First of all, I dedicate this letter to Mi Mummsie-pants Jo :) HEPPY BIRTHDAYY (tomorrow) and sorry I didn't get your letter in the mail yet, I didn't have time to write it last p day so it will be late.
Anyways...
I've literally laughed more this week than I did all last transfer. 100 funny things happened and here they are:
1. The STL's (Sister Pickett and Sister Menlove) tried to poison the whole zone.
It's Thursday morning, which means district meeting. We all arrive around 10 am to study before the meeting starts at 10:30. When Sister Casey and I got there the Sisters were out front of the building picking some berries off a bush. Apparently they had got there 10 minuets early, which is clearly too early to start studying--so being the adventurers they are, they went into the creepy basement to explore! In there excursion, they found a heavy door covered in spider webs. Immediately, both of them sensed a strong desire to find out what lied behind it! So they cautiously pried the door open to find 100 more bugs, but behind the bugs were some stairs…they followed the rickety stairs into the open air to find themselves locked out of the building. They looked around for a bit, being on the far side of the church, a place they had never ventured before. When, from out of the corner of their eyes, shown beautiful bright red juicy berries covering a row of bushes. "We must try them!" they exclaimed and scurried over to them. They tasted them and decided to call them "sugar berries" because they were the sweetest things these sisters had ever tasted. After picking as many as would fit into their hands, they rushed to the front doors to find us and the other missionaries--having desires such as Lehi's to share the berries they knew to be most desirable above all other berries! On there way the decided to make the berries more presentable they would crack open a big green pokey ball they found that had fallen from a tree (strange side note about Pennsylvania: Weird things grow on their trees…they are all around the size of a tennis ball, same in color as well. Some look like a brain and are called "monkey brains" some are soft like and others are spiky!) Being crafty, they split the pokey ball open and made it like a bowl. Then carefully, they placed the precious berries inside. On there way to the primary room (where our district meets) they ran into us, the zone leaders, and the reading 1 elders and sisters. With excitement they told us to try the berries! We all looked at them with skepticism, especially after finding out the origin of the berries. We all knew it was a bad idea…but the sisters made them look so good! Elder Park was the first one to try them, they were good! Sister Pickett ate another to show me that they were quite tasteful so I tried one as welll and it was the sweetest most desirable berry I had ever tasted. Elder Hardy followed suite and so on until most of us had eaten the berries. Many of us ate multiple berries! One of the elders, being very wise, snatched a picture of the berries and scurried away to the family history center immediately after district meeting to find out more about these shiny red berries. About an hour after we had begun our weekly planning, we got a call from the Zone Leaders asking if we were alive. Apparently the berries we had been gladly snacking on were Yew Berries. aka bad news. If you eat 3 of them…you die, but only if you eat the seeds. Luckily none of us ate the seeds because sister pickett warned us that they were nasty. Oh and come to find out, the golden serving in reading 1 knew the whole time what kind of berries they were and that we shouldn't eat them. hmmmm….But none of us died so it's all good.
Morals of the story:
Don't eat berries from the wild…even if they are planted in front of a church building and you check to see that the squirrels eat them too.
Use your own brain when people you trust try to offer you things you know are bad
Speak up when you know your friends are "eating poison" or doing something that could be spiritually fatal.
2. ZONE CONFERENCE!
Go down the road to Emmaus,
Follow the star to Bethlehem,
And eat a sandwich in Nazareth.
That's how zone conferences go :). We had zone conference this week, which means road trip with sister menlove and pickett. :) We laughed the entire way there…mostly about the berry incident and what would happen if word got to president…ha. We were instructed about patience and it was really good, then we watched meet the mormons :) ISN'T IT GOOD!? (I'm pretty sure Spencer probably watched it this week also, all of the US missions were instructed to watch it this week) I really liked the coach, and also the humanitarian and everyone else. It was so inspiring! And guess what else it it….THE PERFECT MEMBER MISSIONARY TOOL! Unfortunately the closest place for people to go see it is Staten Island but it will be coming out soon on netflix and youtube so everyone can see it! YAY!
We had a LA we're working with call us and tell us that she is leaving the church…no bueno. So we went and did some damage control there, she got offended by a not very nice lady in the ward. Sister Ballard is doing better now though and coming to church next week.
We've been doing a lot of cleaning up the ward list lately, meaning finding all of them members we don't know, and if we don't know them then they are usually less active or have moved. During this ongoing project, we knocked on Theresa Wade's door. She is a young mother with beautiful long brown hair, she had big rubber gloves on like she had been scrubbing something or another. She joined us on her porch even though it was pitch black out and explained her situation. Her husband is very very anti to the church. The elders stopped by a couple times and he thought she can set them up to come so he got really mad at her. I felt so sad for her, she had the desire to be apart of the church but couldn't if she wanted her marriage to be a thing. Not knowing what else we could do, I asked her if we could pray with her. She said yes and I said the prayer. It was simple but when I was done, she was in tears, "it's been such a long time since I've prayed" We gave her big hugs and left before her husband knew we had been there. I've been praying for her because that's all we can do at this point.
On a happier note: Stacey VonStettin! She is one of our investigators, she was baptized a couple years ago but ditched out on her confirmation. We've been trying to set something up with her for ages but she just started a new job and she's one of those "one thing at a time" kind of people. We stopped by on Monday night on a whim and she happily set up an appointment for thursday! yay! We brought Heather Anderson (yw from the ward) and taught the plan of salvation to stacey and her two little boys, Colton and Slater. (8 and 6 I think) They loved it! we used the cut out's I made a while ago. yay.
I have 4 more things to share…2 about food and 2 that are bad…I think I'll share the food part first :)
1. I had a genius moment this week after someone gave us salsa and sour cream:
get a bowl
put in a dollop of sour cream
spoon in some salsa
mix
eat with tortilla chips.
it's 100 better than salsa alone. try it.
2. Tajin.
I'm not sure if I've told you about Tajin. Its a spice thing mexicans eat on allllll fruit! and it's sooooo tasty, find some and sprinkle it on all of your fruit, if you put it on something that is not citrus squeeze some lime juice on it first. YUM
Now to the bad stuff:
1. Sister Casey might maybe have appendicitis….
symptoms: pain on her right side, below her ribs.
is that appendicitis? it's been going on for 2 weeks apparently. and we called Sister Anderson and she her to do the exact opposite of what the missionary health guide said to do…strange. we need some google or web md!
2. We found 1 bed bug.
I don't think we have bed bugs though but we're going through the motions and precautions…aka spraying Permetherine on everything, washing everything we own on HOT, moving our beds away from the walls (they are now awkwardly in the middle of the room) and putting the legs of our beds in bowls of water (they can't swim)
Want to hear the way we found out we had a bed bug?? So Sunday morning, Sis C found a bug and was looking at it real weird. She said she thought it was a tick so I took a peek…Nope, not a tick and I continued to get ready for the day. She cautiously put it in a ziplock and brought it with us to church. Something I thought was rather strange because she didn't tell me she thought it was a bed bug at this point. She pulls it out to ask the elders after ward council…they had no idea. So she asked that smart elder that figured out those berries were poison what it was. He took it with him and we greeted people for church. Then he came back and said we should follow him. So we followed him to the family history center to find the spanish elders and ZL's there too: He broke the news to us. And all the elders proceeded to tell us what we should do and stuff…they have all had bed bugs out here apparently. That night the ZL's came over to our apt to bring us the permetherine. When they went to get it out of the bag they put it in, they realized it had spilled everywhere. They ended up dumping half of it down the sink and mixed up the rest in a spray bottle for us. They also gave sister casey a blessing because we had just connected the dots to possible appendicitis a few hours earlier and she was in a lot of pain. Elder Park did the anointing and forgot the words in english half way through so he awkwardly switched to spanish to finish. It was a little bit funny.
So regardless of that bad stuff that happened this week, we had a lot of happy smiles! Here's why. I got to talk to Sister Menlove on Thursday while Sister Casey was in the bathroom, I explained to her how things have been going. Sister Casey started doing this thing where she would jump down my throat every time I would say anything…it was really strange so I just stopped talking to her if I didn't have to. Sister M gave me a challenge to serve Sister C 7 times a day. Challenge accepted. It worked like magic! She started being nice to me. waaalaaa!
Everything's good over here. We are going hiking with Sister Pickett and Sister Menlove this afternoon. It's getting cooler but not cold yet. I'm slowly cracking open my space bags full of cold weather things. The leaves are changing, they change a lot slower here which is wonderful :). Have a happy happy week! Love you!!
Love you to the squishy and back!
Sister Bailey
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