Just another week in Carthage. It has been a relatively calm week, which I am okay with because the next two weeks are going to be crazy! :) However, this week I did have a baptism and a wedding!! Fun Fun!!
 |
| Lexis' Baptism with Sister Duke and myself |
Also this week, we got a completely new Bishopric. There was no leadership when I first got here. So all there was when I arrived was a 2nd counselor over 150 active members. Kinda hard to do much. Now that we have a Bishop, hopefully we will get a ward mission leader, but things are a little slow to catch up here, so we will have to patiently wait.
We have been visiting a ton of less-actives and recent converts on base. That is the bulk of this area, part members and less actives. Most of our investigators are still out of town on vacation, so we haven't been able to contact them. People will start coming back and moving in around August so things will go much faster. A big thing here we have focused on is temple attendance. Not many of the members have been to the temple. So me and Sister Duke are trying to get everyone on a "Yayy!! Temple and Family History are great" kick! We should be helping some people with their Family History soon. :)
Another big thing for us has been making banana bread for some less actives or people that won't let us in the door. We did get into a door that we haven't gotten into lately and we taught the "B___" Family. They are slightly crazy and suffer from poor financial circumstances, but we taught the whole family the Restoration and the son who is 10 is scheduled to be baptized at the end of August now. So that was fun!
I also got to meet an investigator named Mary Lou. She is super cute and came to church for the first time ever!! She also paid $100 dollars in fast offerings and kept asking me when the 'basket' was going to come around. I just laughed and said, "We do things a little more privately and orderly in the Church." She LOVED that so much.
And Bev came!! Even though we hadn't seen her all week, she has all of these crazy field tests coming up. She mentioned a possible deployment within the next three months and now the goal is to get her scheduled to be baptized within the next 6-8 weeks. She feels the Spirit and without really being taught by us, she knows that the Church is the "safest and happiest she's ever been in, at any church." So once she understands everything, she will be a super solid member.
We had 3 investigators at Church!! Neither of us have ever had 3 investigators at Church at once before. It was so sweet! We also had some great dinner lessons with members. A member said that she is going to teach us some self-defense and how to get out of kidnapping situations. She then began providing us with certain legal striking weapons for the State of New York, since pepper spray and stun guns are illegal. One of the pros of being in a military ward, everyone thinks that we are either starving or going to get kidnapped, so they feed us or teach us how to break someone's hand in certain situations. I am not complaining, if I ever get transferred to downtown Albany or East side Syracuse, I won't be worried at all. :)
 |
| Me and Sister Duke |
There are about 5 billion mosquitoes here and we may be slowly eaten alive... we purposely eat garlic powder to keep them away...but if our investigators also start being repelled, we may have to cut back on the garlic. Haha.
And hmm.... what else is new... here is a shout out to the awesome friends back home in the Reunion Ward that are going out on their missions this month. Go get 'em Kacee, Erin and Chandler!!
Love you all, The CHURCH IS TRUE!!
Sister Kylie Williams
