Cherea Baptism. Sister Stone, Cherea and me
Sister Gines and me
Dearest Family,
Spring has sprung here in New York and it is beautiful! I thought that Fall was beautiful... this is another type of beauty all together! Its been raining a lot but we get those few glimpses of the sun (like today) and it makes the whole world seem right again. I'm glad that everyone such a good week! I can't believe Kyle is now done with school for the next two years! Crazy. It sounds like he has a really good summer scheduled before he leaves though. Are you going to go to go to Las Vegas to buy his missionary clothes (People think that is the funniest thing in the world when I tell them that is where I got some of my clothes from) :). I'm glad that they are sending missionaries back into Sendai! I gave a family a tour, a couple days ago, that just moved here from just north of Sendai. They said there is a lot of damage but that things are starting to look up again. I also can't believe that Osama is now gone... We hardly hear any news, as missionaries, but Ally made sure and let us know right when it happened by sending us a celebratory text, waking us up. :)
Wow.. it has been a crazy hectic week. There is SO MUCH TO DO. It is hard, at times, not to feel completely overwhelmed. We are at the sites almost every single day, which I absolutely love it is just hard going from full-proselyting to having maybe two-three hours in your area every day. Its hard to not feel like you're neglecting your area, but President continues to remind us that this is part of our call and as long as we're doing the best we can with the time we have then we're doing enough. We had a really funny thing happen to us this week.... Storytime!
So, Sister Stoker and I receieved a referral a couple days ago, for a man who actually works on Temple grounds and really is interested in learning more about what we believe. So we called him and set up a time to go teach him. He explained, over the phone, that he didn't want to meet at his house but that he wanted to meet somewhere in public, which is understandable- some people are like that. So we go to the designated meeting place at the set up time to meet with him, and wait. It just so happened to be one of the scariest streets in all of Rochester New York. We have a lot of sketchy areas in Irondequoit, it is known for it's ghettoness, but we usually try to avoid most of them and just focus on working in the areas that are a little more safe. So we were sitting on this street, waiting for a man that we had no idea what he looked like. There were tons of people EVERYWHERE! Going about their business, or smoking, or yelling at each other. Sister Stoker and I decided that it would be safer to just wait in the car then get out. As we were sitting there waiting I started to get a little nervous. I kinda had knots twisting in my stomach and so my companion and I decided it would be best if we prayed, in the car, to know if it was going to be safe if we stayed. So we said a prayer, asking Heavenly Father to give us guidance if we needed to leave or not and right when we said "Amen" we were able to feel at peace. So we continued to wait in the car, until we noticed that this group of men that was standing next to the car were drug dealers and it probably wasn't smart for us to be just sitting there watching them :). So we moved to the next street over and finally got a phone call from our referral saying he was waiting outside a community center for us. So we got up our courage and went to find him. He ended up being a really cool guy. He had a lot of interesting questions about the church. When we were explaining the first vision, to him, he asked us if Joseph Smith was the one who saw the centipede.... A centipede? What the? Ha! People hear the weirdest things. So, there we were, two white girls in dresses, standing on one of the scariest streets in New York, yelling the Restoration of the gospel to this man as traffic is zooming around us and old sickly-looking women, with no hair and pink lipstick smeared all over their face, keep running up to us and asking us if we have any money. Moral of this story:
1- Stay away from Hudson Avenue
2- Prayer really works
3- Don't just sit in a car and watch drug deals in the works
4- Jospeh Smith did not see a centipede (or maybe he did, but I don't think that is really important)
5- That even people who are completely off their rocker can read your name tag (Creepy old woman kept coming over yelling, "Sister Carter... do you have a dollar!?")
6- The Restoration of the gospel is true
7- I love my mission :)
I'm excited to get to see and talk to you all this Sunday! Ah! Can't wait! We're going to go over to our ward mission leader's house and they are trying to get it all set up right now. So I might give Tina Ross your phone number, so if a New York number calls... answer it. I can't remember when you have church... We'll most likely try to do it between 4-7 pm (your time) but we'll have her call or text you with the details.
I love you all! I can't WAIT for Sunday! Happy Mother's Day Mom.
Love always, Sister Carter
