MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN

This was a good week, but I can't remember what happened on which day so this is gonna be a little jumbled together. 

Jamming to The Lion King

This pday we had a district pday & ate at that expensive Chinese buffet I talked about a few weeks ago. Then we played basketball & oh my. I'm rubbish at basketball. After that, we jammed to Broadway Lion King music with the Huntingdon Missionaries. Then Sister Top & I talked to people in town & met this nice man named Roger. He's 67 years old & when we were talking to him in a cafe he started singing Christmas hymns to us. Most adorable old man ever. 

Roger!

We also visited a part-member family & put both of their children on date for baptism in October. One of them, Ethan, is 11 & autistic. He is the smartest kid I have ever met & hilarious. The other one, Kristin, is 9 & adorable. She always comes to sit as close as she can to me & cuddles up next to me & I die cuz there is so much cuteness. 

We had a stake family activity in Northampton this weekend & all of the missionaries got to run the activities. Sister Top & I were in charge of the limbo station. The lowest limbo was done by someone who was 5"11 and he did 53 cm! It was insane. After the stake activity, we went to the Chinese food place I told you all about at the beginning of my mission (it's called Chopstix). We ate with the Elders then went home & Sister Top & I both fell asleep on the bus. Then we all went to Lesley's for dinner & service.

We rode to the chapel like this because it was raining and we just curled our hair.

At church, we were expecting 4 investigators to come & none of them did. BUT A POLISH MAN I HAD GIVEN A PASS-A-LONG CARD TO A FEW WEEKS AGO CAME!!! He speaks no English but decided to come anyways. It was such a miracle because pass-a-long cards work .00001% of the time. We set up an appointment with him for the coming week & he is interested in taking all of the lessons!

District photo (Koehler, me, Katrnakova, Top, Swann, Parkin, Mtombeni, Fisher)

This week, one of our church leaders asked us to rate how strong each of the missionaries' testimonies were on a scale of 1-10 & all of us said they were 9s or 10s. After that, we discussed how we built our testimonies to become so firm & it was the primary answers (praying, going to church, reading the scriptures) that we all answered. No matter how strong a testimony is, it is still really fragile. Like a fire without wood, a testimony will burn out if we fail to provide it with constant fuel. We need to keep coming to church, praying, reading from the scriptures, & living the gospel if we want the fire of our testimony to grow. 

RANDOM THINGS:

-We were stopping people in the park & one of them was saying his "halo is a bit rusty right now" because he hadn't been to a church in a while. I thought that was such a good way to describe it & now I wanna say it all the time.

-Ethan, our investigator's son, pointed to a picture of Cruiella De Vil & with a completely straight face said, "you in the morning."  Sister Top & I both died laughing. 

-Elder Parkin is convinced that I was a hipster before my mission who would be married right now if I were still at BYU & used to be Twitter & Instagram famous hahahahahaa 

-The Elders think I look Amish when I ride a bicycle. 

-I'm still working on my English accent & still failing terribly at it. 

-One man we stopped had a humongous German Shepard dog & it tried eating us. No joke. It was the scariest thing of my life.

-The weather here is still bipolar & I have absolutely no idea how to dress each day because it changes from -1000 degrees to 10000 degrees in the span of like 5 minutes. 

-I miss Chick-Fil A & snow cones. 

Sister Sydney Johannes