Hello!
I'm happy to report that Bruce is doing much better. He had to cancel our lesson this past week, but he was better by Sunday, and able to come to Church. He said he's really missed it these past two weeks! We missed him too!! Glad you don't have any cavities.
I hope (haha Deanna's topic was "hope") your talk went well. Good to hear Monique did a good job. Sister McAllister and I spoke on topics from the worldwide leadership training broadcast in sacrament meeting this week. I talked about why we want real growth, or continual conversion, in the Church, and Sister McAllister talked about how we achieve real growth. The ward didn't seem too attentive during either of our talks, and we were a little worried that maybe our talks were a little too substantive (but, they are pretty deep topics if you really want to get at the topic, and not just fluff......and during the week we really felt like a fluff sacrament meeting by the Sisters would be counterproductive.......) but we both got rave reviews from the Bishopric, saying they thought it was exactly what the ward needed to hear, and a lot of members told us they really loved our talks, so I guess we weren't too heavy handed after all.
Hope you enjoy leap day at Disneyland. We're celebrating leap day by doing service for one of our favorite sisters in the ward. Should be fun.
This past week was alright. We're starting up a few new programs in our ward. We've assigned the ward missionaries to teach member missionary lessons to a few members of ward council/auxiliary presidencies. One of the sisters wasn't able to go out last minute, so her companion asked us to go with her. The lesson went well, I thought. So that was good to see. We've also decided ourselves to teach the lessons to the priests and laurels (and their families) individually as sort of a mission prep activity. So far, we've taught the first lesson to one of the priests and one of the laurels...it's been really great, so far! They both have really seemed to enjoy it. I've been getting really anxious with how few teaching apointments we actually get here, in a given week; this is so much more productive than knocking on empty houses or getting kicked out of apartment complexes*!!!
So...nothing that will really show results anytime soon, probably, as far as getting referrals and actually teaching investigators, but at least I'm hoping that this will lay a good foundation for missionaries to work with in the future. But I guess I can't complain, other than I feel like no one warned me that you're always in your hardest area.
Nothing really funny happened this week......Wednesday was kind of crazy. The sister that drove before I got here scratched up one of the doors pretty bad (apparently she drove up against a concrete pillar? while she was going forward??? I don't even know...) and our driving coordinator called us and told us to take the car to Everett to get it repaired...so in the middle of our knocking empty doors we got to take a little jaunt to Everett...we got a Chevy Malibu temporarily...I miss my Corolla...but anyways...we forgot our apartment keys at the car shop, but luckily Sister McAllister needed to use the restroom, so we didn't drive very far before I realized "Hey wait....we're going back to our same apartment...we need our keys!!" (Usually, when you get a new car, that means you're getting a new apartment too!!)
Then we needed to go on an adventure to Kirkland to find Sister McAllister's coat that she forgot when we went there for zone conference a few weeks ago (apparently Elders struggle when it comes to finding the only black trench coat on the only coat rack in the only stake center.........). You're SUPPOSED to tell your district leader when you're leaving the area, and since we'd already planned on going to Kirkland and talked to the zone leaders about it, we remembered to text Elder Powell....and then we remembered to send him a text, "Oh...by the way. We went to Everett earlier, too." We thought that was pretty funny. It's hard to remember your district leader when you've gotten permission straight from the mission office...........that's our excuse and we're sticking to it!
Then, our GPS died on the way home. We'd specifically charged it the day before and everything so that it'd be ready to go to Kirkland and back, but we hadn't known to factor our Everett adventure in as well......so that made things a little exciting. We stopped outside a liquor store (unintentionally...it was just the first parking lot we came too, but we thought it just made the whole situation even more ridiculous) and said a prayer that we could get the GPS to turn back on long enough to write the directions down....Thankfully, we were able to! The GPS will usually only stay on for a few seconds if it's out of juice, but we got all the directions and the second we were done it shut off. Woohoo! Prayer! Yay! So we made it home safe.......after only a few wrong turns and such. What an exciting adventure it was.
Anyways...I think that's everything from me. Good luck at Team Physical Therapy this week!
Love you! Bye!
Sister Holdsworth
*We did, at least, get all but two of the apartments tracted before we got kicked out...and one of those two was the apartment of the employee that kicked us out.
