Week 7: Nashville Tribute Band!

It's been kind of rainy and nasty all week, and not gonna lie, it's been a rough one. We still don't have a lot of people to teach and the people we are teaching aren't really progressing, so it's hard to know how to study effectively and what we should be doing with our time.

I've started to get really overwhelmed with how many different facets there are to this work. You have to find people to teach but you also have to make sure that you're consistently teaching the people you've already found as well as keeping up with the less active members and encouraging them to come to church while helping to strengthen the members of the ward so that they can become more active in mission work...I feel a little bit like we're spinning a bunch of plates and we're just running around trying to keep everything from crashing down.

We've spent a fair amount of time tracting this week, and that continues to be an adventure (read: Sister Myers continues to be bad at tracting). Occasionally you'll meet someone nice who will at least listen to you for a moment and tell you they appreciate your efforts before closing the door, but most people either don't answer or are pretty disinterested. But maybe if we spend this whole transfer tracting I'll get super good at it and then it'll never make me uncomfortable again. I can hope, right?

Speaking of the next transfer, transfer calls were on Saturday. Sister Wells and I will be staying in Mandan, as expected. We'll have a new district leader and a new STL, so Sister Seegmiller will be heading back to Bismarck at the end of the week with her new companion. She's down in Mobridge on exchanges until then, so we have the apartment to the two of us agian. Transfers actually happen on Thursday, so that's when we'll get to meet the new missionaries coming in, which will be way fun. All the missionaries out here are stellar.

The NTB concert was definitely the highlight of this week. I'm a little bit surpirsed that I like their music as much as I do, since country and Christian are both pretty low genres on my list, haha. Maybe it's just because I have nothing else to listen to. Redeemer is by far my favorite; not so sure about their other albums. We all loaded into the transfer van and drove to Minot, which is about 2 hours away, and since we weren't in proselyting clothes or wearing tags or anything it felt like some weird class field trip. The band had a special concert just for us earlier in the evening and then we prayed with them before the real deal, and it was a great evening. It's one of the few times the whole mission will ever be all together, so everyone was super excited to see each other.

I've been thinking a lot about enduring to the end lately and what that means to me. Seems kind of dumb to be thinking about that when I'm only on month 3 of 18, but whatever. For me, enduring to the end is really just having faith that you're doing the things you're doing for a reason, even if you don't always feel it. You might not always want to go to church or read your scriptures or knock on the basement door of the apartment building with the grumpy-looking cat in the window, but just because you don't feel like it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You have to have faith that it's what you need to be doing even if it doesn't feel important or you can't specifically see it impacting your life right now. If some of the gospel is important to you, then it should all be important to you.

Thanks for your prayers! I've needed them lately. Hope your weather has been better than ours!

Sister Myers