FAMMMMMILLLLLLYYYYYYY!
This has been probably one of the most ridiculous weeks of my life. Period.
Lessons Cancelled. Lots of driving. And quite a few referral's.
So after our flat tire incident last week we had to take the car in to get the tire fixed. We didn't plan things out very well though and after handing over our keys, we realized that we had no way to get back to our apartment five miles away, and our car would be in the shop for about the next two and a half hours.
We walked across a field-which last week was a Mexican Circus...literally...you think I'm probably making that up but I'm not. It smelled of Elephant poo and still had some trailers around that we were sure had Zebras and Lions...but anyway. We walked across this field to Wal-Mart where Sister Staker printed some pictures that she had forgotten, and I sat close looking through a wedding/photography magazine. We then realized that it was passed lunch and we still had no car. So after eating at a McDonalds in Wal-Mart, we 're sitting there talking, and Sister Stake gasps and unfolds MY empty wrapper to revile a tiny little...bug. In my wrapper. It looked like a tiny cochroach. I may have thrown up. So then we tromped back through the Circus field with weak stomachs to go and wait for out car. We felt a little bit like hobbits walking through a wasted land. But that might have just been us. But anyways...
We get our car back and we start driving to a less active members house on our list, when the phone starts ringing. The person calling was actually the member we were going to see...only we didn't have an appointment, we were just going to stop by. After a confused half a second I realized that we had called her while going through our 600 contacts in our phone and she was just returning our call. But anyways...
We had a special zone meeting and President Interviews this week. It was really good. At one point we were doing a Spanish study for the Spanish Missionaries, and we were translating someone giving a talk. So one of us would pretend to be giving a talk and the other would translate it into Spanish. Since being in this Spanish Branch where almost all of the speakers speak English and are from other wards, we have a lot of translating. I have wanted to be the translator so bad, but let's be honest, it terrifies me. But after doing this practice, I felt a lot better about it. Sister Staker and I have been practicing doing it and I have a goal to translate in sacrament meeting at some point on my mission. Our Spanish study went something like this:
Sister Staker: "So Joseph Smith went to a grove of trees to pray and ask God which church was true and which he should join."
Me: Entonces Jose Smith fue a un grove of trees para orar y preguntar a Dios cual iglesia fue verdadero y debo reunirse."
We've had some laughing fits over our lack of Spanish words when we're put on the spot and are trying to go fast.But anyways...
President Slaughter gave an awesome training to us of the "First Visitation" and the four different accounts that the church has from different letters and journals from Joseph. They're always good. He mentioned that the church has a website josephsmithpapers.org where a lot of the documentation and records are. It's on my list of things to read when I come home.
Saturday Morning, we had a whole day packed with lessons and things to do, and I woke up and was stretching...and I basically broke my neck. Not really, but it felt like it. Something popped really loud in the left side of my neck and it hurt to move and turn it the rest of the day. I had a sock filled with rice that I have been warming up the last couple of days. I felt like a fool. But it's gotten better. I was just being a cry baby the whole day. All of our appointments fell through and we ended up looking for formers and less actives. We actually had some neat experiences talking to people. We got in finally got in contact with a less active the previous sisters had told me about, James May, and his family was actually in town. His parents told us to keep him at the top of our list. His Girlfriend had just started taking the lessons when I was transferred here, but we lost contacted with him all of last transfer. Miracles.
I've also been trying to be better at asking people who they know that would be interested in our message, and it's one of my transfer goals to just ask everyone no matter what. It was awesome to see how many people we contacted who responded with telling us of people they knew.
Also on Wednesday, we got out to Pleasanton and after a lesson and getting our feet stuck in the mud from the rain in the morning, we realized that our mud caked shoes wouldn't do, so we ran quickly to the store and got rain boots. But neither of us wanted the boots with a little wedgey heal and a bow, so instead we got like farmer in the field boots. They're pretty stylish. So we tromped around the rest of the day like we owned the town. Sister Staker said she felt like Shrek. I don't blame her.
This week while studying in our Mission Study packet "Be Not Moved" we have been studying the Book of Mormon this week. Many of the talks we read emphasized the point that when it comes to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, there is no grey area. It's either true or it is not. I loved how straightforward it was. Learning through this, I have realized just how much our testimonies have to go through the Restoration in order to get to Christ and his Atonement. We can't believe anything fully in the church unless we have a testimony that Joseph Smith is the Prophet of the Restoration. And if we truly believe that Jesus is the Christ, the truth will point us back to the Book of Mormon and the Restoration. There is no other way. it's like the verse in 2 Nephi which says
"...hearken unto these words and believe in Christ; and if ye believe not in these words believe in Christ. And if ye shall believe in Christ ye will believe in these words, for they are the words of Christ, and he hath given them unto me; and they teach all men that they should do good... And if they are not the words of Christ, judge ye—for Christ will show unto you, with power and great glory, that they are his words, at the last day; and you and I shall stand face to face before his bar; and ye shall know that I have been commanded of him to write these things..." (Nephi 33:10-11). The Gospel just makes sense doesn't it?
So the last few days I've learned some interesting things from Sister Staker. She's never heard of Joan of Arc before...and she's been brought up about four times in the last transfer she said. It was a good laugh hahaha I also brought up area 51 for something and she looked at me blankly....she thought I was making it all up. A secret base where an alien space ship landed? Pa-leasseeee. We texted some other missionaries when we got home to take a survey to see if she was the only one who didn't know what I was talking about. Also as we were talking about area 51 we may or may not have scared ourselves while contacting less actives in the dark. To sum up the experience: she told me "get ready to run at any moment" while at a door, a dog barked, we ran, I wacked my head on the car frame getting in which hurt my already broken neck even more, one of us peed our skirt, I thought I heard something so naturally I screamed then she screamed louder, then she swallowed a giant bug and throw up out the car window. It was a pretty eventful night. And right before she had to wrestle with her boots to get them on her feet yelling a couple of times "GET IN THERE!" in the raspiest smoker voice you could imagine. She's not a smoker though.
Oh, another time...Sister Staker was driving and we were talking about our lesson that we had just had when she suddenly starts screaming and yelling at me to give her a book. Not knowing what the heck was going on, I handed her our ward binder. The she slammed it into the windshield to kill yet another giant gross looking bug. She's holding it still trying to drive, and she's yelling for me to take it, still not knowing what is going on, we pull over and she tries to hand me the binder which ya know naturally I think she's trying to dump the bug onto me, so I scream and she screams and the binder is knocked to the floor of the car. we both jump our screaming and screeching to see where it went. We're stopped at a gas station by this point, and we 're both just kind'a painting there when the car starts rolling forward, Sister Staker hadn't put it in park, so we do the dumb thing and try to stop it by pulling on it, luckily Sister Staker got in and put it in park pretty fast though. I hope no one was watching this.
She snores. I snore. We've spent a lot of our nights telling each other to shut up. Or talking to each other in our sleep. It's a toss up.
So over all, it's been a pretty eventful week. We're basically laughing all the time.
That's about all. Enjoy our stories :)
Hermanas Montgomery and Staker
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