SISTER MELISSA RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER #6

SISTER MELISSA RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER #6

AUGUST 19, 2013

Hello! It's been a great week as always.  Here are some fun moments :)

-Elders are funny.  We are all professional missionaries but then every once in a while, you see a little snippet of their real life selves.  In district meeting, one of the zone leaders got up and was applying the concept of how to have companion unity to light waves/physics and to video games and leveling up and having the appropriate weapons.  I was cracking up.  I can picture Hyrum teaching us all about the gospel and using physics to apply it.  And I can picture Bryce teaching a training and applying it to video games... :)

-I have got the family history bug! It's a super big emphasis here!  We have watched a lot of training videos on how to use it in missionary work.  Family history IS missionary work! We are going to try and apply it in every aspect of our work here.  It's something that applies to everyone becaus everyone has a mom or a dad.  The redesigned familysearch.org is really cool and very high-tech :)  Go do family history work! I wish I had hours to explore the sight more!  Mom, you should have the kids do indexing every day as part of their school assignment.  And have them all create a mormon.org profile.  Hyrum and I already hve one.  Then I can tell people to go lookat my family's profiles. 

-We had a tornado warning!  I found it exciting.  It was Sister Hutchins' first since she's from California.  She's had large eyes when we drive through intense thunderstorms...give me Kansas memories!

-One of the biggest challenges for me being in the misison field so far has probably been seeing all the poverty.  You think that poverty is just in 3rd world countries.  Or that it just includes a small margin of the community.  But it's a daily struggle for so many people.  Most ward members barely have enough gas to get to church.  Or they simply dno't have any more money and have just 1 or 2 things left in their fridge.  It's a hard concept because it's so different from how I've grown up.  It'd be so easy to just go buy a case of food for everyone here! But we can't do that because that is not our purpose as missionaries.  These linse from Preach My Gospel have helped me: "You will help people most by teaching them the gospel of Jesus Christ." "Regardless of needs or problems, all people are best helped as they accept and live the gospel."  The bread of life is the gospel.  So even though the only thing we can give people temporally is some homemade bread...we can give them so much more by sharing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

-We get texts about approaching tropical storms everyday.  It's annoying because they're far away next to islands I've nevre heard of.  Where are the cape verde islands anyway?  B/c there's a tropical storm 1000 miles away from it, just thought you should know!

-Our investigator that was planning on getting baptized this week didn't make it to church yesterday...our hearts broke a little bit...but we know she'll make it and it will happen in God's timing.  Her daughter has been praying and applying it in their lives to find their lost keys or to get their broken down car to start.  Also, this lady got a job!!  This is the investigator that lost her job.  But God is good because her new job doesn't have her working on Sundays, is less work, and better pay.  The church is true!

-I have so much to learn!  The more I learn the more I realize I don't know anything.  There are things that I believed before, but I can honestly say tht I know them now to be true.  It is such a humbling experience to be a representative of Jesus Christ.  Elder Bednar said that we are not the light on the hill, it is Christ that is the light on the hill, shining through us.  I am here doing what God wants me to do and he directs me.  I love it!  ANd feel honored that I he trusts me with this task of being a missionary. 

-Stake Conference was this weekend.  I was feeling pretty crummy (headache) during most of it.  I"ve had a bad headache for the last 2 weeks...and I finally can't stand it anymore.  So the mission president who was there for stake conference gave me a blessing saturday night because I was just in tears with the pain of it...it's not a normal headache...I"m not sure what it is yet.  But the blessing included the misison president, the bishop, the ward mission leader, and the two elders in our ward.  Pretty powerful blessing with all of those elect people!  I definiely felt God's love for me and their love for me.  But stake conference was great!  Only in Georgia would it be discussed in a talk what is the best method to slaughter a chicken, would the stake president walk around the chapel and interact with the audience during his whole talk, and would the stake president counselor say "cool" in his southern black voice after the congregation had sustained all of the leaders, and would people verbally affirm and agree with waht was being said :)

-People drive golf carts around their neighborhoods here...I don't get it...it's the thing to do I guess.

-EVERYONE has dogs.  No matter how poor someone is...they have at least one dog and smoke cigarettes.

-Sister Hutchins and I have been asked to do a part of zone conference tomorrow and do a training on the importance of planning.  We'll see how it goes!

-Last P-day, we went to the pier in St. Marys and ate delicious haagen-dazs ice cream.  The downtown area is so cute with small bookshops, cafes, and bed and breakfasts.  Today we went to this middl eof nowhere town to go the dentist.  We ate a rundown looking Carter's fried chicken.  I love local restaurants so I made Sis. Hutchins try it with me.  It was great! :)  Finally got to try fried okra.

-Taught an awesome lesson to a prepared person the other day.  He is homeless, is a sex offender, but is a scholar of the Bible and came to both sessions of stake conference and is so golden.  We love him! We made him a birthday cake last week for his birthday.  So great!

I love serving people so much!  God is helping me to become a better disciple and representative of Jesus Christ.  I've got a long way to go, but it's going!  Love you all!  Go study your scriptures because it'll make everything great :)

Sister Richardson