The Spirit of Elijah

Just another bright, sunshiney week in DeFuniak. Our baptism plans have gotten a little complicated by a sudden inability to communicate with the investigator. We will probably have to put the baptism off from this saturday to next saturday, and that means after transfers, so we are hoooooping we'll both be around for it. Either way, if the Lord calls one or both of us away, I know the work where we are sent will be great as it is here. Me and Sister Bennion have been joking since the first week about me getting transferred to Pensacola. I hope it doesn't happen, but suddenly I'm thinking God might get me back for my sarcastic jokes and put me there haha. The tough thing about serving in this little backwoodsy town was come time for thyroid tests we had to drive 30 miles to get them and there's this huge hospital in Pensacola soooo. But, I'd take the 30 miles again to stay in my beloved DeFuniak.

I named this The Spirit of Elijah because, well, it's so strong! Family History has definitely been something I've been bleh about in life up to this point, but I'm just starting to catch on. So many investigators and less-active members are interested in it, but they don't want to pay for ancestry.com, so that's where we come in and have them go on Family Search with us at church and then they want to be at church more and bam. done. ;) Really, though, I think it's all so interesting. Maybe it's just because I'm deprived of passive entertainment. I couldn't sleep last night, and instead of my old-life solutions of getting out my laptop and chilling on Facebook, I had to read Preach my Gospel until I felt back asleep! With family history at least I get to touch a computer. :)

I can't wait to find out what's in store for me next transfer (next week!!) and I'm looking forward to meeting all of the new people that indeed will make me seem a little less green. I love all of you people and by next letter, you'll know as well as I do what's ahead. I'm thinking of and praying for y'all.

Yes sir, yes ma'am.

Love,

Sister Cooper

Mosquitos Feast, We Fast

It's Labor Day! This week seemed to go by very quickly. We just worked all day for seven days and now here we are at the computer again! 

We found a frog in the laundry this morning. That was exciting. I'm definitely not used to the amount of small critters around yet. Everyone at church likes to give me recommendations of miracle cures for my mosquito bites, but none have worked yet! However, now I carry all manner of creams,sticks, gels, spray bottles and more with me everywhere I go. The ward is always concerned about me and they give me a ton of little things that work for them to keep the mosquitos away. 

Doorstep lessons at dusk will be the death of me.

Fast Sunday went by crazy fast (ha! first time it hasn't been a misnomer). Me and Sister Bennion both fasted to find solid new investigators (without each other knowing what we were fasting for) and during the 24 hours we got 2 solid new investigators! It was great. I broke my fast during our lesson with the second one because it hit 24 hours since we started. I drank a little water and had a piece of candy and I just hoped we wouldn't suddenly be kicked out of the lesson because our spiritual power was gone haha! 

Okay, that's all the story time I have time for right now.

Love y'all

-Sister Cooper

Not By Our Doing

This week I can't help but starting out by announcing this. We got a BCD! If we look that up in the Mormonese to English dictionary, making sure to use the Missionary Dialect we will see that BCD means.... someone's getting baptized. Baptism and Confirmation Date is what that actually stands for and we made sure as of Thursday that our youngest investigator, Morgan, who is a senior in high school, got one of those hehe. If all goes well she will be baptized on September 14th. We are doing our best to support her and keep in close contact because she moves around between school and her parents' houses a lot. But she has a strong desire to be baptized and I know she can make it.

Me and Sister Bennion teach a wide variety of people. It's pretty crazy. There's youngsters like Morgan, old ladies who have been the same religion for 80 years (they don't progress much, but I think they like having the girls over), Southern Baptists looking for a debate, people who let us in because they want to Jehovah's Witness bash and then they figure out that we are Mormon and awkwardly have to let us talk, and then there's like 300 less active members in this ward and they expect us to track down all of them. :O My favorite thing to do is teach progessing investigators though. They are generally more friendly to the Church than less-actives even.

Oh gosh, how could I forget to highlight the biggest adventure of the week. Sister Bennion and I took a wrong turn in the backwoods and ended up stuck in the bug infested Florida sand-dirt for three hours!! A ward member had to tow us out when the Elders couldn't even though they drive a truck. We definitely learned a lesson about using our best judgment there. :P

Okay, highlight of the week. I even got to tell this story to the Fort Walton Stake President who I met yesterday at ward conference. We are teaching this guy David who is definitely one of those people who comes to the lesson ready to debate and negate. He said upfront that the heart is treacherous and he feels no emotion. He owns like 10 versions of the Bible and I kid you not, his hobby is to bring over representatives of different religions and debate with them. So naturally I was hesistant to go over to his house twice this week. The first time went alright. He said at the end, in regard to the Book of Mormon, "I can't reject this completely" which I thought was a big step. Next visit I'm still really hesitant and Sister Bennion starts saying how she wants me to get involved with the lesson more. So yeah we get to this lesson and he's debating everything and then he's debating about the Spirit of God and he says that it's treacherous to feel anything, but then out of nowhere he started tearing up and talking about how he knows the Spirit is real and he can feel it when he reads the scriptures. It's not an emotion, he said, (so I guess it isn't so treacherous haha), but he knows it can help him learn the truth and he agreed to read The Book of Mormon. :) So, we'll see where this goes.

Not by our doing, my friends. It's the Spirit! :D That's what softens people and makes them want to learn more, come to church, and get BCDs. It's really the best missionary in the world.

Love you, everyone!

Till next week,

Sister Laura Cooper

The gorgeous DeFuniak Sunset 

The Measure of Success

I've made it through my first full week in the field. P day came so much faster than I anticipated. Getting lost in the work is actually easier than I thought! All you have to do is get up in the morning, run, eat breakfast, study, and then work as hard as you can until 9 pm.

This week Sister Bennion and I spent a few hours at a retired couple's house making a huge map of DeFuniak and marking every less-active member and investigator on it. We hope that it will assist us and all the DeFuniakan missionaries following us to find out where the heck they are going! We have GPS's, but sometimes a visual aid is helpful. Though we hope that some of these people will eventually be ridded of their need to be on the map.

AKA they will get baptized or come back to church and become the most excellent members of the ward. :))

Also this week we had a district meeting and a new missionaries of Fort Walton zone meeting at the chapel in Crestview. It's hard on the mileage on the car, but it's great to see the other missionaries from time to time. Sister Imlay is still in this zone, so it's cool to see her, and her trainer who I knew at BYU!

This week a lot of lessons fell through, and we worked some with active members to try to get the work going, so when it came down to yesterday morning and our numbers were really low for the week, me and Sister Bennion both were feeling pretty stressed. We talked about it in the car and over a picnic lunch (yeah outside during a flash flood warning... ). Although Sunday was going great and our numbers were starting to pick up, we took our philosophy back to Preach My Gospel and reminded ourselves that the measure of a successful missionary is not an elder or sister who has appointments set up every hour of every day. It's not who is best liked of all the missionaries in the mission. It's not the one who never gets lost or stuck out in the rain. It's not the one who gets the numbers they want... It's the one who commits to find people to teach and bring unto Christ! You can make all of your goals and never help anyone feel The Spirit and come unto Christ. But as long as you are striving to help and invite people, and to introduce them to or remind them of the gospel, you are excellent by Heavenly Father's standards. People have their agency to get to church or get to Fort Walton beach, but we do all we can to help them feel that there is a right answer to that choice. :)

I miss each of you at home, and I send you a hug from me, but know that I love this work! This is the truth, and DeFuniak needs to hear it! :)

Love,

Sister Cooper

                                          This is me trying to survive a rainstorm
 

                                           Me and my companion Sister Bennion

                                             The turtle we found!!!!

                                                         The view from my window! Right onto lake defuniak. :)

The Land Southward

I arrived in Tallahassee Tuesday afternoon and I felt like I was just in a different world! The airport here is super small (it flies only to like Atlanta and Tampa...).

Everything was blurry until I got dinner and my new camera in the mail. Then I was like OMG it's all real! I'm in the deep south. :o

That night I found out I was going to DeFuniak and I was like OH THAT SOUNDS NICE AND LIKE A BEACH OR SOMETHING.

Haha this is totally the town they based Cars on.... Whatever lol. My companion is Sister Bennion from Salt Lake City. She is training me and guess what. She's never served in DeFuniak in fact this is only her second transfer... She is great though! She always makes sure we are out the door for a jog around the lake at 6:30 am sharp. :P Oh and btw my window looks directly onto a train tract where trains start going through at 5 am. xP

Since we knew no one in this area five days ago, we don't really get fed much and we do a lot of tracking less actives down so we can teach somebody. The Defuniak Ward covers two cities and sixty people come to church, but 400 people are on the roll. That puts some serious strain on the people that do come to church so we've got lots of inspiration to help them out. It's funny because Sister Bennion told me that in her last branch the Branch President and the Relief Society President both spent the first Sunday asking the branch members to help the missionaries, give them rides, feed them, ect. 

Ohhhh well sounds like we'll be tracking down less-actives and referrals, and going door to door preaching the gospel for a while. Hey, that's what we're here for. :)  We have ridden our bikes a little but we hope to do more of that because our miles are limited on the car and we're always lost! This place is crazy backwoodsy and spread out. I don't like the dirt or mosquitos (seriously my legs look like I have chicken pox), but I am so honored to be in an area that has been closed to sister missionaries before now! We are roughing it for sure, but I guess the Lord trusts us! 

Ok ok I've got a good story about missionary work. Yesterday after church and lunch, we ventured into the backwoods to find some less actives. We got pretty well lost and our GPS was just like uh IDK drive into a tree or something. So we stopped and knocked on the door of this little house and asked for directions and once we got them, Sister Bennion started bearing her testimony about the restoration and guess what... THEY TOTALLY LET US IN! We talked to this lady and her son for like an hour about The Book of Mormon and everything and by the end the son asked me to highlight recommendations of chapters in The Book of Mormon and he had me explain all of the pictures in the front. Plus they gave us lemonade. :D It was so awesome! We are going back there probably this weekend to teach them again. 

The people in "the land Southward" (here haha) are the funniest. There are churches on every corner. In fact, word on the street is that the local polygamist Church of Christ branch goes proselyting around here and it makes a lot of the people we tract in to suuuuuper confused. We have heard about all kinds of things we Mormons worship. Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Virgin Mary, ect. Oh dear we have a lot of straightening up to do. :P

I'm having a blast! ;) We are biking home after this and probably gonna make some brownies from a mix the senior couple missionaries in our area left for us.

That's me saying bye bye to my MTC comp Sister Imlay! She serves in Baker, FL now, being trained by my friend from BYU Sister Leifson! 

 Love you all a lot!!

Peace,

Sister Laura Cooper

MTC Arrival

I've made it to my first P day! I have pictures to send, but so far all my SD card has accomplished is crashing myldsmail. Ohhhhh cheap PCs. I have 27 minutes to write this so I'll be fast. I got here with the early crowd on Wednesday and the only difference between reporting then and reporting at my assigned time was that I got to have lunch in the cafeteria and no one that arrived on time did. :D After that and a little waiting around, I got to settle in a little bit, but not really because I went straight to class for three hours. My district's teachers are both returned sister missionaries, which is really unique in the MTC. I love them; they are super easy to talk to and learn from. I room with 4 other Sisters-- 2 going to Chicago, one solo sister going to Anahiem ASL speaking, and then me and my companion Sister Imlay going to Tallahassee. They are all from Utah!! :( But, Sis Imlay is awesome possum and she actually knows how to work out and she's teaching me. We have our little fake investigator that we'll be working with during our stay here. It's our teacher Sister Mills, but she plays a sporty college student named Kristen living with an LDS family. She's based on someone Sis Mills actually taught on her mission, so it's been so cool learning more about her based on talking to her and praying for her. Seriously, my comp and I have gone off into a different classroom twice to pray before we taught Kristen, and BOTH TIMES we got walked in on my an arriving class! :P Haha the MTC makes that so normal. Other than that, you've heard that I made the mistake of telling them that it was time for me to have my thyroid blood test again and now me and Sister Imlay have been to the health clinic like four times for one of us or the other! We have consumed approximately 2857923 lollipops from there since arriving. Okay, time is almost up. I love it here, but it's stressful, but I love it here anyway and I'm learning about focusing on the investigator and how to study for hours on end. I feel so stregthened! It is seriously Spiritual Boot Camp. :) I love you all! 

Love,

Sister Cooper <3

Departure

Hey Friends,
I'm leaving tomorrow at duh duh duh duh 3 am.

what.

I'm getting set apart at 8 pm tonight and then this blog gets turned over to my wonderful family, who will hopefully successfully update it and share it to Facebook.

Again. What. 5:35 am departure?! Getting up at like 3 or 2 or whatever. Hah. I'm not allowed to get up until 6:30 though!!

Well, I leave you all with this testimony, which I am stealing from Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, because I think it's the best testimony in all of Latter-day scripture. D&C 76:22. Look it up. ;) But really, Christ lives and I know he will make a difference in the lives of many people in the Florida Tallahassee Mission! I can't wait to see what awaits me in this beautiful place Heavenly Father has chosen for me.

I'll get on my family to keep this sucker updated. See you all again in 2015!

Love,
Sister Cooper