Week 39

Week one with my greenie! Her name is Sister Earnshaw and she is so amazing! I love her so much. She is from New Hampshire and is probably the most interesting person I have ever met. She went to BYU a little before coming on a mission and double majors in Arabic and Economics. She was born in Japan and lived there until she was 5 years old. Her older siblings speak Japanese, but she moved before she learned. She absolutely loves trail mix and has been eating a lot of it the past couple days because we are just so busy running around trying to get things figured out. Her Korean is so good! We had her first language evaluation on Sunday and she did so well! 

This week has been absolutely crazy. My last week in 노량진 was spent packing and shipping all my stuff to my new area. We also had appointments with members and investigators to say goodbye. On Wednesday I headed to the mission home with my MTC companion Sister Troxel because we were both training. It has been a long time since we got to talk so it was nice to catch up. We got to know who our new companions were and had lunch with them. After a training meeting we headed home. 

We have spent a lot of this week getting lost >.< Since we have no idea what we are doing or where to go we have just been wandering a bit. The area that we are opening hasn't had sister missionaries for about 3 years so we are starting completely fresh. We have spent a lot of time copying records from the Elders and trying to call as many people as we can to get appointments. Sister Earnshaw is such a trooper as I try and figure out what is going on. She is such a hard worker and I am so grateful. We have been having a lot of fun joking through the stress of this area.

One miracle that we saw in the past couple days was a random call we got last Thursday. Sophia (윤수미) met missionaries 27 years ago at a park. She had just moved back to Korea from Japan after working there for 15 years. She didn't ever investigate the church, but kept in contact with one of the sisters that she met. Sophia lived in Virginia for 15 years so she is fluent in English. They have visited each other a few times over the years and are still really close. They were talking on the phone last week and her friend told her "it's time for you to go to church" so she looked up the missionaries phone number through church headquarters and gave us a call. She asked for information on church so we got all that to her and SHE CAME TO CHURCH! We talked a little for the first 20 minutes or so and then went to Relief Society together. She really just wanted to see what church was like. The second hour was Gospel Principles taught by our Ward Mission Leader and it was so good. The last hour was Sacrament meeting. The Elders in our ward had a baptismal service, which Sophia also stayed for. She was at the church for around 5 hours with us yesterday. It was amazing!

I don't have much time left, but I hope that you are doing well. I know that this gospel is true. I know that the hard things in life are to help us progress and grow. I know that Heavenly Father loves each and everyone of us. I love you all! Have a great week!

Sorry I don't have any pictures this week because I forgot my camera at home.

-Sister Rindlisbacher