Week 33 - RIP the Dickinson District
Hey there everyone who still reads my weekly emails after 33 weeks for some reason!
This week was pretty crazy, which is nothing new, and MAN, it took a huge toll on me, my companion, and my whole district. It was a lot. But! We have all lived to see another pday!
What caused this district-wide mental break? Read on to find out!
Cause of distress #1 only affected me. So, y'know that huge data project I was given to work on that I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into? Yeah... so on Thursday President Howell essentially said that the Church is going to be rolling out a system worldwide that will do that for all the missions, so I didn't really need to do any of that. SO many tears of pure frustration were shed.
Thankfully, it didn't turn out to be as bad as I thought! Not gonna lie, when he broke that news to me it felt like I had done all that work for nothing and that I was no longer needed. Dramatic, I know. My perspective and attitude improved dramatically Saturday after I was done with my pity party. We had yet another ad committee meeting (we have 2-3 a week) and the other peeps on that were asking some questions about how many ads we had running, how much we had spent on them, how they were performing, etc. and they were going to try and look through all of the random data on Facebook Business Manager, when I interupted and said that I had made an ENTIRE FREAKING INTERACTIVE BEAUTIFULLY AESTHETIC DASHBOARD FOR THIS EXACT PURPOSE and got to share my screen and it was a big moment for me lol. Plus, come to find out, even if my dashboards need to get remade/altered, I'm still the only one on the committee who 1) consistently looks at the data and 2) understands what the heck all the numbers mean haha. So I wasn't fired after all! If anything, this just means that my job is going to get a lot simpler here in a month or so. I'll take that!
Cause of distress #2: transfers. Y'all, I cannot adequately express how much I ADORE this district. These eight missionaries have become my best friends, my confidants, the people who make me laugh, and the ones who have gotten me through A LOT. I legitimately have never been this comfortable with any other group of people. We have a group chat on Messenger and I kid you not, whenever we're having a rough moment or need a smile, we just go through all the videos that have been sent on there. The Killdeer trio of Elders acapella singing "Lost in the Woods"? Yes please. So yeah, transfers were devastating. We're losing two of the Elders and...... SISTER ASTLE IS LEAVING ME. We try not to think about it.
But hey, at least I get to stay in Dickinson 2nd ward for a 3rd transfer!! I love these people. Everyone keeps joking with me asking what I do to my companions that I always scare them off because I've so many while here in Dickinson hahaha. Here's the sisters I've been with here: Sister Taylor, Schmeichel, Isaacs, Calder, Johansen, and Astle. Pretty insane! I tell them that the real reason is that I'm so amazing that everyone needs a turn with me lol.
Onto some good news and fun things! Because remember, don't stress: suppress! Haha I promise I'm fine. Anyway, we found two new people to teach this week! The craziest part? One of them was found on Instagram by Sister Astle and the other one was found on Facebook by me. Technology works!! The girl from Instagram is named Liv, and she told us that 1) she's been looking for a church to join, 2) she wants to come to church with us, 3) she wants to do a Book of Mormon study with us, 4) she wants to pray, and 5) she asked us for some chapters to give her to study before our next study. WHAT?!?!?! Crazy.
The woman from Facebook is Erica, and man, talk about being led to someone by the Spirit! I get to talking with her on Messenger and we talk about church a bit and I ask to do a Bible study with her. I ask her what she would like to study about, and she said self-love, finding love, and what God says about relationships. Kinda odd, but we went with it and found every bible verse related to those topics that we could so that whatever direction this ended up going we'd hopefully be prepared. Well, we get on this call with her, and turns out that she wanted to study on these things because she has an abusive boyfriend that she's living with, she no longer feels the Spirit in her home, she has two kids and a third due within the next 2 weeks, and all this other crap going on.
We had a good long talk with her, and she broke down crying to us and almost had us in tears. She loves God SOOO much, and her boyfriend put her in the position to either choose him or God, which is so unfair and such a hard choice. From an outside perspective, it's easy to say choose God obviously, but when that means an outburst from someone abusive, a cut in income, and your unborn baby growing up without their father? All of a sudden that's a lot harder. She's been praying for a sign of whether or not to leave him, and as missionaries we don't tell people what to do with their lives, but we CAN tell them to follow the Spirit, so we asked her what she feels the Spirit is telling her to do and she said leave (as expected) so we said YES. DO THAT. FOLLOW THE SPIRIT HONEY. As soon as we got off that call, we knelt down together and offered a fervent prayer to Heavenly Father to help her get out of this situation safely and to have the strength to face whatever trials it would bring. Then, God delivered.
Our lesson was on Saturday, and a few hours later that night she's messaging me and tells me that her boyfriend came home and left HER! Honestly, blessing from God making it so she doesn't have to make that hard decision. Then she was super worried about all her utilities getting shut off due to a lack of money. Well, then Sunday she keeps sending me all of these messages with miracle, after miracle, after miracle! Two people randomly gave her $100 a piece, another person stopped by and gave her a ton of things for her soon to be newborn son, and a million other little things! It was amazing to see. I almost couldn't believe it! God answers prayers.
All of that is pretty heckin awesome, right? Right. Just one downer. Both of them live in the first ward boundaries so we have to pass both of them off!!! Not happy about that at all. I don't care about whether I get to count them for my numbers, but I already care so deeply about these women and want to keep teaching them and seeing them progress!!! Well, we'll be making the first ward sisters' day.
We did some service, sat in a bajillion meetings as usual, and set up the baptismal interview for Ted!! So excited for him to be baptized this Saturday. He's a stud. We also had some more district shenanigans haha. One of the elders had this idea for a video, so we all drove down to Medora to film it, and hilarious chaos quickly ensued! It was a blast. That'll be going up on Wednesday at 7 for any who want to watch!
Speaking of videos.... Y'ALL ARE THE BEST. We have that goal of beating the Killdeer elders' music video, right? So I enlisted all of y'alls help and so many of you pulled through!! The elders are getting nervous, so this week let's seal the deal before Sister Astle leaves for Fargo! To make it even easier for you to do, here's the link to the video: https://www.facebook.
Sister Balls
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