It's Literally Raining Cats and Dogs – July 6, 2015

Oh, my goodness I also miss your guts!! 

Transfer news: I am staying with Sister Griffiths! Also, Hermana Imlay's area is not getting shut down and she's getting a new companion. Happily ever after. 

My English class was hilarious. It was an awesome experience and I'm going to miss my little Mexicans. Funny story, so I has developed feelings for yours truly. He's thirty. Needless to say, suddenly leaving the Spanish area is a lot easier. 

Josh is amazing. I brag about him all the time. Even my companions want to know how he's doing. Thanks for the pictures! Especially the surgery one. Yummy. Seriously, the difference between his back before and now is amazing! Science! 

I'm going to be twenty.....AH! That's old! Really old!! Sister Griffiths keeps congratulating me for surviving teen pregnancy, hahahaha! I have no idea what I want for my birthday. I think I want a baptism. Yeah, that'd be great. 

Now...where to begin? 

Ah, yes....Monday.

So, it was Sister Ward's last official P-Day as a missionary and she wanted to do something fun with us. Being poor we had to find something fun and very inexpensive that was also not far away. See the dilemma? So, we were texting back and forth throwing out ideas and...

Me: We could just drive around until we find something. Or we could go to the pet store and look at the fish. 

Sister Ward: We should buy some goldfish and give them to the Elders!! 

Yep, that's my mom. She started it. Anyway, so we ultimately ended up going to Walmart and picked out four little fish to prank the Elders. Don't worry, we didn't pay for them with church money. We named them Sergei, Murdock, Blake, and Salazar. This is where it gets interesting. All of a sudden an enormous hurricane storm thing started dumping. Thunder, lightning, the whole shebang. We didn't have enough time to wait it out...so we ran. Imaging for yourself six Sisters running through that with two bags of fish. 

In the end we managed to find their apartments and placed the bags of fish in front of their doors. We didn't knock, we just ran. Around the evening we get a phone call asking if we did it. "No, of course not!" They might have saw through our lies because Elder Kovolov swore Russian vengeance. Should be fun. Anyway, the fish are dead now. 'Tis the sad tale in the life of a goldfish. 

So if anyone asks me what the craziest thing I did on my mission was I will tell them this. Stateside English speaking missionaries gone wild. 

It's sad to say that my mission mom is dying. At least I got to be in her Zone for the last bit of it. She's so proud that I can now answer phones like a normal person. 

In case you didn't know, I talk in my sleep. And my companions are painfully aware of when I speak. The main event for this week happened at about three in the morning. According to my companions I was moaning and Sister Griffiths and Hermana Imlay woke up. Then I proceeded to talk...

"It's raining cats and dogs." 

"What?"

Louder, "It's literally raining cats and dogs!" And then I raised my arms, put my fingers in claw position and "Raaaaaaah!" 

I'm actually really glad that we're going to be working all the time in our area now. It has gotten increasingly more difficult to balance both and our numbers are showing it. I'm really excited to blow up this area and find someone to baptize. Our investigators haven't answered our calls or anything which sucks. We're hoping that as we work hard and try our best to find, teach, baptize, retain, activate, and serve every day we will be blessed with golden people to teach.

Did you read the Ensign? I would like to share something pretty dang cool that I found in there. I was reading the story of Matthew Cowley. He was a missionary who served in New Zealand for five years and eventually he became an apostle. I found a few things that were pretty amazing to me and I hope to be fully able to incorporate it into my work. It starts off with Elder Cowley's father speaking to him.

“My boy,” he said, “you will go out on that mission; you will study; you will try to prepare your sermons; and sometimes when you are called upon, you will think you are wonderfully prepared, but when you stand up, your mind will go completely blank.”

“What do you do when your mind goes blank?” Elder Cowley asked.

Father Cowley replied, “You stand up there and with all the fervor of your soul, you bear witness that Joseph Smith was a prophet of the living God, and thoughts will flood into your mind and words to your mouth.”

Later, he became a member of the quorum of the 12 Apostles. 

“We are all missionaries in the Church. Every man and woman has the responsibility of being a missionary. Our slogan, our theme in the MIA [for 1947] is, ‘Let every man know for himself that this work is true.’ Just ponder for a moment. … Everyone should know for himself and herself that this work is true. It is the only way. What good is a man’s religion if he can’t give a good reason for the hope that he has within himself? … Sometimes … we think it is a fine thing if we can talk about the philosophies of men and what we have read and all that, but that is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. What we are to preach and what the world needs is faith, repentance, baptism, and the reception of the Holy Ghost.”

Elder Matthew Cowley (1897–1953) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Matthew Cowley Speaks (1954), 159, 160.

It has been raining a lot for the past three weeks which is very abnormal for July. However, I am not complaining. I would rather be cool and wet in July that have to face the legendary Kentucky heat. We are blessed. 

Luckily, it was clear skies and sunshine for the fourth and we were invited to join our bishop's family for the celebration and fireworks. We weren't allowed to light any, but we were allowed to play with sparklers! Yeah! I will send a video of the fireworks we got to watch so you can at least enjoy a little since you missed them. :( 

It was so much fun. They are a great family! We taught them a short lesson on how Heavenly Father prepared this land to be the birthplace of the restoration and what we learned was so cool. Basically everything related to the gospel is cool, but this in particular was.

“Its timing in 1830 was providential. It appeared at precisely the right moment in American history; much earlier or later and the Church might not have taken hold. The Book of Mormon would probably not have been published in the eighteenth century, in that still largely oral world of folk beliefs prior to the great democratic revolution that underlay the religious tumult of the early Republic. In the eighteenth century, Mormonism might have been too easily stifled and dismissed by the dominant enlightened gentry culture as just another enthusiastic folk superstition. Yet if Mormonism had emerged later, after the consolidation of authority and the spread of science in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it might have had problems of verifying its texts and revelations.”

God knows the end from the beginning and is the author of the grand design of human history. He directed the affairs of history so that America was appropriately fertile soil for the seed of the restored gospel to be planted and tended by his chosen seer, Joseph Smith.

Happy flippin' birthday America! 

Anyway, I can't remember any of the rest of the week. In fact I can't believe it's Monday. Everything is going by so fast what happened?! 

I love you all so much and miss your faces. Your in my prayers! Heavenly Father loves you a lot! Like a lot a lot. 

Anymoo, I LOVE YOU ALL SO FREAKING MUCH! 

Love,

Raye 

Between Lexington and Frankfort

#1 So, Hermana Imlay is from Hurricane, UT. And apparently Pioneer Day
is a big deal. She was genuinely concerned that we had no parade plans
for that particular day. So, to make her feel better I decorated her
planner.
#2 This is a training for Zone Meeting. Inspired yet?
#3 Lexington Zone
#4 so, I realized that in my district picture from last week, Elder
Kovolov's face is covered. So, here he is in his Ukranian self.

#1 "Pose like a model!" Sister Griffiths
#2 Carol's (recent convert) cat, Zangray. He's, um, special. But, he
is my favorite cat.
#3-5 July fourth. I am the flag.