Aug 12

There are weeks where you have a lot of lessons, a lot of news, or, a lot of service. That was one of those weeks. We had a service project nearly every day, one to help a woman in the ward unpack and rearrange things, one to weed a flower bed of another, another day to paint the house of a non-member, and the most memorable would be cleaning our investigator's kitchen. 

She's around 80 years old and has terrible health, which we attribute partly to the fact she does not have a very clean kitchen. So one day we just went over there, threw out bad food (which Sister Loy had to do because Sis. Walker and I didn't even know what half of it was), cleaned the counters, did all the dishes on the counter clean or not because even the "clean" weren't that clean, and scrubbed the outside of the cupboards. There was still a lot of work to do when we left, so we decided to enlist the elders to help us finish it up. They just happened to have a painting service project at their investigator's house the next day, so we did a deal where if they helped us finish cleaning the kitchen we would help paint at their investigator's. I thought it was a great deal since I love painting, but what we didn't realize until afterwards was that we had another painting project the following morning as well, and we painted for hours. Needless to say we were exhausted by the end of the week and out of clean service clothes, but we accomplished a lot.

We also had Zone Conference this past week about opening our mouths to invite people to learn about the gospel. We had different workshops, one really fun one on practicing using clues around you to open up a conversation and talk to people instead of awkwardly going up and asking them flat-out if they'd be interested in religion. Our district leader then made it a competition within the district to see who could extend an invitation about the gospel to the most people, whether or not they accept. 

So yesterday while we were in the Asian market, I saw a woman looking over an odd vegetable, and not knowing exactly how that was going to lead into the gospel, I asked her if she knew the name of it in English. She only knew it in her native language which was Tagalog, and I don't even remember exactly how we got into it, except that it involved an embarrassingly extensive list of questions about the vegetable before she asked what my nametag was for. Ha! It's always exciting when they're the first to mention the church - but she'd seen a lot of missionaries in the Philippines, and even though it turned out she's really active in her current church, it was a neat experience meeting so many people as I tried harder to talk to everybody, as awkward as it can be at times.

Sunday one of our investigators disappeared - their trailer was gone, and their neighbor had no idea where they went. We were devastated, as she was on date, and they were such a good family! They were screening our calls, and we didn't know where the wife worked, so that night we just prayed that somehow we'd be able to get in contact with them. The next day we randomly decided to call them again, and the wife answered! She told us where they'd moved, and that she wanted to keep learning, so we hope to be able to continue teaching her soon, but she now lives with her mother-in-law who's Buddhist, so we can't teach her at their house just yet. But in spite of current complications, we're just happy that they're still nearby and we can still keep in contact with her, and continue to pray that we'll be able to meet with her soon.

Love you!

Sister Dunster