Better Late Than Never

The Week of 6/23

Amanda lives on the corner of Esther and Ellen

Sister Ruth and I live on the corner of Esther and Ellen, so the other day I decided to read more about Esther. I learned that she was a missionary in a way, too! She was super awesome and so courageous! I have learned a lot about being courageous this week. Sister Ruth already knows everyone so well, they know her so well, and she has so much more experience teaching that it was hard to get in a few words edgewise. I've been working on it am most often able to testify, rather than teach, but am getting better. She has been an awesome trainer. Yesterday we got to teach Jessica who is almost a month clean from smoking and she was pretty excited to see us. Her mom was also getting into the lesson, and it was so great! Their enthusiasm about the gospel was so exciting and we practically left high fiving. It felt like the MTC and was such a boost! Since then our lessons have been getting better and better. Tonight we are teaching Dennis and having another member dinner. We have so many investigators it's hard to keep them straight! It definitely keeps us busy and on our toes. Yesterday Sister Ruth was feeling very stressed so we asked the elders to give us blessings and they were amazing! Our blessings were so similar which made me realize how similar Sister Ruth and I are and how much we need each other as companions! 

​The other night we went out for dinner with an awesome member who is not afraid to say what she thinks! We got into this intense discussion about Word of Wisdom and child abuse which I was a little worried about, but when we shared an actual message with her it was amazing! She is struggling with her son who is being rebellious so we brought a talk from the Ensign about faithful parents and wayward children which she absolutely loved! Sister Ruth and I talked about how the church had changed our lives and how we had gone on missions even after hard things and she loved it. She couldn't stop telling us how cute we were and how much she loved us and how we were such good missionaries. She tried to get me dessert but when I said I didn't eat sugar she went back into the Word of Wisdom for a minute and how healthy I must be before making our waiter go back and get me a bag of chips to take home. She was awesome, it is so fun having dinners with members! They are so helpful and giving!

On Saturday we were going to help the Bryces with a garage sell, but they canceled it and took us to breakfast, instead. Sister Ruth and Sister Bryce knew each other fairly well so they were pretty chatty and I was being a little quiet when Brother Bryce suddenly started telling us all these stories from his mission when he was super outgoing and talked to everyone, telling me I needed to talk more. I tried to hop in the conversation, but he just kept talking! He started talking about placing Books of Mormon so I asked quickly if they read it as a family, which allowed us to teach them about reading as a family. They said they did for a while when things were really rough, but stopped after things got better, and even threw in the fact that they had a puppy, now. I'm not sure why that was also included, puppies are lovely but not as good as the Book of Mormon! We committed them to read and scheduled an appointment with them while their daughter is at girls camp. She is very interested in the church and we are hoping that she has a great experience and helps her family to be more motivated to work to getting back into the gospel, for the dad, and getting the rest of the family in the gospel. She also told us that there was a huge sale at Bed Bath and Beyond, and we were barely able to say that that place was great when she offered to go get us a bunch of stuff, which they dropped off at our house that night. She was such a sweet lady, we couldn't believe all the things they got for us! We saw Jocelynn, their daughter, at church yesterday, and she said her mom had loved us. This made sister Ruth super excited because she said missionaries had tried to teach her before but she didn't like them very much because they didn't explain things super well where she didn't have much of a religious background.