Hey dad! It as indeed been quite the year. I can NOT believe its been a whole year! Mission time is crazy. It's definitely true that days feel like a week. And weeks feel like a day. And I might add that apparently a year feels like 6 seconds.
At the mission devotional last night president eaton said something way cool that everyone needs to hear. I think a lot of people nowadays tailor Christ's teachings to however they want to live. Instead of tailoring themselves to fit Christ's teachings. President said it's like creating your own diet. No matter how much you want or say that brownies will make you lose weight, the fact is that they don't and that veggies and exercise are the way. Christ told us the way to live with our Father in Heaven and with our families perfectly happy forever. He provided the way. It's our job to follow him, not to change His way. In fact we cant. So don't try. Just submit to God's will and you will get where you want to be:)I love that! Have a greaaat week!Love Sister Erin Orr
MOM:)
I love this new ward and companion! I am seriously stoked about these current circumstances! You wouldn't believe how perfect this all is! Sister Westover is bomb! She is from Midvale, Utah and we are just very similar and get along well. It's nice to have someone so like me. We have a lot of fun! The ward is cool! I have met some awesome people. I LOVE the Lopez's. They are seriously so funny and sarcastic and I just want to be best friends with them. (this is a family that Jared met on his mission and he's really close with them)
Also we are teaching an incredible lady named Libby. She is getting baptized on the 28th! She has NO religious background so she is just a sponge. But, she has always done a lot of meditating in the past and I think that has helped her become in tune with the spirit! She recognizes the feelings of the spirit so quickly and just knows and loves this gospel already! She gets so excited about new truths and things becoming clear to her. It is such a privilege to be a part in helping her get ready for baptism! We just talked about temples and family history. There is a family history discovery center at the church right behind the Seattle temple and president just told us we can now take investigators with a baptismal date there! So we are all going this week! I'm crazy excited! And we get to take Libby to walk on the temple grounds. She's gonna love it!
It has been downPOURING this week!! So much rain! And because of that no one is outside, so we get to do a lot of tracting. Whoo! I don't even do my hair in the morning because its just going to be soaked all day anyways. Or makeup. One day we went tracting and it was raining so hard and no one was listening and it was so tempting to cut our finding hour a little bit short BUT we did not and at the very end as we were finding our way back to the car we met a girl named Jalleyah who is the bomb and is looking for the true church and wants us to introduce our message to her sister as well. Blessings!
The craziest thing happened Saturday night. So we were sleeping and we started hearing this banging sound and Sister Westover thought it was some one hammering upstairs but I thought it sounded like someone knocking on our bedroom door. It was 3:00 am. and it was loud and scary! And it happened all night! We didn't sleep and we were scared as heck! I thought if I opened the door I would no doubt get stabbed. Well, a member of our ward is the apartment manager so we asked her if she knew anything about the banging. and she said that the lady who lives above us got locked out on her balcony at 10 pm and was stuck out there in the freezing rain until 6 am she was trying to get peoples attention all night! We felt SO bad! We brought the poor lady some brownies when we got home from church!
We stopped at a senior living center and visited a member lady who said that in our letters home this week we should mention that we visited the "crazy house". Haha, she is a hoot! She gave us the full tour and introduced us to almost every single person there.
It snowed for like 8 seconds so that was new. Everyone freaked out.
There is seriously a lake in front of our apartment complex that wasn't there before the rain came. It's left us about 6 inches of dry path so we can still get to our apartment, but it wont be long before we have to break out some kayaks or something to get home.
The only really progressing investigators we have are Libby and another named Corrina who is amazing. She just wants to get baptized so bad! Which is way exciting! But other than them we don't have a super solid teaching pool so we will be building that up!
I'm excited for your package to come! Hopefully I will get it tomorrow! The nice thing about my last area was that the mission office was like 4 inches away from my house. So Sister Young would call me as soon as a package arrived to come pick it up. But now I have to wait till district meetings again. I guess thats a first world problem. There's a girl serving here from Papua New Guinea and it takes a YEAR to get a letter from home. So I guess I can't complain. :)
I LOVE you. Hope the primary program goes swell. You should have emily critique for some quality constructive feedback. Primary programs are her specialty! :)
Have an amazing week!
LOVE sister Erin Orr
