Laurel's Missionary Journey

Hey All!!  I don't really have very much to report this week! Sorry this will be a short one. Things on campus are going great. We started teaching a girl named Lavacia who wants to be baptized! The date she has chosen for now is November 24th, which will be the very last Saturday that I am a missionary. If I am still here in this area, and if she chooses to continue meeting with us and progressing towards Christ, she will be my last baptism on my mission. My goodness... time flies!  We had a member of the Quorum of the Seventy come visit our mission this week. His name is Elder Bowen, and he talked to us a lot about how we can step up our game and work harder. I am excited for that prospect! I am really exhausted currently from trying to be more diligent already, so I know that adding the extra goals that Elder Bowen has set for us will be a challenge, but I look forward to it. If you have enough faith, you will see so many miracles.  That really is about it for this we...

Hey Friends!! Okay, so this has been the absolute craziest week of my mission! For three days, I didn't wear my name tag, I wore jeans, and I went by my first name. More on that later! This is probably going to be a long email... sorry about that! First I wanted to talk about the miracles of missionary work. There is a guy in our ward here named Dusty who got baptized a little over three years ago. After his baptism, he went and served a Spanish-speaking mission in Idaho. He got back a little over a month ago, and I was here in the ward when he gave his homecoming talk. Since then, he has been called as the Assistant Ward Mission Leader. He is basically the best member fellowshipper ever, and goes so far out of his way to help all the new people we bring in. It turns out that Dusty actually taught Kaleel with the Sisters two years ago, and then he got to speak at Kaleel's baptism a few weeks ago. So why am I telling y'all this? It's because missionary work, works! There...

Hey Friends!! Okay, so this has been the absolute craziest week of my mission! For three days, I didn't wear my name tag, I wore jeans, and I went by my first name. More on that later! This is probably going to be a long email... sorry about that! First I wanted to talk about the miracles of missionary work. There is a guy in our ward here named Dusty who got baptized a little over three years ago. After his baptism, he went and served a Spanish-speaking mission in Idaho. He got back a little over a month ago, and I was here in the ward when he gave his homecoming talk. Since then, he has been called as the Assistant Ward Mission Leader. He is basically the best member fellowshipper ever, and goes so far out of his way to help all the new people we bring in. It turns out that Dusty actually taught Kaleel with the Sisters two years ago, and then he got to speak at Kaleel's baptism a few weeks ago. So why am I telling y'all this? It's because missionary work, works! T...

Surprise!!! I realized on Monday that I forgot to include in my general email, or in any of my other emails, that my Pday has been switched back to Saturday! So, the regular schedule is back. I am always going to be emailing on Saturday until I get transferred or come home, whichever happens first. Which is happening sooner than you might think. The subject line of this email comes from a realization that I came to a few days ago... I only have 96 days left on my mission as of today. That's right folks- I've hit double digits. I am, in fact, a dinosaur. I know that the tenor of my emails recently have seemed to be a focused a lot on going home... I promise I am not only thinking about that! I am also doing missionary work. I think that the surprise I feel about having fewer than 100 days left comes from a memory I have from my time with Sister Adams. I remember I told her that she had less than a hundred days and she told me to stop talking about it. I laughed at the time, but...

Hey Wonderful People! This week has been so insane. We had exchanges in the Tallahassee 6th Ward, which is where I had exchanges when I was first a missionary over a year ago. It was so WEIRD to go back to that place and have memories flood my soul from that time. I was sitting in the apartment that Sister Hulstine, Sister Pau'u, Sister House, and Sister Richins and I hung out in. The strangest part of that was that out of all of those people, I am the only one who is still a missionary. Sometimes I don't think about how long I've been in Florida, and then sometimes things like this happen and my mission age slaps me right in the face. While our campus was on break, we had the opportunity to go and do some roster work in the smaller congregations here in Tallahassee. That means that I got to go to Perry, which I used to cover when I was serving in Madison. We didn't get to go there very often, but some of my fondest memories are from that little town. We got to go ther...