Well family,
pretty sure you are all dying for the news... :) well, i am still in brooklyn! i moved to the area right below my last area - bensonhurst, brooklyn. our area is u-shaped and the entire area in the "u" is midwood :) haha. i guess the Lord just really really needs me in brooklyn. i sent a map to the family of the new area boundaries and stuff so yeah, family it's not in an envelope - open carefully :). and one very big item is now i have to use the stinking library to do my email - so i have been severely limited on time. THEREFORE, i will be printing all of your emails out probably after my email, so i will have no idea of what is going on. anyways. this week was pretty bombin. we had to say a whole bunch of goodbyes on monday which really sucked, but it was really good at the same time. i am so blessed. i cannot believe how much i have been able to be an instrument in Heavenly Father's hands and i really understand why President Norby said that i would feel more joy than i have ever felt in my life on my mission. yeah, totally right. monday we said goodbye to rachel and she was really really sad. she had bought me a present (which she shouldn't have, but she was really stubborn about it) and she gave me a letter that made me cry. she just said how much i meant to her and how she sees God when she sees me and how i am not only her friend, but her sister and life saver. yeah, i do NOT deserve that. i was SO BLESSED to be able to be there to see her change her entire life and so blessed to see her where she is now. when she was confirmed they said that she would be able to go to the temple with her family and be sealed - well, she told her husband that he needed to come to church. he said he would when things got better for their family and they moved to a safer area (he told me and sister smith that he honestly couldn't just change his life around because people get killed for doing things like that) well, rachel told him that he was being stupid and that you can't wait for things to get better before you turn to God. that you have to turn to him because things are bad. yeah. HOLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHOA! her faith is amazing. right before we got there on monday night, she had been studying faith and preparing a talk for church because she just felt like she would be speaking and, since that is one of her biggest fears - well, she thought she should practice. it was AMAZING. and on monday night i really struggled because i was leaving so much of myself in midwood - as well as so many people i cared about. i couldn't really believe that i could love another area and yeah. OBVIOUSLY pretty faithless. and then i moved!!!!!!!!!
so transfer day was crazy like always. thankfully we got some elders that have a car to take my bags because i REALLY didn't want to drag them through the snow and slush forever and then take them on an hour and a half train ride - transferring trains too. so - thank you elders. you are a very big blessing. AND, i was pretty stupid and put ALL of my books in one bag and it was SOOOOOOOOO heavy. and then i thought i was going to have to take THAT monster on the train to my new area. bless the elders again, they took it for me. and poor elder morales (who i have never really met until tuesday) had to drag my bag up three flights of stairs to my new apartment. however, i was very grateful that i didn't have to do any of it!!!!!! :) AND, some random man took my other bag that i did have to carry on the train down the stairs for me and that was very nice of him. there is good in the world! my new companion is sister kim and holy cow. i'm really REALLY excited to be with her. she is AMAZING and we are going to have a really really good transfer together. she is from korea and she is teaching me a little korean :) she and her family moved to the u.s. when she was 13 and holy cow. she is really really strong. and so funny. and we get along REALLY well. she has served with everyone of my other companions and she also started her mission in midwood. therefore, she is cool.
we had a BUNCH of meetings this week and that basically took up the whole week, but they were really good. we had zone conference and a mission-wide conference because a member of the seventy had some appointments in washington d.c. and so he called pres. nelson and asked if he could come and speak with us. and it was an incredible answer to my prayers. HUGE. he talked a lot about prayer and our true relationship with our heavenly father. and he talked about being a true disciple of Christ and what that really means. he told us about how we all need more faith and how simple it is to gain faith. he just said that if you are more obedient, you will be blessed with faith. no questions. and he told us an AWESOME miracle story about his mission and how he and a companion worked sooooo hard to find one person to baptize. the other companion was going home and he hadn't baptized anyone. so they worked harder than they had in their entire lives and he said they literally just wept when the elder got on the train to go to Helsinki, Finland to go home because they hadn't seen a baptism. and then
HOLY CRAP i am so sorry i didn't use the subject line for this but i SWEAR i didn't forget - it's written in my planner :) i would like to wish cory michael a very happy birthday today and chelsea a happy birthday on friday! happy happy birthday!!!!!!!!!!! okay, so i will finish real quick cuz i think i'm going to get kicked off sooner rather than later -- seriously i'm so grateful i haven't had to deal with this until now. bah. and i'm very grateful for libraries for letting us do this so really it is a blessing. anyways.
so elder pierson and his comp were really sad... and then he got his new companion and they went home to drop the suitcases off and he had a note on the door from a member saying get to my house immediately. he was pretty scared of that note because the member was a little crazy -- but when they got there this man (who was described as an "Igebor" HUGE guy that was really scary) dragged his son into the room who was in the military and home on break. he said that before his son left, he told him to read the book of mormon and the son had, he knew it was true, and he wanted to be baptized in the next two days before he had to leave again. that was before elder pierson's companion had left finland for home. it was awesome. i have seen that so many times that Heavenly Father tests us until our very limits - and a lot of times we don't see the results we expect. However, if we have faith that is not dependant upon those results at all, then we are blessed with some awesome tender mercies from the Lord.
that conference was a HUGE answer to my prayers. i felt so good leaving and i have fallen in love with being a missionary again. :) cheesy? oh yeah. do i care? nope. sunday was AWESOME too. i met the ward and i feel like Heavenly Father has just put me in a little bubble at least for this transfer that is a "perfect world, perfect mission" bubble. the ward is AWESOME. and i was just overwhelmed with love for all of them :) there are a lot of really cool people. our ward is SUPER diverse - the area is too. there are chinese, japanese, phillipeno, russian, latin, american and caribbean and a couple of other places in our ward. it is AWESOME. we have more languages that can be spoken in our ward than most countries have in the entire country. pretty tight. the church came here to do the new pass-along cards for mormon.org because there is so much diversity. so we have a bunch of ward members on those cards :) cool!!!!
aight fam. time's up. love you all so much. sister kim and i changed valentine's day to charity day this year (it was the only way we could bear hanging hearts all over the place) so - happy charity day! and happy birthdays and cory i'm way proud of you for being able to get the priesthood. always take it seriously - it's huge. love you all!
sister mich smith
AND
oh and i hate to say it -- but it might be a LOT easier if you guys wanted to switch to written letters some of the times. however, i know that is a pain. so if you can't well, keep writing emails :)
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