Apples to Apples: I grew up playing this game and I never win at it. I'm usually always in the boat that I draw the best card for the green card after I already placed a card down, or I am always a close second who never gets picked. We played it for our FHE activity and I surprisingly won! With some of them I really was just playing my "discard" card to get rid of it from my hand and it won. I was excited but it was just a lot of fun to have so many of us sitting around this round table playing apples to apples in a YSA branch activity.
Tuesday: This day started off pretty rough. The North Pole sisters had to spend the night before because their CO detector was going off and the firefighters said they wouldn't be able to fix the problem that night. It was cool to have them spend the night but we ended up going to bed a little later than we planned, which made the morning difficult. Neither of us were in the best mood and when we sat down to plan out our day we had nothing planned except one lesson in the evening that we weren't too sure if it would pan out. We put in some stuff to do, but scheduled in four hours of tracting split up into two hour segments. Tracting is not the most effective way of finding people to teach, but when we have nothing else to do it bides our time and exercises our faith to find. We figures that the YSA (Young Single Adults) would most likely be living in apartments near the University so we started there. The first complex we went to had a lot of opposition. Not exactly like a "fourth-floor-last door" situation, but close enough was a lady who answered the door and allowed us to share a message with her. After talking to her she shared this story of an elder 16 years ago who passed by her on the street, paused, and then turned around and handed her a pass along card say, "I am supposed to give you this card". 16 years later and she still has the Christ pass along card on her fridge. Awesome story; she was excited for us to give her a Book of Mormon and another pass along card. The sad part about it is that she is out of our stewardship. As YSA missionaries, we teach only the members who will attend our ward/branch which will be people 18-30 living in the Fairbanks Stake boundaries. Afterwards we tried more apartments and found YSA-aged guys all in a row. #miracle. Later that day we met up with Aisha. I had taught Aisha (pronounced Asia) in Palmer while I was being trained and just recently found her up here in Fairbanks working at Taco Bell. We had her records moved to us and we made her a new investigator! Then the crazy lesson happened. We had dinner with Laura and asked her to come to our lesson with Sergei afterwards. We were talking with him and getting to know him better when it came down to talk about the gospel. We planned on going over the Restoration, but didn't get passed the first principle because he shared with us that he doesn't believe in God. Mind you this is a less-active member, so at one point he must have believed. We asked him questions about how he came to this conclusion and he shared with us his hard life growing up. The lesson was solely guided by the Spirit because even minutes after leaving I couldn't remember certain questions I had asked him that helped propel the conversation to address his concern. With a bold invitation we committed him to pray to God to receive an answer about what we were teaching him was true. A day that seemed would dredge on turned out to be a very productive, miracle-filled day!
Nenana: We went to Nenana this week which we plan on going to once a week. They, Brother Verhagen and his daughter Merry, took us around to visit with a lot of people who have some sort of leadership in the community to elicit service opportunities. Our branch mission leader is a strong advocate of the Ammon theory. He said tracting does not work in their won and that they have brought a lot of people to the gospel through service. The only thing is that all the people they convert have to move because of the lack of jobs there. This is a very small town; and I mean small. If you are driving to Anchorage you'll miss it if you blink. We have a service project we are helping out this Wednesday there and they are super excited that we are coming to help and meet the lady they are helping. Also, they said a new member moved in with a non-member husband who said would like to help with the service so we can meet him too.
Dance: So we texted DJ on when we can meet up with him this week and he invited us to come to a dance he'll be at. On our missions we can't really dance especially ballroom dancing because we aren't allowed to hold hands with members of the opposite gender. We came to just support him and to talk with him a bit about meeting up to have a lesson. He comes up to Sister Richards and asks her to dance ... Awkward. We had to tell him our rules and it was just awkward. We did talk to him for a bit and he said he would come to church if he had a ride. We squared everything away for him to have a ride and he came to church!
Rabbits: Oh the crazy things we do at Dawson's place. Last time we were over there for dinner, he and some other YSA members were blowing stuff up for us and melting metal. This time after dinner we watched them "dispatch" (their words) rabbits. I held a baby bunny while Dawson hit the rabbits over the head with a 15-pound steel rod. Then we watched them prepare it by taking off the hide just as I learned in Soldotna. Sister Richards really wanted to see how it was done because some day she wants to own her own homestead and live off the animals she raises. She still needs to taste rabbit to see if she likes it but as of right now she is sold.
Lessons Outside: We set up a lesson with Craig to meet at the library because we couldn't find anyone to come with us. He said it was a nice day outside and that we should jut go out to a picnic bench for the lesson. While he was sharing some of the experiences he had on his mission a drunk, native guy came up to our table. He originally asked us for money or food which we had neither on us. He then began to harass us by saying some inappropriate things so we asked him to leave. It took him a while, but he eventually started to leave cussing at us as we walked away. Craig saw him pull a knife out and was very concerned about a drunk guy carrying a knife around the park. We waited for him to be far enough away from our car to pull out and leave to head to see the Women's Conference broadcast. General Conference is this Saturday and Sunday. Again, this happens twice a year where the prophet and the apostles speak to us as a whole broadcast from Salt Lake City. If you would like to watch it, it will be on BYU TV or on LDS.org.
Sent from ALASKA!
Sister Shelley Willden
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