End of the Month and Short on Miles - the Blessings of Walking

Dear Family,

Love you!

So, this has been another interesting week as usual. There are lots of ways to do missionary work and, it seems, lots of different ways to interpret the rules of missionary work, so Sister Bergeson and I have been working on what version we will be living by. At least several times a day, we have to ask each other how we have done different things in the past and then try to figure out what we think that we should be doing. It is quite a process. We have both always been with companions that are near the end of their missions and who have already figured out what they are going to do, but it has been fun, although sometimes a bit annoying, to figure it all out for ourselves.

So, I love the Oakview ward, but I am a getting a little worried that I am getting to close to some of the members. I love them a lot and they seem to like me a bit too ;), but I have just been feeling like we are sometimes a bit too buddy-buddy. But, maybe that is what they need right now. That has become my common phrase lately whenever something weird/unexpected happens. "Maybe that is just what they needed". We just go with it.

Ok, some highlights for the week. It seems like in the past couple of weeks, all of our investigators have just kind of disappeared. Either they are too busy to meet with us right now, or they are not interested in learning right now, or we haven't been able to contact them for a while. Even our less-actives that we have been teaching have suddenly gotten more difficult to get a hold of. So, this has meant lots of finding. Also, because it is the end of the month, the cars are running out of miles, so we have been doing a lot of walking. Fortunately, it has worked out in our favor.

On Thursday, we met a younger lady named Crystal. She was interested for a minute, but told us that if we could show her in the Bible where it says that we need a prophet today, she would let us teach her. We showed her a couple of scriptures in the Bible that talk about prophets, but she still didn't seem convinced. Just as she was about to shut the door, her husband showed up. We continued talking about modern day prophets. He was shocked. He said that this was something that they had never even considered before and that they were having a hard time wrapping their minds around it. We left them with some different things to take a look at and invited them to pray about it, but the soonest time that they said that they could meet with us and really give us their full attention will not be for about 3 weeks. So, we will wait and we are praying that nothing happens to them in that time before we can meet with them.

On Sunday, we got a ride to church and then had the evening to spend in the area. By the time we had our meeting with the ward mission leader, Brother Loveridge, and ate dinner, the building was pretty much cleaned out of people. We thought about calling a member to drive us down closer to where we wanted to go, but decided instead just to walk there. It was about 3 miles with a busy road on one side and empty cornfield on the other. We felt like real missionaries. We only met two people on our walk. The second person, who we met just before we turned in to the neighborhood we were headed for, was a man named Travis. He has looked into lots of different religions, but still had a lot of questions and seemed a bit confused when he tried to explain exactly what he believes. He agreed to meet us at the church building on Thursday so that we can teach him there. It’s funny how every missionary story with finding investigators seems to happen at the very end. It usually has something to do with the last 5 minutes before heading home, or in this case, the last few steps before reaching our destination. It just reminds us over and over that the blessings don’t come at the beginning. They come after patient perseverance.

Then again, on Monday, we worked in the Trail Center and then had a member drop us off in one of the parts of our area. We knocked some doors and tried to check on some people, and then ended up at the home of a woman who Sister Kusnerik and I met in November. We had only talked to her for a moment because it was during a Husker game (oops!) She had told us to come back the next week, but we were not able to make it and had gone back since. The first thing that she told us when we got there was that her husband just died recently. At first, she was a little bit cold, but we warmed her up and were able to teach her a little bit, leave her with a copy of the Book of Mormon, and are going back to see her next week. It is amazing how timing works out when the Lord is directing the work. We always seem to be in the right place at the right time, even if things happen in an odd way.

The other, not so spiritual, highlight for the week was not a person, but a sandwich! We bought some Caribbean jerk marinade last Monday that looked delicious and decided to cook some chicken with it in a Crockpot. Then, we shredded the chicken, put it on sourdough bread (that we were given from Panera), topped it with provolone cheese slices, grilled pineapple rings (grilled on a George Foreman) and then grilled the whole thing in the George Foreman like a Panini with a little bit of butter on the bread so it got all golden and crispy. It was so good! Yummy. We made it twice. Yum yum!

Well, that’s all folks!

Love you so much!

Sister Melly