Institute: I love institute. We have two in a week. The first is for the Old Testament. The lady who is teaching is very knowledgeable and has a very organized structure with the class. I'm excited to learn more about it since I have never read it cover to cover. The other class is on the Book of Mormon. After the first class I realized that our mission has basically been a BOM institute class. All of the material that we covered we learn over and over in our district and zone meetings. There were only two YSA members who attended the Old Testament class and also attended the BOM one. One is Caitlin, who is the Relief Society President and the other is Kaiana, who is up here for the Air Force. I was impressed that this guy, who works on the AFB, and is a student at UAF, would come to both institute classes and participate. He just got called to be our new Branch Mission Leader. So excited to work with him. According to President Wright, he seems so enthusiastic about missionary work. He served his mission in South Korea and loved it.
Service: I love that we get unplanned service opportunities that arise throughout the week. We have glam nails on Tuesday (which I realized I am not good at painting people's nails and should just stick to removing their nail polish), and Food Bank on Thursday's. This week we received a text from a girl in the YSA Branch needing help moving her stuff into storage for the winter as she moves back down south till next Summer. We got some of the elders to come help and we loaded our cars with furniture and boxes and got done pretty fast.
Lessons: We had another lesson with Tucker for his new member lessons. We had the lesson after dinner at Rachel's house. Her roommate Danny came to dinner and she even participated in the lesson. Hopefully we can work with her soon. We had lessons planned for DJ and Terry, but both got cancelled this week. Hopefully we can meet with them again soon. Terry will be gone until mid September for work though. We drove to Nenana for a lesson with this lady Robin. She had us go on a little goose chase to meet with her. We brought a member from the Branch who met with us while at this restaurant. We started sharing what the BOM was to her using the pictures in the front and she cut us off to do this later. Though she said she is interested. She flaked on coming to church, but hopefully we can continue to meet with her and help her anyway we can. We also had Church in Nenana. It was interesting. The Branch is mainly made up of one big family: the Verhagens. The "parents" have 9 children who still live in Nenana. They were very emotional on Sunday.
Exchanges: Exchange miracles never fail. I went on exchanges with Sister Burdick who came out on her mission the same time I did. We stuck around the North Pole area because it is helping their area and our area since our area is everywhere. We tried by some people and got in touch with a less active who had more information about a recent-convert-less-active member whom we just found out about earlier that same day. Amazing. We went tracting later and found some YSA-age people and a potential investigator for them. Two birds, one stone. It was really fund to visit and catch up with her about our mission lives.We did visit someone who had opinions about our "Mormon culture". This Church is a hospital for the sick, not a palace for the perfect. I know people have been offended by Mormons before and I apologize if anyone has. We try to live what we preach for this is not just a Sunday religion, but a way of life; and we are not perfect people. No one is except Christ.
Sent from ALASKA!
Sister Shelley Willden
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