology do not mix.

My email was too SHORT.

So we had a few awesome lessons this week. Lilianna talked about baptism all on her own! Nick tells people the church is true in casual conversation and the Garcias love missionaries and want us to do FHE with them. :)

Shot calls on Saturday took us all by surprise. I thought for sure sister Campbell and I would be companions for 3 cycles and I was totally okay with it. I learned so much from her!!! President Morgan called to release sister Campbell and we both just wanted to die a little.

Oh! I have a funny story for you!!
Did any of you see the drug bust on tv that happened in Harlem? Around
125 street? They arrested like 300 people? That's where we work. Every day pretty much. Our investigator lives in that building and her brother is in jail right now because of it. a member told us all about it. Don't worry, there hasn't been that much apostasy here.

I am so excited for this new cycle. It is going to be so busy and so fun!! Everyone is in our zone now :) and sister Richeson is in my district which means we are going to have the sassiest district EVER!!!

I promise to write more next week.... But here is another picture for you :)

:)

 Well hello again. This week seemed so long and so much happened!

Thursday was our mission tour with elder Snow. It was awesome.
Everyone had to write a 5 minute talk and by Wednesday night I hadn't even started mine so after planning I wrote some ideas down and set my alarm so I could get up extra early and finish it. I always use my iPad for an alarm, and I guess I left my wifi on or something because it DIED so our other alarm didn't go off until 630 and we had to leave at 715! Needless to say I was praying pretty hard that he wouldn't call on me!

The conference was so awesome. In the last three months president has introduced a lot of new mission 'themes' for lack of a better word, and tons of new goals. It has been really overwhelming, especially as a leader because we are supposed to be the example and the model of all of these new things president has talked about. The conference was such a relief because it went back to the basics. Even president did.

He started the conference by talking about the companionship. He said nothing works if only one companion is trying. How true that is! I'm sure it's that way in life too. Then they talked about consecration and how living that law takes time. Elder Snow's wife talked about the hymns and journal writing, and then he talked about faith, and he said that he is still working on faith and repentance. I think I agree. :) he took some time to invite people to give their talks. He called up one girl and after hers he said okay, now we are going to critique it!
It was HORRIBLE! Definitely a flash back from my public speaking class. He even talked about filler words!

After lunch Elder Snow talked about the links in missionary work and how each of them work together. He said it all goes back to finding, which is so true and I so hate it :) it was so nice to spend some time talking about the basics like working with the word and retaining new converts. It was definitely something I needed!

After the conference was over the leadership got to go to MLC with Elder Snow. He didn't plan anything so for an hour we got to ask him questions about being a leader. Some of my favorite things he talked about were making and setting attainable goals and maintaining a certain standard of excellence. He said it feels so much better to achieve a modest goal than to never achieve any goal at all. That is so true for me! He said missionary work, like life, is 95% rejection so we have to do what we can to find success. He talked about pushing yourself a little harder each week to slowly progress and how that is so much better than setting a really high goal one week and achieving it, and then not even coming close to that goal the next week.

Sorry that was a lot. I hope you realize sometimes these emails are more for me than anyone else :)

Friday we were on a split with our roommates. It's kind of crazy because sister Campbell was companions with sister Barlow and I trained sister Orme, and it just worked out so that we would be companions with them again! Sister Orme is awesome. They are kind of struggling in their area with finding things to do, so hopefully it picks up soon.

Saturday was kind of crazy. We planned with the zone leaders in the morning for zone meeting, and then we spent the rest of the day running around. We invited soo many people to church! We taught Yasmine, our awesome new investigator. She wants to be baptized and she loves the idea of a modern prophet. Her mom used to meet with missionaries in the Bronx so we are hopefully going to teach the whole family soon.

All of the trains were busted Saturday so we walked A LOT. We ended our night with correlation. Our ward mission leader is so awesome. I love talking to returned missionaries who still love the work and are doing their part as member missionaries. Anyway, after correlation we were asking them how we should get home and they gave us money for a taxi. Now no one is allowed to judge us for this next bit. Okay?

All taxi drivers are male. Seriously. The white handbook says that we always need a third member of our sex with us, even in the car. We were really excited to take a taxi and we were praying for a female driver but mostly we were just excited to hail our own taxi :) so we stand on the corner and try our best to hail a taxi. We wanted an OG taxi. Welp... Just our luck (and kind of karma for breaking the rules) the first one that pulled over was a stinkin MINI VAN!! Seriously. The Mormon vehicle of choice. We were kind of dying. And the driver was a guy. So.. It never pays to be disobedient.

Sunday we left our house at 7:15 and didn't get home until 9:30. I was exhausted. We had an interview, did our studies in Central Park, ate dinner with our favorite family and did some lookups to find the 100 people we invited to church because NONE of them came.

Monday was zone meeting. It went really well! Sister Campbell and I taught about how we can have the spirit with us so we can teach by the spirit. In my humble opinion, it was the best part ;) Monday I was feeling slightly unmotivated, so after zone meeting, we went to get some froyo. Oh! I don't know if any of you know the sandwich punching game. If you don't, you aren't missing out. But basically; if you are eating a sandwich and you set it down and don't cover it it is free for anyone to punch. Elder Berryman was eating this HUGE hamburger and he left it uncovered for like 2 seconds and sister Campbell punched it soooo hard. I was dying it was so funny. He was so so mad :)

I can't remember what exactly we did after that... But at some point we visited Nick to find out why he wasn't at church. I LOVE nick. He is so crazy but also so sincere and amazing. We took him to a park and on the way home (he knows everyone) he stopped by some hob looking guy and said "Tom, can I have a hug?" And then while they were hugging he said "Tom.. Jesus loves you!!" I felt the spirit so strong. It was crazy and so cute.

Tuesday I was on another split. This time with sister Jensen that someone asked me if I knew. :) she is so cute! We were in Harlem and we saw so many miracles but I'm just too tired to write about them :)

Today we went to the 9/11 memorial and to battery park. I have a TON of pictures so I will try to narrow them down...

 

 

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!!