Week 28

This week has been so crazy busy, I can hardly believe it. I'll do my best to talk about everything, but we'll see how much I get through!

Tuesday, we did mission president interviews and district meeting. It went really well. It's always a great opportunity to actually sit down and talk to President Morgan for a few minutes (about 15-20 or so). It's a pretty rare opportunity--only about once every three months--but it's really nice. He's a pretty straightforward guy.

After interviews, we had a lesson with a potential investigator who was a Catholic nun for a while. She was really neat! She's struggling with her testimony of God, and she doesn't have a huge interest in learning about the LDS faith, but we testified and she said she'd take the Book of Mormon with her on her vacation.

Wednesday was our Zone Leader Training and the start of exchanges. After ZLT, it started pouring and lightning/thunder... It was pretty intense. We ate as a district at Olive Garden, and when we came out we got soaked. That was when we started the exchange. It was good, but man, it's tough to run an area after you've only been there three weeks! I had plans, back-up plans, and back-ups to those, but sometimes you run out of things to do! but we kept overall busy :)

The crazy storm system continued overnight into Thursday, and that was a rough morning. The sister I was on exchanges with woke up at 4:30 (to use the restroom) but it woke ME up, and I thought that I missed the alarm... so I rolled out of bed onto my knees. Luckily, I check the time, and realized, nope, not time to wake up. Less than an hour later, I was woken up again by tornado sirens! At 5:30. I do not like missing sleep!

We had an interesting dinner that night. We and the elders were at a member's home, and one of the elders was ill, my companion got ill during the dinner, and the tornado sirens went off again. Poor members! haha

I ate my first gas station hot dog on Friday. It was alright. Chelsey would have hated it, of course!

Funny moment of the week: we were tracting, and ran into someone who would actually talk to us. A man, maybe in his 50s, very chatty. Not super interested, but he said that he would check out mormon.org. Well, at the end of us talking, he held out his hand to shake, and then totally went into a bro hug. Awkward! But even funnier was Sister Esterholdt's reaction, she was totally shocked.

Highlight of the week was of course General Conference! It was so good. "missionary spring break"

some of my thoughts:

Elder Holland started with a bang! That's for sure! I'm glad that the only person who ever spat on me was two! But I loved what he said, discipleship isn't all just encouraging and teaching, it's also worrying, warning, and weeping. As I've studied the Book of Mormon on my mission, I realize more and more that the missionaries in there, even though they are very righteous, have a lot of sorrow. It is not easy to be a true disciple of Christ; he is not a comfortable god.

I felt like some of the themes of this conference were courage, God's law does not change, defending your faith; but also, service, love, and reaching out to those around us.

I have more thoughts, but we have a Zone P-day today (Easter egg hunt and watching a movie, Ephraim's Rescue! Woohoo!) so I have to be speedy! Maybe I'll write more next week about Conference :)

Love you all!

Sister Barret