Shaping and Sculpting

Me and Sister Lloyd have developed, sort of on accident, a little tradition of obtaining a childhood toy every transfer. First, we were stuck inside during that storm back in April, and we got Wonderlooms to make bracelets. Last transfer we each had to get a little nerf pistol because district activity was a Nerf War. This transfer we've decided to make it Play-Doh. We bought a few containers of Play-Doh and a few cutters that make animal shapes. Don't judge, there's nothing to do in Brewton on P-Day and we eat dinner alone most nights. This is how we keep morale high.

So anyway, as we've been sculpting away making farm animals and busts of ourselves and our BFFs the Sister Trainers, we've been also been shaping ourselves and our area. We have gone biking-finding-walking-time crazy. It's our favorite thing to do, and it's sometimes the most frustrating thing to do because we just can't find a soul to talk to. It is also scary because some people are just really creepy. We have to carry cards to give out that aren't filled out with our number, just in case we run into the crazies on the streets, which happens like at least once a week. But like I'm saying, all of this is making us more intensely into the work of the Lord. We find great joy in meeting awesome people like a few that we met this week who are like "When I lived somewhere else I knew people from your church and they were awesome, and I want to learn about my family, and I'm church shopping, ect."

As well, we have great angst over getting ourselves in yet another sketchy neighborhood with sketchy people out of which we must bike at great speeds.

It's worth it when we met prepared people. We found a sweet family this week. We stopped to talk to a lady sitting on her porch, and she has a husband and 5 kids. No one has that here haha. Everyone is like "I live here with my mom and my cousin Joe and my friend's nephew Pete, and my girlfriend". Whatever works for you I guess haha. :P But I do hope we can get to know this young-ish family and teach them. The mom told us she would really like to learn about her family history once the kids are back in school, and that when she's seen us out, she's known that we are Mormons and wanted to meet us.

The things that keep us going. :D Shaping orange and purple play doh cows and shaping the city of Brewton one day at a time

-Sister Laura Cooper

Outta Nowhere

Some weeks you just never know what will happen next. Welcome to that week haha! We are still trying to focus on finding and talking to everyone. As usual, lots of random happenings came out of that. We met a lady named Vida (I like to call her Vida Min) who basically just said all of the right things. She is all about Christ and families, but she doesn't go to church right now. She wants to learn about her genealogy, but doesn't want to buy ancestry.com. She's so cool. Hopefully we will get to work with her. 

More out of nowhereness. We had the 3rd emergency transfer in the area since I've been here. One of the elders had to go home for a medical problem, so we got a new elder in from FSU campus. The Lord keeps sending us missionaries from Tallahassee. They done don't like it out here in the boonies but whatevs. Hope he survives and isn't too shocked when the first person he talks to on  the street is one of the many town loonies haha.

One of the recent converts we visit, baptized before either of us got here, basically came to us as therapists and told us we are the only people that understand her. We weren't really sure what to do so we just let her cry it out for a while and told her Jesus loves her. She was back to semi normal the next time we saw her, so hopefully it helped some...Then yesterday out of nowhere our lady who walked in to sunday school last week came to all three hours this week. We visited her at her Avon booth on Saturday, but for obviously reasons couldn't do a lesson with her or anything. But then she totally made her way to church on sunday. We aren't sure if she is investigating or church hoping for fun but she did say we can start teaching her lessons and such. And she actually helped us set up the church before it started. The elders investigator came early and helped too. That made two nonmembers serving in the church. Score one for them.

Expecting the unexpected and more out here.

 -Sister Laura Cooper

First Birthday

With the passing of Pioneer Day, I have hit a significant missionary landmark. I am 1 year old in mission time! Sister Lloyd and I had a wonderful birthday party on our roof. She got me a Frozen 1st Birthday card, a birthday cake milkshake, and loaned me her lighter so that we could burn a shirt. It's days like these when I wonder what I have done with my mission! Sometimes I think that a sister who has been out a year is so old! It's not like I don't feel like I've been out very long (well, sometimes I do) but it's like I want to do so many things with my mission and I don't have all the time in the world. Yikes moment. Better bunker down and work like crazy for my last 6 months.

We did a lot of talking to people this week (again!). I am literally walking through pairs of shoes! They get especially torn up when humidity showers rage through Brewton and I'm swimming along the flooded streets... Well, at least I'm wading from ankle up. Yeah the dress shoes don't like that. Some miracles because of it though. We got to sit down with a lady we met last week and start working with her a little bit. We've met a few people that either really want to do family history or check out our little Brewton congregation or whatnot.

And then there was the lady we waved at who somehow found the church on Sunday. Really can't explain that one.

Can't write too well right now, but hopefully I'll keep having miracles to share and not just crazy people stories! Love y'all!

-Sister Laura Cooper

Street Life

Our week essentially began with Zone Training on Tuesday morning. Zone training constitutes of a bunch of missionaries getting together and talking about the theory of missionary work and then acting it out. It's too much sitting for little restless me, so sometimes I'm known to be a little bit rambunctious but this time I didn't even get in trouble for anything. :D :D

  

We watched a good Mormon Message called The Wrong Road or something. The Zone Leaders really had to stretch to make it fit. We are pretty sure they just wanted to show the video so they came up with this presentation about how if we don't meet our goals we were just on the wrong road but now we know the right one. Oh dear.

Most of the rest of the training was on street contacting and using family history. One set of sister trainers told us we should spend between half an hour to two hours on the streets everyday talking to new people.  President Smith has asked us to mostly use the family history approach. We decided to give this finding time thing a try (especially since we were going on exchanges the next day, and we wouldn't want to be caught disobeying their counsel hehe). And even though we didn't get to teach that many lessons, we felt so accomplished just getting out there and giving everyone a chance. Lots of people are curious about what we are up to, and are usually just happy to hear that we are not selling anything or teaching something of the devil. We talked to a few people on this one street (who are all kin to one another) and this family is just very friendly and they want to know about family history!  We love people who want to know about family history. Seems like our leaders are kind of inspired! (Guess I can't rebel then...) JK rebellion is bad and I don't want to do that. :)

  

This week I will hit my year mark. That makes me one old missionary. :( But I can't be having frowny face over that because that is an important milestone! My farewell get together was a year ago today. *insert clichés about how fast it's gone*

  

It's been an awesome year. They say the last six months is time to shine. Bring it.

-Sister Laura Cooper

Break the Sicky Shell (from July 14th)

Well, most of what I've written to my own family this week has been about how sick everyone in my district (including sister Lloyd and I) have been. But the good news is we have as of late been able to leave the apartment, get some fresh air, and get feeling better. Maybe it was partly blurry heads from sickness, but we decided to spend a couple of hours just straight contacting and tracting. I had to door approach and older teenage (like maybe 17 year old girl) which is always the most awkward thing to happen at a door, because you never know at that age whether they are 18 and living independently, or if you should ask for their parents. But she said to come back and meet her family, so hopefully that will turn out okay. :P

The few people who said we could come back probably makes up the highlight of my week. Some of the week I don't remember because I was in a mind fog. Our volunteering with the library was all about firetrucks this week. But that was on one of my knocked out days, so I was like "hahahaha TRUCK LOL big red truck big red truck.".

Hope this week goes better and that this craziness does not spread to all of Brewton. Sorry for the short blog post this week. There really isn't much to talk about. We are excited to get fully back to work though! It's gonna be a great week.

-Sister Laura Cooper

Crick

As a stateside missionary, I didn't think I would ever get to know the kind of missionary work where the Elders are the only priesthood holders in town half the time, we don't have a church building, and we baptize in natural bodies of water. But Brewton has proved me wrong!

This week I had a mission highlight-- a baptism in the creek! Britney, the famous littlest investigator, was baptized 2 days ago, with her nonmember dad and grandpa there. She's a great little missionary. She's invited her dad to church like every sunday. He doesn't believe in organized religion, but supports his wife and daughter. He believes that if you do join a religion, you have to mean it. So he is very proud of Britney. I do hope we can teach him at some point.

At the baptism, we had talks on baptism and the holy ghost of course. Britney liked them, but whenever the speaker would ask her a question, she would try to throw them for a curve ball haha. Like one of the speakers said "your parents aren't perfect, but your heavenly father is." and she was like "yes they are!". Basically just to give the speaker a hard time. She is a firecracker. That's for sure. She was an appropriate baptism to have on 4th of July Weekend.

The creek dip made her real cold, but she really enjoyed it. She wants to keep going and get others going along with her in the Gospel. Heck yeah.

Also we found out this morning that me and sister Lloyd, and actually our whole district are all staying another transfer here together. That's pretty sweet! I'm glad we get to stay and keep the Elliott journey going. I don't know why this is the area the Lord wants me to stay in for a long time, but it is and I'm down for that.

We've got to go have a coordination meeting with the relief society president now at Huddle House. 6 more weeks of boonies again. Sweet goodness haha. We have an adventure ahead of us. Love ya, followers!

-Sister Laura Cooper

The Primary Push

We return to the story of the littlest investigator. It's getting better by the day. Britney's energy and childlike love for the Gospel is helping her Mom get ready to be fully into the church, and in turn is letting Vickie help Britney get baptized. Vickie has righteous desires and is very humble. She has always wanted to be at church, but I think that the push of a little child being like "I want to go to church with you!" has made the biggest difference. Britney has even been working on her nonmember Dad haha. He doesn't believe in organized religion really, but he strongly believes that if you unite yourself with a church you should be faithful to it, so he wants Vickie and Britney to keep going.

I have a few other random stories to tell about the week. We helped out at the library again for the Summer Reading thing. This week it was a magic show. I love a service project that involves us seeing a magic show! We mostly just take pictures for them, and help move the furniture around. But this week I got to be the leader of singing BINGO before the magic show started. Getting the badge out there in creative ways? check.

Also Brewton, Alabama made one major step towards becoming Mormonville, AL. I think we might have to compete with Monroeville to get that actual name, but nevertheless, we have a store now called "THE MODEST CLOSET", which sells basically maxi skirts and cute shoes. We're actually pretty sure that it's owned by the local Pentecost church (the kind of Pentecost that is around Brewton is very conservative-- we see lots of and lots of entire families with mom and all the daughters dressed in skirts everyday.) But hey someone is sharing our sentiment of not enough modest clothes. Common ground I say. We are shopping there the moment we get out of this library. :D It just opened on Saturday. We couldn't shop there because it wasn't P-Day, but we totally walked by and talked to the owners, and then picked up some opening day barbeque. I like that place already. I'm looking forward to another good week. Transfers come out soon. What is your guess, my followers? 6-more weeks of Boonies for me?

 -Sister Laura Cooper