Guess who's taking over the area?!

PICK ME!!!

Yep, we got the call last night from Elder Page (one of the assistants) that Sister Park is being transferred. It’s good. She’s been in Lyndhurst for 6 months and is kind of burnt out on the area. It will be good for the area to have some fresh blood in it! I am a little nervous just because at first, the sister coming in won’t know anyone sooo when we’re planning, I’m going to have to do most of it since she won’t know who the people are. But really, I’m excited! It will be a good change.



Sister Park and I yesterday at sites.



So what happens is you get the call that you’re being transferred but you don’t find out where you’re going until transfer meeting on Wednesday. They just call in advance so you can have your stuff packed & ready to go. So I made a chart with all the areas to see where the openings are and figure out who could come to me. The options for people coming to Lyndhurst are Sister Wright, Sister Wattles, Sister Manwaring, Sister Everson or (possibly) Sister Law. I’m not sure about S. Law…she won’t call me back! I’m excited to find out who is coming to me! Plus, I’m excited to be at transfer meeting on Wednesday because my friend Kat Bennett is coming! I met her in French class at BYU freshman year and she wrote me in the MTC telling me she got called to the Cleveland mission. Because she’s a full pros sister I probably won’t see her much so Wednesday will be fun.

Ummm review of the week? It was an awesome one so let me tell you all about it!

Tuesday- Training meeting was awesome. It just really opened my eyes to how freaking amazing sites is. We read over the dedicatory prayer that President Hinckley gave when he dedicated Kirtland in 2003. It is honestly such a special place. Everyone needs to come and experience it once in their lives. Sites is just another way to testify of Jesus Christ and the restored gospel through the stories of the early saints. I mean come on folks… if having Visitors Centers and Historic sites wasn’t helping to move the work along do you think the Church would waste money on them? The answer is NO. They are effective! I love getting to participate in all aspects of missionary work. We had district meeting on Tuesday as well.

Ohhhh yeah….so changing directions for a moment. I’ve been meaning to tell you…so the brethren have been doing studies and they prayerfully identified 8 points that are pulled from PMG that we are to focus on. They are teaching these to all the missionaries in the field right now and then come next summer they’ll start teaching them in the MTC. They are:

1) The Doctrine of Christ –The Missionary Purpose

2)The Role of the Holy Ghost in Conversion

3) Revelation through Prayer

4) Revelation through the Book of Mormon

5)Revelation through Church Attendance

6) Teach People, Not Lessons

7) We Invite, They Commit, We Follow Up

8)How To Begin Teaching



We study these in personal & comp study and also in district meeting. As we’ve been implementing them, miracles have been happening! It’s so cool. Anyway, back to district meeting.

I did the workshop on principle 3. We were talking about prayer. Go read the Bible Dictionary definition of prayer. It is my favorite entry in the entire BD. I love it! Elder Bills made a really neat comment. He said that the Holy Ghost is the agent of conversion and prayer is the act of conversion. So true. Without the spirit nothing can happen…people aren’t touched and can’t know of the truthfulness and prayer is the most personal way we can invite the spirit in. Cool huh? I thought so.

Anyway, then Elder McClellan committed all of us to emphasize our relationship with God in every lesson we taught this week. That helped in my miracle of Wednesday! Oh, and that night we ate with the Rogels. They are an older couple & Sister Rogel is LA. She came to Church in September and bore her testimony and definitely said “I know the Prophet Monson is true and Eying and Oobendore”….yeah, those last 2 are def supposed to be Eyring and Uchtdorf. Ha! She’s kind of crazy.

Wednesday- A man named Steve called in on the MTC in-bound line and I talked to him on the phone for an hour and 15 minutes. He’s been investigating the Church on and off for a couple years and he’s going through a REALLY rough time and just has lots of problems. It was so cool because I was able to bear my testimony to him about our relationship with God like 4 times in the conversation! It was a good experience.

Thursday was AWESOME. We had weekly planning and then we were in our area ALL DAY! We were supposed to meet Latoya but she’s spacey and totally forgot so we went and did our back up which was tracting Yorkshire. So we parked in front of this one house (that had no signs of life in it)and we went to pray (you do that a lot as a missionary) and when we were done praying, there were 2 middle aged black men sitting on the front porch. Happenstance? No. We got out of the car, grabbed our BoMs and started talking to them. They were really nice- Kalvin and Calvin. Seriously. We introduced the BoM to them and Sister Park was totally in the middle of the 1st lesson when Kalvin interrupts and starts telling us all about this 6 foot unicycle that he rides. What?! Calvin sounded legitimately interested in the BoM and the other Kalvin…I don’t know. But we set up a return appointment for Saturday and said a prayer with them.

Like 15 minutes later, we’re stopping by this former investigator and we notice we have a voicemail. It’s definitely from Kalvin. He goes “Sister Webb & Sister Park, it’s Kalvin- the one you met, on a unicycle! You just said a prayer for me and I just wanted to say thank you. A really good thing just happened to me. God bless you!” That totally made my day! Then we were able to stop by Joyce and talk to her for a little bit. She’s awesome but we still haven’t been able to actually teach her. THIS IS THE WEEK! I swear it’s going to happen.

After her, we went and saw Kia and her 7 year old sister Kayla. Hahahaha it was a funny night. We were sharing the scripture in 2 Nephi 2 with her about agency. Sister Park asked if Kia knew what it meant. Kia said, “Say it in a sentence and I’ll tell you what it means.” So Sister Park goes, “I have the option of choosing the black one or the white one.” And then Kayla (the 7 year old) goes “RACIST!” hahahahahahaha! It was hilarious. Sister Park turned bright red and was like “no no no that’s not what I meant!” Ha. It was too funny.

On Friday we got to sing at this event for LDS Family Services and then they wanted us to sing Saturday morning for them too so Sister Park & I slept over at the Boynton home. It was fun.



Sister Park and I in front of the temple when we
sang on Saturday.



So Saturday, we had to be at the Temple at 7:15 am. LDS Family Services was having this adoption conference/seminar there. Having a “morningside” in the temple was an excellent way to start the day. At the end of the meeting, everyone stood up and sang The Spirit of God which was sung for the 1st time at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. AHHHHHHHHHH THE SPIRIT WAS SO STRONG! IT WAS AMAZING. I had goosebumps up and down my whole body. I wish you all could’ve been there!

So the rest of Saturday was ROCKING. We had appointments back to back from 1:30 until the end of the night. We stopped by Sister Jankowski, who is such a sweetheart. She gave me and Sister Park bracelets and watches because she said we always make her happy and she wants to make us happy and she wants us to have something to remember her by. Sweet woman! Then we went to our appointment with Calvin/Kalvin. We were a few minutes late and missed Calvin…but we were able to talk to people on his street while we waited for Kalvin to show up with his unicycle.

We taught Kendra and Linda about the Book of Mormon. Awesome. We set up a return appointment with Linda and will be back next Thursday to teach her. Then, Kalvin brought his unicycle! I’m bummed…I forgot my camera so you can’t see the pics or the short video I was going to send you. BUMMER! Next week though. It was awesome. Anyway, Kalvin was struggling when he was trying to get up on the unicycle so the next door neighbor Harvey came to help. Then Harvey asked Sister Park & I what brought on the unicycling. He was probably wondering why there were other white people in his neighborhood. Haha we’re a rarity down that way. But, we told him that we were teaching Kalvin about our Church so he was showing us his unicycle. That brought on some conversation and we ended up talking to Harvey for over 45 minutes. He reminded me of that really annoying guy on The Princess Bride- “INCONTHEIVABLE!” Yeah, that one. He was all about Plato and Socrates and he just had this interesting philosophical mind. We were SO bold with him and told him that the Book of Mormon could solve any problem that he was having in his life. He’s like “Whoa, that’s a pretty big promise!” and I was just like “What do you have to lose Harvey?! Just test it out! TRY GOD. DO IT!” He is not…yet. But he told us we were sharp and that he was impressed that we didn’t evade any of his questions.

We had to run because we were already 15 minutes late to our next appointment so we prayed with him & set up a return appointment for this Thursday (right after we teach Linda!) Yorkshire is GOLD! We’ve found so many new people down there this week. Jeff, the appointment that we had at 3:30 wasn’t there when we rolled up at 4:15. BOO! We tracted into him last week and we’re going back to bring him a BoM and teach him a 1st. We left a sticky note on the door saying we’d call back so I’m hoping that when I call tonight, I can set up a time for Saturday that we can go back.

Our 4:30 appointment cancelled on us too but our back-up worked…I got to meet the Lohse family, who’ve we’ve been stopping by since I got to Ohio in July and they’ve never been home. They are interesting. Really interesting. Carl considers himself Mormon except that he still smokes, doesn’t come to church and isn’t baptized. Oh, and he just joined the Masons….what?! What even do the Masons believe? Someone should read Brother Bott’s book called Mormons & Masons and tell me what’s up with that.



Dinner with Alexis and Sierra Gervasi last Sunday.



Then we had dinner with Sister Pennington and Kia! I love that family. They ran to the store right before we got there so we played with the neighborhood children. I love little black kids- they are SO stinking cute! I’ll send pics of them next week as well. We taught the Penningtons after dinner and then went home to wrap it up for the night. It was such an amazing day!

Yesterday, we had church and then we were at sites all day. Sister Park & I took a family on tour that were from FIJI! How cool is that?! They were the cutest family. The kids were so beautiful and they had the cutest accents. They had funky names that I couldn’t pronounce- except for Nauvoo. I got that one.   Oh, we had fast Sunday today because we didn't have it before Conference. So, both Sister Park & I fasted that we might be able to reach our monthly vision of 1 baptism & 3 baptismal dates. We knew that we had to find someone this past week to reach the goal (because investigators have to come to church 3 times before they can get baptized). Well, we knew that we weren't getting anyone new to church and so we were fasting that somehow we'd still achieve that vision. So then, Kia came to church and told us that her mom gets out of rehab on October 20th so we can move her baptism up from November 6th to October 30th!!! We're still going to be able to meet that goal!!!!!!!! I'M SO EXCITED! Other than that, there's nothing too exciting except for the fact that Sister Park is getting transferred…but you read about that at the beginning of this letter.

Um…because transfers are this week, we had district meeting this morning and then we went out to eat with some people in the zone. Fun fun fun. Now we get to go home and I’ll write letters and clean up our apartment for my new companion that’s moving in and Sister Park will pack. Sounds like a good day to me.

Anyway, I hope you know I love you all so much and I know that Heavenly Father knows & loves each of you too!



Peace out girl scout!

Sister Webb