One full year on the mission! I am soooo blessed to be able to be able to be out here 🙂 I love getting to see miracles in this work! I love how my testimony has been strengthened during this past year! I love how the Lord is helping me to grow and change daily! I love being a missionary! I was thinking about it and if it were an option to serve a mission for two years I would totally sign on for another year! But that isn’t an option, so I’m going to try work hard and try and make these last six months really count 🙂 I love this work! “This isn’t missionary work, this is missionary fun!” 🙂
So this week we received a referral for this girl that didn’t live in our area. The missionaries who gave us the referral told us that she would prefer Sisters over Elders. So into the elders area we went to a very ghetto side of town. All these children were running around everywhere and the adults that were there either looked at us like we were crazy or they just looked stoned. It was an apartment complex that looked pretty run down. In the front there was a mud hole, about 3 feet across and maybe6 inches deep in the very middle that the kids were using as a swimming pool. We were the only white people so we kind of stood out. One little girl ran up and gave me a huge hug! I still have no idea who she was. We finally found the referral and went in to talk with her. She called her kids to come sit down and we ended up teaching like 6 people including some random neighborhood children. When we left we told them we would be back on Sunday. Yesterday we went back over and the kids met us in the yard of the apartment complex telling us that their mom was sick. Before we could leave a little 2 or 3 year old boy came up and took both my hands and just leaned against me wanting to be loved. One little girl grabbed a hand he was holding onto and began inspecting in, mesmerized by the fact that she could see my veins. A different little girl went behind me and stood there petting my hair. A third girl took my scriptures out of my hand so she could hug my arm. All the other kids gathered around us wanting to talk with us and read our name tags. A little boy named Bubba kept telling us stuff, but he was too young for us to understand him so the other children had to translate for us. It was so precious and I just wanted to take them all home with me. I’m positive this is why the Lord didn’t send me on a foreign mission. I don’t know how much of that I could take. They were all such sweet children who just want love.
(after a zone meeting)
We had a chance to visit with our less active that came to church last week and we had a good lesson with her. She had read from Alma 18 in the Book of Mormon and we asked her what her thoughts were on it and she started talking about how bad society is today and how mean and evil people are. The she said, “Sometimes I wish I was Ammon and could just chop everyone’s arms off with a machete!” It was pretty much hilarious! (Alma 17)
This week there was a fantastic Relief Society Activity that we got to bring a few investigators to! Linda Fuller is a lady in our ward that specializes in Cajun cooking so she taught as all a few tricks 😉 Sister Fuller does competition cooking and she travels all over winning all the competitions she enters 🙂 She said, “The secret to Cajun cooking, is cooking with love.” So every time we are adding flavor we just need to remember that we are adding more love. At one point she was working on the rue for a dish and she said, “Let’s just add another stick of butter for flavor.” And that, my friends, is how the south cooks. You want something to taste a little better, no problem, just throw another stick of butter in there! No wonder so many missionaries gain a few extra pound when they serve down here lol Our investigators had a good time and we definitely enjoyed the activity as well 🙂 We learned how to make jambalaya, crawfish etouffee, bread pudding, and gumbo 🙂 Yum, yum, yum! The best part of the activity was when we all got to eat it at the end 🙂 My stomach was very happy 🙂 There is nothing quite like some good Cajun cooking 🙂
So do you remember the man we met a few weeks back that came running after us shouting, “Hey do you have a Book of Normon?” Well… Since then we have been able to meet with him 3 other times! Last week he accepted a baptismal date and by our second visit with him he had already ready up to chapter 16 in the Book of Mormon! Yesterday we got to talk with him about prophets and he loved the idea of there being a modern day prophet leading Christs church today on the earth. We told him to pray about it and he said, “I will pray about it, but I already know that what you said is true. It’s right.” It was fantastic! Things are going so good with him 🙂
Miracles and blessings from the Lord 🙂
I love you and the church is true!
Sister Mignonne Rogers 🙂
Sister Mignonne Rogers 