Sister in Spokane: The Work is Picking Up, and Purple Hair

Note from Mom and Dad: We haven’t updated Taya’s blog for a little while, so the post below contains info from her emails and letters for the last 4 weeks.

Hello everyone!

So... tons of changes this week! We still have three more weeks left of this transfer, but we had a sister missionary in our zone go home early for medical reasons. I was called to train a mini missionary for a week! I'm excited but it's kind of stressful. A mini missionary is a laurel or priest within our mission that may have some type of medical issue or something like that. So they go on a test run mission of sorts with the full time missionaries to see if they can handle missionary work. Usually they have a companionship take a mini missionary but Sister Lott will be going with Sister Olsen, the companion of the missionary that went home early. My mini missionary's name is Sister Bracken and she is really sweet. It will be interesting and fun and a little stressful all at the same time, but it's only for a week so I can handle it. :) After that I will join Sister Lott and Sister Olsen and we will be in a trio! I will be second training Sister Olsen for the rest of the transfer and we will cover two areas - the Greenbluff ward and the Foothills ward. Phew! Lots of new changes. ;) I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm guessing by the end of the transfer I will be transferred out of Greenbluff because by the end of this transfer I will have been here for five months. :) But we’ll see.

We’ve been continuing the new member lessons with Rick and Mary, and I just love them. I can’t wait until they are able to be sealed in the temple! :) I look forward to taking my family back up to Washington after my mission, and introducing them to Rick and Mary.

My health has been pretty good lately, I have a day here and there that is more of a challenge, but mostly I’ve been having really good days. Sister Lott and I have been trying to do more workouts in the morning to try to stay fit, and that has been effective. :)

As a mission, we have a goal to have each of us read the Book of Mormon in 40 days. That’s about 13 pages a day, so that means we are reading during our personal study and our lunch break. Does anyone want to join us? :)

We’ve had a few good lessons with N___. It’s been so great to teach her. She is working on rearranging her work schedule so that she can get work off to come to church. I just love her so much! We made some cookies for her Dad in hopes that he won’t dislike us as much. :) Noel also went to the Young Single Adult ward family home evening! She has been reading in the Book of Mormon and loving it.

We’ve still been visiting the people that we have been working with at the Regency Nursing Center ( Diana, Virginia, and Ken). Ken loves to sing with us, so this last time we sang “Nearer My God To Thee” right before we left. As we were leaving down the hall, we could still hear him belting out the last few verses. :)

We’ve had a few of our investigators come to church, Noel and Elijah! :) Yeah, investigators finally coming to church! We were so excited!

We have a new investigator named C___. It was so good to teach her! We tracted her out. She is a single mom with five kids, three that are still home with her. We taught the restoration lesson to them and it went really well. She has been through some really hard things. She was born into a really hard situation and raised in a poor household. She was homeless for awhile and drove to Spokane with nothing but her car and her kids. She worked hard and worked her way up and now has a nice clean apartment. It’s inspiring to see her hard work! :) The one problem is that she works on Sunday, so I don’t know if we will be able to get her out to church or not. But Heavenly Father will provide.

So, I accidentally left my purple toner shampoo in too long and it dyed my hair purple! :( That would only happen to me. :) So I had to call Sister Dymock and get permission to get it fixed. Sister Carr does hair so she tried her best to fix it, and she did a great job! I’m glad since I couldn’t exactly proselyte with purple hair.

We also did some more service for K___. We’ve been doing some service for her in hopes that she will have some interest in the church. This week we helped her weed her yard. She is “softening” up a bit and was asking some questions about the bible and B.O.M. That’s huge because when we first met, she didn’t want to talk about religion at all. She also gave us some Hawaiian T-shirts and homemade soup for helping. I needed a new P-day shirt, so that’s perfect.

There’s a young woman age girl who is a non-member and has been coming too mutual here in the ward, so the Bishop asked us to come too mutual when we could. The young women held their own Olympics and Sister Lott and I were the judges. It was a good evening. When we got home, we walked in and there were flowers on the table from my parents. They had ordered us flowers and had them delivered with a cute note on them! Thanks Mom and Dad! :)

Sister Olsen (who joined our companionship, so we are in a trio) is awesome! She is from American Fork and also went to USU. So, I have two great companions now! :) On a sadder note, after Sister Bracken (the mini-missionary) was with us for a few days, she got sick. She came down with a bad case of the flu, and her parents had to come pick her up. I’m going to miss her! It was so great having her with us for the few days that she was. It had a funny way of helping me realize all of the good that is actually going on here in the Green Bluff and Foothill wards! Covering the two wards has helped keep us really busy. We are teaching a lot more now and have more investigators and prospects!

President Dymock told me that since I’ve been here in this area for a while now, that’s it’s likely that I’ll be transferred when transfers occur in a few weeks. If that’s the case, I’m really going to miss Sister Lott, Sister Olsen, and people that we’ve come to know and love, and all the people that we are working with. But I know that everything is in the Lord’s hands and he will watch out for everyone.

Thanks everyone for the letters and support!!!! :)

Love,

Sister Worthen