Monday, February 6, 2017

The Lemon Dress

Hi Family Mine!

This week in the life of Sister Sabey, I told a member that I love quesadillas, so their ten year old insisted on making me a quesadilla.  Actually, he made me four. So that happened.

Transfer News: The "Two Transfer Curse" has been broken, and I am staying in Highland for a third transfer.  Sister Miller, on the other hand, is getting ready to leave her greenie area, so I will be getting a new companion on Wednesday.  We have been absolutely busy.  We've had so many teaching appointments with active families and even a few investigators that we don't have time to fit everyone in during a week.  It's awesome! I love getting to teach.

We have one, potentially two new friends.  Both were being taught by Elders, but they wanted to be taught by sisters, so we are getting to help.  Our friend that we made this week is named Nicole.  She already has a testimony of the Book of Mormon, it's really just helping her make good friends in her area and that will help her see just how much the Gospel of Jesus Christ allows her to reach beyond what she ever thought could be her full potential.  We are also meeting with Ashley this upcoming week, so news to come on that.  The trick for us will be coordinating with leadership that we don't know since neither or them are actually in our area.

This week was filled with funny moments, so I'm going to talk about that.  At the old folks home this week, I was talking to a lady named Opal.  She's the one that yodels.  She is so sweet and her memory loss is extremely advanced.  It's so sad, but she's awful fun to talk to.  She asked if she could sleep at my house, so I told her she could and that we could make waffles in the morning.  Then she asked me "What's a waffle?"  Turns out, it's harder to explain what a waffle is than I thought.  Some other people there asked if one of the Elders was my brother.  I asked if he was behaving himself and they told me no.  I love the old folks home.

If I haven't told y'all, I don't particularly like praying in front of groups.  At church in one of our wards, our ward mission leader always asks whether it's my turn or Sister Miller's turn to say the prayer.  It's always Sister Millers turn.  He finally caught onto the fact that I say that, so now he's started insisting it's always my turn to pray and then laughs at me.  So this time, I thanked Heavenly Father for "these people that I put up with" and then asked Heavenly Father to "bless Brother Ethridge to have a good time watching the Super Bowl".  He said it was his favorite prayer.

I hope those stories were enjoyable.  If not, here is my favorite funny story of the week.  Sister Irvin has a lemon dress.  She got it at Goodwill for $7 at the beginning of her mission, so the entire mission knows it as "Sister Irvin's Lemon Dress".  Some of the sisters in her zone (she's in Higley zone) wanted her to wear it last Tuesday to a zone meeting, but it was dirty.  She promised to wear it on Friday.  So on Friday, she texts those sisters and asks, "Hey, did you still want me to wear the lemon dress?"  A few minutes goes by, and I guess they had tried to text Sister Irvin earlier to remember to wear it.  They texted back and said, "Oh no... We sent that to Elder Ashton."  Now, Elder Ashton is the "Fleet Coordinator" in the mission, so he is in charge of cars and bikes.  He and his wife are a senior couple, and he is stricter than strict.  To describe how he is with driving, Sister Irvin puts it, "If you are going to even think about getting behind the wheel, you had better have Jesus in your soul." And on top of that, Elder Ashton will completely sass anyone about anything.  You do not want to get on Elder Ashton's bad side.  So in the early hours of Friday morning, Elder Ashton received a text that said, "Don't forget to wear the lemon dress!! :)"

Now onto miracles:  Kyle committed to at least praying about a baptism date!  We also met a family that our bishop has been wanting us to see for ever.  They never answer the door, but we were finally able to meet them, and set up a return appointment.

One night we were having a particularly hard time finding motivation, so Sister Miller and I decided to try something that Sisters Irvin and Angeloudis had done that they said worked.  We did five push-ups with claps in between and then went out to work.  They said after they did it, they saw miracles.  Well.... it actually ended up being more like five attempted flops that left me flat on my face, but I guess the Lord wasn't judging the quality of my pushups because we still saw miracles.  We met another family that never answers, set up a return appointment, and got a phone number to confirm with them before we come.

We also have a member of our ward who I've been worrying about.  She's a recent convert and she only speaks Portuguese.  I learned that one of the Spanish sisters in the mission can speak Portuguese as well as one or two ladies in that ward, so we decided to set something up so we could get to know her a little better.  Sister CedeƱo was super excited to speak Portuguese again, so we got to know her.  I found out that the member, Roberta, understands Spanish.  Now I can at least talk to her in both of us speaking broken Spanish at church.  She seems very lonely, so that was nice.

There is another member of our ward who is coming back to church and we finally got to go have a lesson with her.  We have been teaching members the Restoration lesson to get them excited about missionary work, so that's what we did with Melissa.  It was a great lesson, and her testimony is solid.  But she has a six year old daughter who was bouncing off the walls and would completely ignore Melissa when she told her daughter to stop.  It was really frustrating because I didn't know how to help and I wanted it to be a good experience.  We got through the lesson the best we could and then we got to the First Vision (Joseph Smith History 1:16-17).  President Nattress said that the Spirit always came so strongly when he would quote the First Vision. I hadn't had a super powerful experience with it, but it always invited the Spirit.  So I would continue to quote it.  That night, however, when I quoted it, the little girl actually sat down and for those twenty seconds was completely attentive.  After, she was back to goofing off, but even so, it wasn't as disruptive to the lesson.  There is power in simple declarations of truth, and I am so happy I got to witness that.

I love you so much family!  I pray for you every day.  I hope you are all doing well, and I can't wait to hear from you.  Until next week!

Sister Emily

1001 N Burk Street
Gilbert, AZ
85234

January in Arizona

 I gave a horse a bath and then braided its tail

 My high score is 20

No comments:

Post a Comment