This week feels like... Forever... The added day between last p-day and this p-day doesn't help. Anyway, we had zone activity on Monday which was pretty fun. It was a scavenger hunt around the mall. Then Monday night we got a new investigator in the singles ward!! It was a member’s friend who came to dinner with them. We shared the 20 minute Joseph Smith video and it was so powerful! I love sharing about Joseph Smith because the Spirit is always so strong.
Tuesday was hard... It was my last day in ASL and Glendale.. We had lunch with Jason and William. I had a really hard time with that because I was saying goodbye to two really good friends for a long time. Then that night we had dinner with three more of my favorite members, Madeline, Bethany and Jordan. Getting transferred is the worst...
Wednesday we had transfer meeting. I'm now in the DC 3rd South area with Elder Hamblin who was my roommate in the MTC. It's super different.... It's a bike area for one, and it's like... The smallest area in the mission... It's so weird to actually have like... boundaries. It's new to me. Our area has the National Mall and our apartment is right down the street from Gallaudet! I'm Obama’s missionary right now. We're not teaching him... Yet... Haha, I need to find a way to contact him. So, the DC 3rd ward is split into four areas, and has two language groups too. So 12 missionaries in the ward. So, they do one meal for us a week. Wednesday nights. I got to go to that my first night. It was pretty fun. We convinced one of the sisters I was deaf and kept that going through the whole meal! It was awesome.
Thursday we did some shopping for me because I was out of food, and also transfers.. Then we weekly planned. We got two last minute appointments that day! It was awesome! They both went really well. We talked about Enos, and about family history. Friday was hard.. We didn't have anything set up, and Elder Hamblin wasn't feeling very up to going out and contacting all day, so we inside a lot... I got a lot of studies done and tried my best contact people in the building. We actually set one of the cleaning guys as a referral. He had been meeting with missionaries in Guatemala! Then we got outside and had a good lesson with a member. It was fun!
Saturday was similar.. So I organized a group of people we didn't know in the area and got Elder Hamblin to come and try to contact them with me. We did that for about 3 hours and then we came home and had dinner. Sunday we had church which was fun. We had a singing sacrament meeting, so people would get up and tell their favorite hymn and then we would sing a verse of it. I signed along with all the songs too. Then we had dinner with Ceasar. Afterwards, we had a lesson with an investigator –R-. She is on date to be baptized at the end of October. She originally met the Amharic missionaries, and talked with them for a while. They couldn't get anywhere with her so they passed her to us. After a while she called us and said she had fasted and prayed and knows that this is the church where she belongs!! We taught her the Plan of Salvation and she accepted everything and was super nice and she'll definitely get baptized! So that's really exciting! We walked home. We were at the opposite side of our area so that took a good hour, but it was fun!
Yesterday we had Elder Perkins tour! It was really cool because a couple weeks ago they had us all fill out a survey about Preach My Gospel and then the meeting was about the results of our survey. We, as a mission, need to focus more on chapters 9-11 of Preach My Gospel regarding finding and teaching. It was super awesome! He had so many good stories. I am really grateful for the meeting because it helped me keep motivated and helped refresh me! He shared a lot of stories, but one of my favorites was about a time when he was a mission president and they were having a conference with Elder Perry. They were doing a role play and he was supposed to contact Elder Perry. So, he started by asking how his day was and his family is doing and about 15 seconds in Elder Perry starts pounding his fist on the table saying "you took too long to get to the message of The Restoration!!" We need to tell people about that right away because it's what sets us apart. That was super powerful, and I'm going to be applying to my contacting more!
Today we've kinda just chilled at the apartment. Hopefully some of our buddies should be coming here soon though! I love you guys!!
