Happy New Year!

We kicked it off with a supercool joint priesthood-relief society lesson on guess what? MISSIONARY WORK! Actually it was more just inviting everyone to get to know their neighbors and giving them deadlines to do it. There are very many weaksauce excuses for not sharing your testimony, but I greatly dislike the excuse, “I don't know any nonmembers.” Well whose fault is that? How are you supposed to love you neighbor as yourself if you've never said more than Hi, bye and please turn that down, to them?

Anyway, we did work hard at that lesson, we handed out family mission plans for people to fill out, that we can follow up on, we showed the preach my gospel video and we called people ahead to roleplay for us. Meeting the neighbors, segueing to a gospel subject, testifying at every opportunity, talking to everybody, from the plane, to the store to your own family. I really liked some of the roleplays. Brother Brown opened up his scriptures 'on the plane' and sat there smugly just expecting Brother Poli to just ask about it.... “So, are you going to eat those
peanuts?”. It's all right, he rolled with it, gave him the imaginary peanuts and just told him about the Book of Mormon anyway. This ward has a good sense of humor.

Our ward mission leader has kind of a cool idea to have the ward missionaries go around and work with people to do missionary work in their homes, just like we do. It's a good idea, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe it will at least help people go and do their home teaching. Scripture study + Visiting/Home teaching + Family History work = Successful ward. Because there's about 20 multi-faith families in the
ward, that's an excellent source for our teaching pool, and we've visited quite a few of them, but if they don't already know someone in the ward or are used to the idea of people coming by to share spiritual messages, they're not going to be very open to us.

We went to get some things for a dinner we were invited to on New Year's and had to go down an unfavorable isle of the store to get some Martinelli's juice. NOBODY was making eye contact with us as we walked down the liquor isle. It was pretty funny. We grabbed our grape juice and 6 lil plastic cocktail glasses and tried to leave, but an older lady in one of the other aisles said, 'Hey Sisters!' and it turned out she belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Israel and used to be a tour guide at the Kirtland Temple. She started to sing us her favorite song from the LDS hymnbook, so we stood there by the cough syrup singing, “As I have loved you, love one another...” with her and listened to her stories about taking the Osmonds through the temple. Never a dull moment.

And my poor companion. She always gets in trouble for looking cute. This is why I don't wear makeup. That day some older Hispanic man who comes into the visitor center a lot was winking at her at a restaurant and started walking toward her and she had to run for it. Today, we were getting groceries at el Walmart and some guy who was a little challenged dropped an excellent pick up line, “So has anyone ever told you, you look just like Dolly Parton? But you're prettier. No really...” And proceeded to start telling her all the things about her that were purtier when I
quite subtley said, “Happy New Year!” and moved her along. My last companion, Sister Cameron, same problem. Some guy, slightly inebriated, walked up to us as we were walking back to our apartment started up a conversation with her, so I gave him a pass-a-long card and wished him a good day and good bye. Our college neighbors asked Sister Cornell if “mission ladies could like, date,” And what her weekend plans were. “Nope! Thanks for your time!” and away we go. President apparently trusts me as a bouncer. I do my best.

As you can be it's been a highly spiritual week. Actually it has. It always is. I've found a hidden talent for getting people into the God's Plan for His Family presentation when they were only planning on seeing the nativities. I shanghaied group of 3 that turned out to be a grandma, daughter and grandson. It was neat. And the daughter was the oldest of 10. So I told her all about being raised by Lisa, more or less, and testified about how cool my family is and how that closeness simply
wouldn't have happened with the Gospel. They didn't have much time, but what I said was true and they were open enough to feel that, and all three of them loved the visitor center, but the grandma said, “I've been studying about Judaism, but I've decided to change my focus. This was really interesting. I'm going to find out more about this church.” She wasn't up to meeting missionaries, but I gave her some good materials and just felt warm and fuzzy. I could tell this seed of faith landed on some very fertile ground and some elders somewhere are going to be excited when they meet this woman and her 10 kids and bajillon grandkids all open to learning the Gospel.

Anyway, life's good. Thank you for the support and letters and 3 tapes and influences. The gospel's true and it's the best cause in the world.

Love ya,
Hermana Deb