Week 10: 10/21/13

So this week...... :) A Brother in the ward gave us a referral (sidenote: it is so fun to see the excitement of ward members when they get involved in missionary work again.  Whether it is coming with us to lessons, having family mission plans in action, sending children on missions or doing missionary work on their own.  There was another Brother who was so excited to tell us after church last week about giving a Book of Mormon to his friend and how he can't wait to keep telling her about it) and we were talking to him on the phone to get more information and see what he could do and what we needed to do.  In gospel principles a couple weeks ago the lesson was about missionary work and the statistic from the manual said there had been about 1 million missionaries in the history of the Church.  So Brother L. told us he did the math and that means we are each responsible for 800,000 souls!  And told us that he thinks this referral would "eat the lessons up like lunch!"  I love being excited about missionary work!

Speaking of lunch, Sister Z. and I have decided we must be the picnic missionaries or something.  We have a lesson with Tracy every week where we sit outside her apartment and talk about the Gospel, and with a new investigator this week we weren't able to get someone from the ward to come with us to this man's home since it was pretty last minute so we brought chairs outside again!  It is fun, and luckily those are usually nice days :) Though for our first actual lesson with T. it was raining so we sat out with our umbrellas and had a lesson anyway :)

Also speaking of eating outside (more directly this time) we had a service project up in Lyons on Thursday which Sister Z and I rode up to with the Spanish sisters to save miles (did I tell you about how last month we weren't informed about our mileage allotments until the last week of the month and we were already 100 miles over?  Oops...they forgave us because it was for flood relief but we are being very careful this time!)  On the way back the Sisters dropped us off at our car at the stake center, but the one thing we forgot in their car was our keys!  Haha so we had a picnic in the parking lot of our snacks we had taken up to Lyons and walked home to get our key and shower super fast before a lesson :) Adding to our list of smelling like smoke and marijuana, hair that smells like manure (we were cleaning out a barn that got mudded) also means we are doing our job right ;)

The thing all of the missionaries looked forward to this week was being asked to usher at (and President Brown approving of us attending) the BYU Ballroom performance on Saturday night!  It was super duper awesome, and John, the TA from my ballroom class, was in it.  He also ended up coming to the Ute Creek ward on Sunday, and was a little surprised to see somehow he knew in Colorado!  So that was fun.  It was a little weird to be part of a little more "normal" life for an evening, and I have to say I really like being a missionary, it is much simpler in a lot of ways ;)

I think I will start reviewing my journal before I email so I can remember all the good bits from the week :) but that is all I can think of for now!  Just trying a little harder to be a little better :) Have a good week!

love, Sister Emily DeFord

Sister Z. and I at the high school for the BYU ballroom performance

the poster the Hermanas made for our district goal of 550 lessons this transfer.  I especially love the scripture on the bottom!

This is Viticus, who fell into the window well outside the Huntington Hills sister's room while I was there for exchanges.  The white handbook doesn't say you can't adopt pets outside your window!