Life is Great

Life is great in Carthage, IL.  We had another good week.  On Tuesday, Sister Thompson had a Leadership meeting in Iowa City, so Sister Cox and I spent the day in Keokuk with Sister Pratt.  So we are all brand new missionaries and we spent the whole day tracting around Keokuk and visiting sisters in the branch.  It was so hot and we each got blisters from our shoes, but we met some good people.  Wednesday we volunteered at the hospital and the library for service hours and our dinner appointment was with a single sister in our ward.  We found out that she has only been a member for just over two years!  So we changed our lesson and are going back to visit her this Wednesday.  We went tracting after dinner and the people here are really nice to us, but don't want to hear our message, so I am so thankful that it is almost pageant time, because even though they don't want to hear our message they don't mind coming to pageant.  So we give them the pageant card and little do they know, when President Hinckley rewrote the pageant he wrote it so it teaches the Restoration! 

On Thursday, Sister Thompson had to conduct training at two different zone conferences so we went up to the Davenport Zone Conference in the morning and then traveled up to the Clinton Zone Conference in the afternoon.  This was an all day affair, but it was really neat to see some of the people from my MTC zone as well as meet other missionaries.  Also, the training was really great as well.  Something that was said at one of the meetings that I really liked was "if you don't change from a meeting it was worthless"  meaning that if you don't find something that you could be better at then what was the point in wasting your time, we should always be looking for ways that we can better ourselves. 

My companions are great and I really like being in a threesome.  Since there are three of us we tend to offer one another for different tasks that have to be done and we always use the phrase "Sister ______ would love to do _____ " haha and whenever it happens we always look at each other and about bust up laughing.  We also figured something out, because it seems like one person will be picked on all day to say the prayers when we are with other people and ask them to choose who says the prayer.  But we finally figured out that whoever is the person in the middle they are the one who is getting picked to say the prayer, as of now the theory has not been proven wrong. 

The area is not very receptive, but we have some potential investigators that we are really focusing our work on this week to try to expand our teaching pool.

After church on Sunday we went over to the Family Search Center and Elder and Sister Price fed us lunch and helped us learn more about the family search website, which has been completely updated since I entered the MTC and it is way cool now!  Elder Price grew up in Geneva, and is second cousins with Nita Hirschi's husband.  After the training the Price's took us over to the Relief Society President's home for dinner and we were able to go over the entire list of sisters in our ward and figure out which ones we should visit.  We also stopped by a lady who Sister Thompson had tracted into before we came and she was way nice and set up an appointment for us to come and she'll feed us and we will teach her the first lesson.  Only problem is that it is set up for a month out so we will keep our fingers crossed that it will actually happen. 

Keep praying for the people's hearts to be softened in this area, and we will continue to work hard at trying to find those ready for the gospel. 

 

Love you,

Sister Call