Sister Melanie Visits Boy's Town, Parades, and Skypes!

Sister Melly at Boy's Town with the World's Largest Ball of Stamps - 4 million!

Founder of Boy's Town - Father Flanagan

Boy's Town Visit with the Watkin's Wagon

Dear Family,

Love you! Happy Mother's Day! It was so good to talk to you on Sunday. We spent Mother's Day running around doing all sorts of things. We had church in the morning. They gave all of the women little forget-me-not grow kits. We are going to plant them and put them in the window of our apartment. If they live, I will send you a picture, but that may be a pretty big if. After church, we had lunch with the Gunn family. They also invited Katie, our recent convert, over. They have seven kids who were all very sweet. Then, we went and stopped by some of our investigators' home and took them Mothers Day cards and some of the Oreo balls that we kept inheriting from the families at church. We had dinner with the Kmieciks, Skyped, and finished our weekly planning. It was a bit of a crazy day, but most days are pretty crazy.

The Trail Center has recently made a big change. Instead of having the Trail Center Leaders and then everyone else, we now have 6 committees. Each Committee has 2 sets of sisters and at least one senior couple. The Trail Center Leaders are each assigned two committees to oversee. We are on the Education Committee with Sister Proctor, Sister Hawks (Bellevue 2nd), the Johnsons (a senior service couple) and the Wrights. The idea of the committees was to lighten the load of the Trail Center Leaders and to help us all be able to contribute and better use the talents of the sisters. Ha ha. When I think about being on the education committee, I remember before my mission when dad asked me teach something or explain something and I said "I don’t want to. I'm not good at teaching." and Dad said "Well, what are you going to do when you are on your mission?" "I don’t know. I'll figure that out then" ha ha. How things have changed. I am certainly not a perfect teacher, but I think that I have gotten a lot better. Our current projects on the education committee are helping the sisters develop master lesson plans for the Trail Center (coming up with ideas of various things they could talk about, scriptures to share/ questions to ask, etc) it seems like that is one of the hardest things in the Trail Center: not being rote in giving tours. I learn something new and start sharing it on tours but then I share it all the time and suddenly it doesn't seem very new or exciting to me. We have to constantly be learning and finding new stories to share so that we don't become robots. When I do this, the Spirit becomes a lot more present on my tours. I am able to learn new things and gain new insights from the Spirit because I am able to approach the things that we talk about with an open mind

Let's see, I don't know much what else to say about this last week. We have spent a lot of time in the Trail Center between getting ready for the parade and serving there and everything else. Although the Trail Center has always been my home, it is even more so now. I love the Trail Center.



Sister Melanie (on right) in the Florence (Nebraska) Days Parade



The time we had in our area has been mostly devoted to visiting recent converts. They are so fun to visit because they love us and they really need the extra attention to their testimonies, but we are working on getting them more integrated into the ward so that we can focus our efforts on finding and teaching! We have already been able to find a few good new investigators and potentials.

Yesterday morning, we met a man named Pat. I am excited about him, although I can sum up everything that we know about him in just a couple of sentences. He lives in an apartment building near a less active in the ward. We knocked on his door. He is kind of a recluse and seems afraid of people. We were surprised that he opened his door. He hasn't been to church in 30 years, but took a restoration pamphlet, said he would read it and let us come back later this week. We only talked to him for a few minutes, but we both just fell in love with this guy (in a missionary sort of way). We were both so excited.

So, yeah, things are going great! I still don't know where all the time goes, but I am enjoying it!

Love you!

More Missionaries in the Parade



Missionaries waiting for the parade








More Missionaries

Have fun in Hawaii!

Love, Sister Melly

Skypeing with Sister Melly

The other day, we were on out way to our area and passed a building that was under construction. I looked over, and saw the crane hoisting something on top of the building. "Wait a second; is that . . . the letter 'e'?" It was the letter e. A giant letter e being hoisted into the air. It reminded me of something from Sesame Street. Sister Belka says I am going to be on Sesame Street on day. Take that as you will.

Love,

Sister Melly