November 7, 2011

Hello!

This week was an amazing week! I am sending a bunch of pictures from Fancy World. Best. P. Day. Ever. We had so much fun going on all of the rides and just enjoying a great day together. Wearing pants was also a great part of the day. The group one is in front of the G5- a straight plummet into the mountain and then back out again. So scary! We rode it twice in a row to start the day off and 3 times in a row to end it. There were almost no people there. So on almost every single ride we'd tell them zai-yi-ci! (again one time!) and go again. There was one that had 7 loop-de-loops. That one was fun the first time around... and the second... by the third we were all a little trippy. Thankfully the elder in front of me made it off the ride before losing his breakfast. It was a close one. The 4 of us sisters went on the ferris wheel. It was the longest ferris wheel ever. I think we spent over 25 minutes or more on it before we got off. We went to go see a little peter pan circus-type show. The first was peter pan doing acrobatics. Then there were the pirates doing flips and tricks across the stage. All in all it was a great day.

Tuesday was an equally great day- just in a very different way. We had a conference with Elder Gong of the Seventy. We talked a lot about the Joseph Smith experience and how we can learn it and testify of it to help the people we teach gain a testimony of the Restoration. It was so amazing the way the Spirit testified to all of us while we were in there. I don't think I've ever been to a meeting that had the Spirit that strong for the entire meeting. Our district was asked to do the musical number. One of the pictures is us on the train in the space between the cars trying to practice on the way home from Fancy World without disturbing the passengers. We sang Joseph Smith's First Prayer to the tune of In Humility Our Savior, all a capella. It was really cool. I got goosebumps. The elders going home this move call gave their reflections. It was really interesting. They were all different. The two from our district, Elder Lindsey and Elder Weber, shared really unique experiences and advice. The third elder stood up and pretty much said that he regretted the time that he had wasted waiting for his mission to change him, because he didn't put in the effort himself and now he's going home and he can't get this experience back. It was really really sad. It made me think over all of my goals and desires for my mission and make sure I'm doing everything I can every day to serve and become better so that looking back I can have no regrets.

We have some really awesome investigators that we're working with this week, and we are hoping we can help a few of them get baptized in the next couple of weeks. We had 9 investigators come to church yesterday, which was such a huge blessing. For some reason getting our mudaoyou to come to church is something I've really struggled with my whole mission. Everyone here is always too busy or has things on Sunday or they are so busy the rest of the week that Sunday is their only chance to sleep in or whatever. I was so excited to see so many people willing to give up their excuses and come to church. It is one of those things I didn't really understand the importance of before my mission, but now I know that I never want to let anything in my life become more important than going to church every Sunday.

The corn bread is not a big deal. I think we can get everything we need here... more or less. We've gotten good at finding good-enough substitutes. I forgot it takes corn meal and not corn starch. What do you use corn starch for then? Besides elementary school science projects? If there's a simple recipe that'd be nice though.

Hope you're having a great week!

Love you!

Love,

Danielly