2/25/13: WISCONSIN!!!!!

Since, I last posted, I've made it to the field! But let me start at the beginning :)

The end of my time at the MTC was rather sad, to be honest. I loved my teachers there and my my district was AWESOME. Loved them.

We took lots of pictures and made our goodbyes worth it, for sure. It was grand.

On the plane from SLC to Denver, I was surrounded my missionaries. It was a relatively small plane, and 23 of the people on it were missionaries. So any opportunities to share were negated there :/

HOWEVER. On the plane, I sat next to an Elder Parry, and on the other side was a talkative, opinionated old lady. Her name is Barb. We were scarcely on the plane waiting for take off for two minutes when Elder Parry nudged me and whispered something I didn't understand. Then he repeated it.

"Convert her!"

I guess I can do that.

So I started asking her about herself and what she believed. She was headed to Milwaukee for her fathers funeral, and although she was in mourner's black, she was talking about how she knew he was with Jesus and how it was actually wasn't that sad of a thing. We asked her about her relationship with Jesus. She seems to go to church somewhere, but her philosophies are her own based on her interpretation of scripture.

She knows about Mormons. She thinks it's nonsense because she's compared the BoM to the original Greek and apparently JS's translation was way off.

Wait...what?

Don't ask me what she was trying to get across. I didn't completely understand it. Greek? Whatever.

Anyway, we actually talked for almost two hours about the gospel. Elder Parry took out his BoM and she took it from him and made us give her a rundown of every single book in it. We NAILED it, and she was super impressed, because she didn't know anyone who could do that with the Bible that well.

She went on a tangent about how Satan sometimes makes bad things seem logical and reasonable in order to draw people away. That was an interesting contrast to her statement about the BoM.

We started running out of gospel principles to talk about, and looked out the window to see how we were doing. 1 hour and 45 minutes, and guess who hadn't even lifted off yet? That's right. Us.

Turns out there was a messed up computer or something, so we were delayed. But we got off the ground a few minutes later.

Even though we had woken up at 3:00 AM and were pretty tired, it was worth just talking to Barb the whole ride. About life, occasionally straying into the gospel. At the end, as we were landing, the Milwaukee suburbs were SO BEAUTIFUL. And Lake Michigan. Awesome.

We landed and I extended the invitation to pray about the BoM, since, as she had said, Satan sometimes uses what seems like logic to distract us from truth. She accepted it and challenged us to do the same with the Bible.

O...kay.


Love her though. She actually taught me a lot. She's taught every single grade from kindergarten to 12th in her life. We talked a bunch about homeschooling, too. She was pretty cool.

So that's my story for the day. I got to the mission home, and we did a little testimony meeting and some interviews. It was grand. On Wednesday, we went to the stake center and I met my new companion, Sister Ipson. She's spunky and wonderful.

My first assignment is to open a new area. It's West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. I was so excited to get to work.

So how was my first night? Besides Sister Ipson feeling the most bored she'd ever been on her mission because we sat in the stake center for 4 hours waiting for a ride, it was...well...yeah.

New sister area. No car. No bikes. Just the public bus system and our own two feet. We knocked like 4 doors before it was too late to do much more. We have a nice little apartment with brand new stuff, and we bought bread, PB, and J to last us until Pday. Then we did some comp inventory and called it a night.

So, the rest of the week in our new area? The work here is going SO

nowhere.

Okay, I'm kidding, but I'm not. We keep getting lost on the buses. It takes us two hours to get to appointments, and most of them have cancelled or we've missed. Okay, all of them. We did get to teach a lady named Mallori, who is a member but needed some strangthening. I really liked that. But the numbers in our planners go something like 0,0,0,1,0,0,0,2,0,0. I so wish we had a car. But we decided we're not complaining anymore. We're just not.

This week is going to pick up SOOO much! We're finally figuring out the bus system, and we've met quite a few people that we can hopefully turn into investigators, and the ward is SUPER nice and helpful. West Allis WILL be the promised land. All in good time.

We accidentally wandered into a mall at one point. I got SO nostalgic, which is weird, because I don't generally even like shopping. But it happened. We're staying away from there.

Love you all!

Sister Neal