Oi! Guess what?! Today is my two month mark!! So crazy.
Anyways, how was everyone's Thanksgiving?? Mine was great so I hope yours was too!
We moved into our new apartment this week so here's my new address. I'm only here for two more weeks though so you probably won't even need it...
Sister Alia Yun Earls
1240 College Pkwy Apt. 814
Lewisville, TX 75077
Whelp it's been a fun week! A little slow since everyone was out of town or busy with family, but we had some dinner appointments and we were still able to have good lessons with the people that were here :)
Tuesday - Hmm we visited with Sister Starnes and shared some scriptures with her and asked her what she was thankful for. She's such a sweet old lady, but she's very sick so she doesn't come to church anymore :( We've visited with her a lot lately. Oh and we had dinner with the Stacey's (members) and Madga and her family. So Magda is the recent convert I mentioned in my last email and her son Noe got baptized when she did, but she has two other kids (Ashley and Isaac) who haven't committed to being baptized yet. It's so lame because they come to church every week and they love it and they've already made friends in the ward and they go to activities during the week, but something is still holding them back. We're planning on meeting with them again this week and figuring out why they are so hesitant about baptism. Noe is awesome though. He's 12 and he recently got the priesthood and he passes the sacrament every week :) Ashley is 16 and Isaac is 14 and they're awesome too, but I just really wanna know why they're not baptized yet...
Wednesday - Interviews! We had interviews with President Ames and I got the best news ever! Sister Richards (MTC companion) got her visa too! So we're both flying to Brazil on the same day, but we're not on the same flight which is super lame. I think we might have the same flight from Sao Paulo to Vitoria, but the long flight from the states is different. I'm flying to Atlanta first I think and she's flying to Florida. Oh also, the Elder from our MTC district (Elder Hendrickson) who got reassigned to Chicago got his visa and is flying out on the 15th too so he might be on one of our flights. Oh and during interviews, Sister Burraston asked President Ames if we could make a temple trip to the Dallas temple (which I guess is rare since it's not in our mission and missionaries only get to go every three months or something) since I'll be leaving soon and he said yes! Sis B is awesome! So we're probably going next Tuesday which means that our P day will probably be that day instead of Monday. Hmm what else did we do this day...We did a lot of tracting and handed out He is the Gift pass-along cards. And we met Jennifer Salvatori who has been an investigator for a while so it was nice to finally meet her. She confuses me though because she's Catholic and she believes basically everything that the missionaries have taught her, but she kinda wants to blend the two religions together. I don't know how else to explain it. And she believes that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that we have a prophet today, but she still likes the Catholic church...Anyways, we had dinner with the Cevello's who are an awesome family in the ward and then we stopped by Bishop Myres' house. He spoke to me in Portuguese and basically made me teach him Lesson 3 briefly haha he wanted to see how much I knew. Then we came back and taught the Leonard's. They're hilarious.
Thursday - Thanksgiving! We had weekly planning so our morning was busy and then we had a late lunch / early dinner with some members (the Olsen's). It was awesome! And they had a huge table of pies at the end haha I've never eaten so much pie in my life.
Friday - Not very many people were home, but we met with Sister Wilson (she serves in the Primary) and we had dinner with Briana at Chipotle. Oh and we met with the Elmer's who were actually the ones who introduced Briana to the church so that's cool. Oh and Mom sent me the best Christmas package so I was stoked on life.
Saturday - Moving day. Elder Proffit and Elder Kaelin helped us move to our apartment. It's actually pretty nice :) Oh this day was kinda sad because we had to drop an investigator (Maddison) :(((( We prayed a lot about it and we asked her as many questions as we could during the lesson to make sure that it was the right decision, but it was still hard. She just really didn't believe that anything that we'd been teaching was true and she wasn't progressing at all :( But, we did give her all of the tools that we could and we just encouraged her to keep searching and praying for truth.
Sunday - Church was super fun! Rachel Rogers gave her mission farewell. She would always come on exchanges with us when we taught Maddison. She'll be serving in Boise, Idaho. Oh and for third hour, we were all combined and some of the youth did this skit thing about missionary work that we helped plan with the ward mission leader. It was pretty funny. We had dinner with the Richins. They're such a fun family! I'm really gonna miss this ward. Seriously, the members are so stellar.
Sorry whoa this email is crazy long.
Oh by the way, if you haven't already, y'all should check out the new video that the church released for Christmas called He is the Gift. If you haven't heard of it, you can go tolds.org and it's right at the top I think or you can go to christmas.mormon.org and it's there with a bunch of other stuff. The church is going crazy with this initiative. It's kinda like the Because of Him video that they did for Easter, but they're going all out for this one. Like they're taking over the main YouTube page on Dec 7th with their advertisement and for the whole month of December, they're gonna have (I think) two big billboards in Times Square. It's crazy. And if you get the Ensign, they mailed out pass-along cards with every magazine so you can hand them out :) So yeah! Discover the Gift, Embrace the Gift, and Share the Gift this season!
Eu amo vocês!
Com amor,
Sister Alia Yun Earls
We had dinner with a recent convert (Briana) and she took us to Chipotle!!! I was so so happy! Really bad hair day, but it's all good because free Chipotle. Briana's awesome. She's only a couple of months older than me and she's almost to her year mark of being a member and she told us that she's thinking about serving a mission! She'd be an amazing missionary :) She's the only member in her family, but she's so strong.
We went tracting in a trailer park in Bartonville and this cat kept following us around at every door :) Missionary work is so fun haha even cats are joining in
We had dinner at the Cevello's and I got a little confused on how to label my cup...
We had Thanksgiving at the Olsen's (members)! So fun! And the had a huge backyard with this crazy long zipline. All the kids were on it and I really wanted to do it haha Thank goodness I was wearing a longer skirt. Poor Sister Meiners tried to do it after me, but she ended up falling off on her butt right away haha I felt so bad, but it was hilarious
We had to walk a mile and a half back to our car after our dinner appointment on Saturday with the Peltier's (we were running low on miles at the end of the month so we did some walking that day) and there was this random area of trees all covered in lights! It looked so pretty. The pic doesn't do it justice.
