53 - The Sabbath is a Delight

It's May now and spring is here! 

Look at all them dandelion flowers! 

And that weeping willow is getting its leaves back fast! 

Did you know that weeping willows loose their leaves here? 

It just doesn't get cold enough in Arizona! 

They look like ghost trees with their leaves off, their little wisps still hanging down and blowing gently in the wind. 

Should have taken a picture of one before leaves came back, sorry.

It's been really nice recently though, and we even went to a park and studies outside today because the sun was shining.

Aw, Thanks, Sisters Barret and Schoenfeld

Oh, also, when we came back from Ray last week, we opened up our closet doors and mine looked like this:

Sister Barret and Sister Schoenfeld are so nice!

Sister Edwards spent a good portion of time recovering from sickness this week. 

We spent basically two whole days inside. 

During that time I wrote some letters of appreciation to three Sisters who are leaving for home at the end of this transfer. 

Sister Springer, Sister Dennison, and Sister Sumsion are all ending their missions May 9th. 

They are all great sisters.

They next day we stayed in, I figured out using the ward list, a map and our GPS all the less actives in our area and made an organized list so we can track them down and bring them back to the fold. It was awesome, but I feel that the reason that it got done so fast was because my companion was so sick. 

It's never fun to be sick.

The good news is, she was better come the weekend; therefore, for church, yay!

Speaking of church, there are some awesome things that have happened in church that I have just not had time to mention yet.

My very first Sunday, the Bismarck Temple President and his wife came and spoke and the wife was telling a story. The Temple was understaffed that day, and no one seemed to be coming in anyway, until this African man walked in. He was a regular. He came and did baptism's very often at the temple. He had a family name- his grandmother. He wanted to have his grandmother's baptismal ordinance done. Well, only females are to be baptized for females and males for males in harmony with the truth of gender being a huge part of our divine nature, and there were no females there, except for her, the temple president's wife. She hadn't done baptism's in awhile! She usually helped others with doing baptisms if anything. She got dressed in white and her husband as well and her husband baptized her for this African man's grandmother, and how wonderful of an experience that was.

This was in Bismarck. He was African and he was a regular. I couldn't get the question out of my mind. Was is the man who was baptized in December of 2013? Who had such a dynamite testimony and brought all of his friend and acquaintances to church and just wanted to share the gospel with everybody? Was it him? I love him? Is it him?

I asked the temple president and his wife afterward and they confirmed my suspicions!

It was Daniel! Oh! I love him soooo much! Seriously, he is the reason for like, so many of the baptisms in Bismarck! And I was able to see him baptize his friend, his first baptism that he performed, and it was sooooo cool! Plus hearing the baptismal prayer in a Liberian accent is just super cool too.

And there's another story... but darn, I'll have to tell it next week.

Back to the present.

This week was actually stake conference for the Minot Stake.

We all stayed with the Minot sisters, who live in a member's modified attic. It was cramped, but it was fun, and the most like a 'sleepover' I've ever experienced on my mission for better or worse. haha. That moment when the lights are out and people just decide to keep making comments because we all know that no one reeeeally wants to sleep. haha.

This really does mark that I've been on my mission for a year because stake conference was my first Sunday in Bismarck, and that was the Stake Conference where it was announced that the stake was splitting into the Bismarck and Minot stakes. So Here I am again, back in Minot, only this time conference was held at a big center which was part of the Holiday Inn instead of at a sports stadium.

Stake Conference at the Holiday Inn

They even had it on their big electronic activities board which I find humorous, but awesome.

Conference was great. It had an emphasis on Temples and the importance of Sabbath Day observance, giving the sabbath to the Savior. It was pretty crazy- Sister Edwards was actually asked on the fly to give her testimony! When she walked up, they whispered to her that they would like her to speak about the first vision and recited Joseph Smith's experience and that she had two minutes. She began, trying to catch her breath that her nerves robbed from her:

"I saw a pillar of light... exactly over my head... above the brightness of the sun..... which descended gradually until it fell upon me. ....When the light... rested upon me, ..I saw two personages...... whose brightness and glory defy all description.... standing above me in the air. ....One of them.... spake unto me, calling me by name.... and said, "This is my Beloved Son, hear him!""

Her testimony was powerful and touched many. It turns out President fed them four names the day before of missionaries who could bare there testimony about the missionary purpose.

But something that I will always remember about this stake conference is seeing this little boy.

Kyle has Spina Bifida, just like Marshall my brother, :)

This little eight, soon to be nine, year old boy has Spina Bifida and reminds me a lot of my brother Marshall. I saw him before conference started and went up to him to say hi. After sitting back down, I became pretty emotional, just with the similarities causing my heart to miss Marshall very much. After a member that I knew well asked me if something was wrong, I could not hold back the tears. But I eventually calmed down (and the priesthood blessing that my companion suggested I should get probably helped) and things are a'okay. Plus I get to see Marshall and the rest of my family this upcoming Sunday on the Skype call home for Mother's Day! So that will be really nice.

After we got back home, we had a lesson with Dude watching "On the Lord's Errand," a documentary about Thomas S. Monson, the prophet on the earth today. It's wonderful! You need to watch it!

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2009-09-01-on-the-lords-errand-the-life-of-thomas-s-monson?lang=eng

And after the lesson we had dinner, with a member who lives just outside the city and they have horses! We got a small tour of their outdoors!

Horses really are beautiful creatures.

Well, that's it for this week. Next week I will know whether or not I'm staying with Sister Edwards another transfer or not. 

She feels like she's going, but you never know! 

Till next week!

P.S. (Pic) Look at this cute little bat just hangin' out on the wall under the balcony of a member's house! So cute!

P.P.S. May the forth be with you.

52 - Giving Service

Don't have a lot of time today, so this will be a quick fast entry!

First off, this mission boundaries have officially changed and the mission home is now officially packed up and is now located in Bismarck. 72 missionaries are no longer within the original mission boundaries.

It was very sad for President and Sister Anderson to go around and say their goodbyes to them, but they will do great in their new missions.

I have been having a hard time recently, harder than I thought, with dumb Satan and natural man causing my mind to have negative thoughts and be all competitive with Sister Edwards only in my mind and I hated feeling that way and when it got to the point where I noticed I needed to express how I was feeling I became an emotional mess. But it's ok, because talking about it is like, most of the battle for me.

We cover part of the 2nd and 3rd wards in Williston

But two days later, we had exchanges. While I was with Sister Schoenfeld working in her area, it was a very productive day! We taught five lessons with basically no wiggle room in between and taught the less actives about the importance of the sacrament, committing them to come to church so they can fully partake of the atonement! It was solid and Sister Schoenfeld was pleasantly surprised to have gotten in with so many people that our day was just eaten up with lessons! And when we came back...

Sister Edwards and Sister Barrett heart attacked our rooms, and wrote compliments on hearts and awwww it was so nice!

And Sister Edwards bought me awesome blueberry candies and Lillies on top of it!

I am so bad at repaying people. That was SO nice of her! I know she says I don't need to repay her, but I want to. It was soooo nice.

Speaking of service, we did a lot of service this Saturday. We helped someone move, and we helped paint someones house. 

And we brought stuff to a BBQ thing that just kind of happened.

It was this Dude's idea.

That's right.

I'm calling him Dude.

He is a member who is returning to activity and we are going to be teaching him the missionary discussions.

He's awesome.

But we were there for way too long, like 3 1/2 hours. But it was good. We had lots of gospel conversation, and Pablo (I think that's the name I decided to give him lol) was there, our investigator, so that was really good.

In between exchanges and this day of service though, I was sick with a cold, so I spent quite a bit of time getting better. But Sister Edwards is awesome and while I was recovering she went out and taught our lessons that we had set up.

We just came back from Ray and we had a good run up there, or as good as possible. Sister Edwards's stomach has been giving her problems since Sunday, and Tuesday it was so bad that she couldn't go out and work, and then all the women in the house became either sick or busy. So we only saw one person, but it was a good visit. She fed us dinner.

And then on Monday the Boone's had a BBQ and a less active family came to that, and that was great for them!

That little boy in the Superman outfit just kills me.

He's three and part of the family who is less active. He is just SO cute!

That's all.

Hopefully Sister Edwards gets better soon.

After all...

Where there's a Will, There's a way!

51 - A "Ray" of Sunshine

So just like Sioux Falls, Williston has a bunch of smaller cities surrounding it. Sister Edwards has only came here one transfer before me and she was sick the majority of the transfer and she didn't know even exactly what our area and ward boundaries were, but we got that all figured out this week! 

Yay! I feel better about my life. Or, the area, which is kinda my life.

Therefore, we figured out what small towns we cover which ends up only being Ray. Ray is about 40 miles out of Williston, so we definitely needed some help from a generous member to do work out there, and low and behold, this awesome family, the Boone family, was willing to provide all of our transportation and living needs for us to go out there for a couple days! So Sister Boone came and picked us up Tuesday afternoon.

The Boone's house is what I call a nook and cranny house. You look at it and it looks super tiny. Then you walk in and there is way more space with way more rooms than you thought could fit in that thing. There isn't a hallway, just a bunch of rooms put together. A nook and cranky house. It was built nearly 100 years ago and is still standing, but is falling apart, but its one of those things where it's practically pointless to fix it up because it would be more efficient to just tear it down and build it up again. And they aren't doing that- and I wouldn't do it either. 

Their house is charming, and the room we stayed in was very homey, copies of Fablehaven and other fantasy books, Mario stickers around the room, and DS systems on the dresser at the head of my bed included. 

Not to mention snoopy and Super Grover.

As soon as we got to the Boone's house and unloaded our overnight bags, 

Sister Boone gave us a little drive around tour of Ray which took like three to five minutes and we stopped by the City Hall on cute little Main Street to get a map.

Ray reminds me of a combination of Tea and Worthing. the appearance is similar to that of Worthing, that old falling apart with two bars and a city hall on Main Street, but friendly and receptive atmosphere, though the streets are wider and it is maybe twice as large, so that and the less-active population of about ten or so reminds me of Tea.

There's also some odd houses in Ray. And this one I just had to get a picture of.

First thing we did was knock on all the doors up North. See that part on the map that's above 7th street? It's brown? Yeah there's only like, three streets with houses right there, and they aren't even houses, they're trailers. We walked all the way up there from the bottom of Ray, taking maybe fifteen minutes or so, maybe twenty. And it was very windy. Our skirts were going crazy. But it was also very sunny! Short sleeves, glorious! It's been so nice this week! 

Anyway, we knocked on all of the doors, got about seven less than solid potentials out of it. It was interesting, all to the trailers were just in the middle of dirt, aka mud when it's wet outside, and it's interesting to see what people put outside to walk on to get from their driveway to their trailer. You mostly had falling apart criss crossed boards to step on like big lily pads, but there were also nice round stones at one house, red wood chips at another, idk. Just interesting to me.

We then went back into the main part of Ray and confirmed where some of the less active members lived and we had a lesson with one person! And they have the cutest little boy ever! We are excited for her to get fellowshipped more by Sister Boone, who is her visiting teacher, and to see her start coming back to church!

We then came back to the Boone's house and they had a BBQ with all the two households in Ray who are active. It was SO fun! We invited some people to come on over when we were finding people in the afternoon, but it was just the active families that came. But that's ok. We played lots of games. A round of ninja, a cool type of monkey in the middle game with a volley ball, a game where a person had to be in the middle and spin around with their eyes closed and point at a person and command them to do a certain animal sound and they'd have to guess who made the sound, it was great.

And Sister Boone is going to start having these BBQs whenever we are up doing work in Ray so there will always be a good fun thing to invite people to. HOW COOL!

Seriously being in Ray was like going on vacation. But we were still doing work and teaching lessons. We were exhausted at the end of the day and we all gathered inside and played games, a game called White Lies that what fun and this picture telephone game. And the next night we played Seek. Tell me that doesn't feel like vacation. And it even more felt like vacation when we turned the lights off in our room and it had glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, because the only places I've seen have glow in the dark stars on the ceiling is places where we've slept when going out of town on vacation!

Then it felt even mooooore like vacation because the next morning we helped Sister Boone cut up jeans to make name tag things for girls camp. She's the girls camp director. And we did it outside in the Sunshine because it was in the 70's and just soooo nice.

Sister Edwards and Kiki :>

And then after lunch, we went on splits with two of the lovely super cute young ladies that live in the house! Sister Boone's daughter went with me and her sister, who is about the same age as her daughter, went with Sister Edwards.

Sister Edwards and the sister went out and taught two lessons! Another lesson with the family we saw the day before, and then they saw another less active family, who now wants to feed us next time we're out in Ray!

Me and Bridgette (aka, Batgirl!) :>

Meanwhile, me and my partner in crime left a few sticky notes on doors that didn't answer and we knocked on a couple doors when we were out of people to try. 

My awesome temporary companion, little Boone, works at the Cenex, the gas station in Ray, and who opens the door to a random knock but two of her coworkers! 

So we went in a taught them a lesson! Super awesome. We left them reading commitments, so we will have Little Boone follow up with them at work! How awesome!

So we went home and ate dinner and I called a couple more people who I had realized I missed, and this guy with only a phone number in the ward list answered the phone. 

And mind you, usually conversations with less actives over the phone are like, 'I'm ok, you don't want to waste your time coming to see me. Bye.' 

But this guy, when I asked, how are you, he was like, "I'm doing absolutely great!" 

He was the most enthusiastic happy guy ever! He gave us needlessly explicit directions to his house and we set up an appointment to see him in the morning after studies. It would be Thursday, our last day in Ray.

So we sleep, wake up, study, and bring Sister Boone's Sister with us to the lesson. This guy has a very well decorated house, and you can tell he loves hunting with all the taxidermy on the wall and the all around decor. So I'll call him Hunter. We watched the Because He Lives video with him and just talked with him. And he said at one point,

"You girls are doin somethin' to me."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You're bringing back memories. Good ones. I haven't felt this way in a long time. It's been a looong time since I felt the Holy Ghost. I miss this."

And he talked about how he really screwed up his last marriage. And wanna know what's weird? All of Sister Edwards previous areas have been in Wyoming. She knows his x-wife 'very' well. In each one of her areas, she's met someone who has a close family connection with Hunter. It's like the areas she's served in were like, super weirdly inspired or something. haha. Crazy.

But this guy, he just kept thanking us for coming over, and we asked him if he had his scriptures. And he said yes, but he couldn't find them when we asked him to grab them. And he was so sad, that desperate cry of, "I saw them the other day though! I know I did, I have them somewhere!" He wanted his own previously treasured set of scriptures. We told him to take the Book of Mormon we had and to pray for help to find his scriptures. He did and he thanked us again and again for coming, so excited to come to church again! 

AH! It was one of the coolest lessons ever! The perfect way to start out the day of April 16, 2015, the day that BOTH Sister Edwards and I reported to the MTC exactly a year ago.

It was sad to leave Ray that afternoon. It felt like we were getting transferred away from an area that we both loved dearly. But great things are in Williston too.

The one big thing that happened in Williston this week was we met a less active family in Williston that Sister Edwards had never heard about before and we invited the son, who has many questions, to think and pray about taking the lessons along with his nonmember girlfriend who just gave birth to their first a month ago. His mom was there for our visit too, but she's very bitter about the church because she has a lesbian daughter, so she doesn't want to participate in the lessons at all if her son does decide he wants to take them.

On Friday, we send a text to Hunter, saying:

"Remember to read your scriptures! Did you find them yet? :)"

And his text back? Probably the longest most awesome text I have received as a missionary ever.

"Yes and I read the one you left me about the two brothers (Holland's talk Apr 2015), very touching. I want to thank you two for coming into my life. It's rejuvenated my thoughts on life and the Lord. That's all I thought about yesterday. You two little ladies are already way special to me. Guess that's what I needed to kick start me. You two made me think about how important that life and the Lord is in our lives and to me that is so very very special. Your parents should be so proud of you because I was so touched the way you just walked right in my house and picked me up and gave me that spiritual boost. It's the first time I've felt the Holy Ghost in so long that I'd forgotten how good it feels. Wow, I'm getting all emotional sitting here writing you. I'm feeling the Holy Ghost soo strong right now. I love you two girls so much for entering my life and can't thank you enough for giving me a second chance. Wow, can't hold back on tears, unbelievable. Anyway, you ladies have a great day, n' I will see you in church on Sunday. Thanks again, both of you."

It's moments like these that help you remember that the gospel truly does change lives. Sometimes that sight can be dimmed because of others not being receptive, making you wonder if the gospel is truly that life changing if people reject it over and over. But it's the Lord that prepares people, and it's so rewarding to find them.

He didn't come to church because he unfortunately got called in to work, but next Sunday!

We are planning on going to Ray next week, so I won't really have much time to made a blog entry next week because we will be in Minot maybe for p-day because we are going up to Ray on Sunday, so we might only have 45 minutes to email, but we will see. Regardless, I'm excited to go back to Ray next week!

P.S. Hunter has a room entirely devoted to the Broncos. So if you're a Broncos fan, then you'd appreciate it.

P.P.S. Some members took us to a restaurant very very similar to Benihana's in Arizona. It was awesome!