11 months in field :)

Good morning everyone! Or afternoon where you are I guess...

This week was a little crazy. I guess the peak of the craziness was when we got a call from President Chesnut on Monday night. For those of you that don't know, that's never really a good sign unless it's your birthday. He asked us to train at the MLC we had last Friday. So Sister Anderson and I trained on how to become converted as a missionary to all the zone leaders, sister training leaders, assistants to the President, and President and Sister Chesnut. That is possibly the most terrifying thing I've done in my life. Good news is I didn't pass out so I can pretty much do anything now!

In other more terrifying news, spiders are everywhere. On Monday night we were teaching the restoration to this couple and all was going well until we got to the Great Apostasy. I was talking about it when suddenly the wife's eyes got super big and Sister Anderson screamed and jumped up and I followed. As I looked back, I saw this huge spider run across the couch that I was just sitting on. Apparently the spider was hiding behind me and was running toward Sister Anderson. So that was pretty terrifying.

Then a day or two later in companion study I saw this huge piece of fuzz on Sister Anderson's chair. Or at least I thought it was fuzz until it moved. Turns out it was this huge spider with yellow triangles on its butt and bright green fangs that turn blue when it's angry. After a minor freak out, we caught it in a jar and put some foil over the top of it to lock it in. I may or may not have shaken the jar a few times, and that may or may not have been how we found out its fangs change color.

Anyways, asides from the many spiders we saw this week, actual missionary work did happen! Here's some miracles of the week:

Monday we somehow recovered from terrifying spiders attacking us and had a pretty great lesson about the restoration :)

Tuesday we had burgers for dinner. Those of you that don't see that as a miracle can stop reading.

Wednesday we helped one of our investigators, Kimberly, organize her house. She was in labor as we helped her and we helped her get everything together to head to Sacramento that night to have her baby. The miracle would be that she didn't have the baby on the bus ride to Sacramento haha.

Thursday we somehow miraculously finished planning our training!

Friday we had MLC! We both didn't pass out giving our training and I got to see a bunch of my friends that I don't get to see much outside of MLC.

Saturday we had an amazing lesson with this new couple that we're teaching! :) they had tons of questions about the church but they were both very open minded. We ended up teaching them the restoration and the plan of salvation. They told us we cleared up so many of their questions and things and they invited us back to teach them more.

Sunday we had the best miracle yet! It actually starts earlier in the week. On Thursday or so we got a call from this lady living in Sparks and she told us about one of her coworkers that had been asking questions. She asked him if he wanted to meet with the missionaries and he said yes and called us and gave us all his info. We set up a time to meet with him and taught him the plan of salvation on Sunday. The Spirit was sooo strong in that lesson as he shared experiences with us and shared with us that the things we were teaching him were things he believed. We invited him to read the Book of Mormon and pray and set up a time to meet with him later this week. Then, a couple hours later we got a text from him thanking us for teaching him. He told us that he had been answering the questions at the back of the plan of salvation pamphlet with the scriptures listed and had been receiving answers to questions he'd had for years. So we're pretty pumped to be teaching him!

Welp this is probably my last week in this area. And I know I've said that every transfer for the last few transfers, but this transfer I'm basically guaranteed that I'll be transferred. It's really weird to think about considering I've been in this area for longer than I went to Purdue and to think that I have less time left on my mission than I've been in this area. But anyways this week we'll give another training on a different topic (thanks elders -_-), meet with some awesome investigators, and go to the temple! It'll be a pretty busy week! :)

Love y'all!
Sister Ashley Gootee :)