Dearest Family!
Hope you are doing well! Happy New Years! i bet i'm the first person to say Conrad Bland Bean Smash to you in the year 2010!!!! hahaha!!!!!!! How was new years for ya'll? we got together with the other sisters serving here and we watched the Emma Smith movie, and then we went home and went to sleep, before the new year. so weird going to bed early. haha.
this week has been so cold. with the wind chill factor is has been exteremely cold. we're told to stay indoors if it gets below 10 degrees, so there have been a few days that we just don't go tracting outside. oh its a cold i've never felt before.
we had an real neat experience the other day tracting - we actually tracted on HARRIS Street!!!! there's a lot of Harris things here in PA. Harris Ave. , Harris St., Harris somethin' else. i have yet to snab a pic! so anyways, we're tracting on Harris Street,--and this story by the way strengthened our testimonies of how God has his hand in everything, it was just neat. and we knocked on this door, and this dad answers, you can see his teenage daughters poke their heads out from behind him to see who was at the door. and i said hi, and introduced who we were, and he said, oh yah, we've been to Temple Square before, and i was like, Oh really?! well what did you think of the message that was shared with you while you were there? and he was like, well, it's not for us, but i was like, ok, well, can we share a card w/ you? ( the pass along ones) and he was like no, and he just shut the door. we were like, oh ok, they weren't really open at all. alright, next house, what ev! :) so we keep on tracting down Harris St. :) and we stop at this one house and this guy just talks and talks and talks to us, like, we hardly get any words in, he's super nice, very open, he'd lost his wife 17 yrs ago, and just recently his Downs daughter in March, and he had such a good attitude about it , it was fun to talk w/ him and hear about his family, and what was important to him. seriously this guy talked forever, we were there on his door step for almost an hour. when we finally got to wrap it up, we gave him the temple pass along card and invited him to visit the website on mormon.org- we said good bye and left, as we got to the street from his house, there were these 2 people walking towards us and they're like, hello. and it was just kind of weird, dark outside, at night, no one ever approaches us, and its this guy and his daughter from the earlier house, they had been waiting out on the street for us w/ hot choc to give to us- almost the whole entire time we were talking to this other guy! the dad said he had felt bad that he had turned us away and invited us to come into his home for fresh hot choc!!!! when does this ever happen?! i was thinking in my mind, it's never this easy....is the hot choc. poisened?? haha. so we go to their house and eat hot choc and cookies ( i have realized this is how missionaries gain weight while they're on missions haha ) and we sit and talk. super nice family! they have two daughters that they homeschool, they travel a lot- been to france, when they went to Temple Square, it was to go do some geneology- so it was nice to have some things in common with to talk about. the whole time i was praying, please Heavenly Father let his convo. have a chance to turn to the gospel somehow. they had already rejected us when we tried at the door, so it felt weird trying to bring it up again, but somehow it did again, in a smooth non pushy way, and that was the night. it was just amazing how it all happened, i don't know what will become of all that-- we are def. planning on stopping by again, but its just so neat how things happen. if we hadn't been talking on that guys step for that hour, the other man and his daughter would have missed us, b/c we'd been going down the street still tracting, and they waited for us, out in the freezing cold. anyyways it was just so neat. i'm going to send this real qucik. my time is almost out. and i'll log in again and finish up.
hey Fam, i'm back. ok, so i hope you liked that little experience, it was just neat how it all happened. the other day, we went and visited this less active. she's super nice. such a sweet lady. she lives in this huge victorian style mansion, that her boyfriend built. they've been living together for a really long time. and it's a bed and breakfast, and people do weddings in their back yard. it's gorgeous!!! i'll send you a pic of me and sister bradshaw in front of it. but anyways, we went over there to visit and they asked us if we wanted to go out to dinner! and we were like, yes! ( we didn't have any dinners this week, on the sign up sheet, which means we have to get it our selves. which is fine, but its hard on a low budget, you know the works, but amazing how once again, Heavenly Father is always watching out for us, some how, we ended up getting dinners every night!) so before we left, her man, Richard said he had to go feed the animals before we left, so guess what?! i got to go in a barn, and brush the cow's hair with a weird brush thingy, and be surrounded by cow pie smell, and roosters and chickens, it felt so good! home!!!! and,...haha, i was laughing in my head because i was wearing my Boggs, and as i was walking in the poop infested barn, i thought to myself, sorry boggs, this is gonna have to do until i get home, cuz my boggs are made for farm life ya know, so they probably were like, oh this is nice to walk on barn type rubbish,...get it?...haha? ok ok, i'm lame. well, i'll be going, hope you like the pics. i took some silly ones at the laundry place! love you!oh yeah, the other pic is of us and Chen Li. he's from Beijing, super super nice guy. we were teaching him and he moved to Nebraska. so sad. so this was taken the day before he left w/ the Finding Faith in Christ Dvd we gave him. he looks like a soldier. haha.
