October 20. 2014 Letter

The temple is gorgeous! I'm so jealous! Thanks for the pictures :) I've just been staring at the drawing of it that they have on lds.org.  My week has been crazy! I guess I'll add some stuff that I forgot to tell you last week too.  All Monday we were camped out in a members basement because it was supposed to get really bad.  It never did get too bad, but I'll send you some pictures of the damage closer to our apartment.  We had exchanges with the STLs last week and that was really fun.  We had lots of really cool experiences too.  Like when sister McDougal and I were walking home from getting some addresses, we almost got hit by a car...Alabama has literally no sidewalks.  The car pulls over a little ways down the street and the lady gets out and starts saying sorry and telling us to be careful.  She realized we were the missionaries and starts getting really emotional.  Sister McDougal and I had no idea what was going on.  She told us that her cousin had just commit suicide and that the church had really helped her through that.  She was a less active member and didn't know how to get back to church.  We taught her some and set an appointment to come back.  I haven't been back because this was in Madison, but it was a really cool experience...then we had a sleep over and pulled pranks on each other.  The next day I went out with Sister Brunner.  She's legit.  Roll model missionary right there.  Anyways we went tracting and ran into a guy taking out the trash.  We tried talking to him to find out that he only spoke Spanish.  Sister Brunner tried talking to him anyways.  She was doing really well, but couldn't understand what he was saying.  I kinda could so I would tell her.  It was crazy how we both worked together to talk to this guy who didn't know English.  She would speak and I would translate.  We set an appointment to come back and teach him, so we will see if our Spanish skills extend beyond contacting people.  We had a lot of really cool experiences last week, but this week was kinda off.  Sister Pratt says its because we had a baptism yesterday, so the rest of the week everything went wrong.  We were out for an appointment about 20 miles away and had some time before hand, so we decided to go tracting...There is no off time apparently, just tracting time.  This guy we came across was interested so we set an appointment to come back.  His kids really liked us and were excited for us to come back and play.  We came back a few days later for our appointment and his wife answered the door.  She said they weren't interested and shut the door.  That wouldn't have been so bad had we not traveled so far to get there and had the two boys not run out after us asking why we weren't staying to play.  I didn't know what to say to them.  Then on the way back to the car, this car full of college girls yelled something at me that I cant repeat because I'm a Mormon.  I was somehow able to hold off the hulking out until we got back to the car and away from people.  That bothered me for the rest of the night though.  The next morning I prayed to get some answers and comfort in my personal study.  That day in my 8 pages of the Book of Mormon that we are reading together as a mission, I ready the story of Alma and how he was spit on by the people, but instead of being angry, he was sad for them because they didn't have the gospel.  It was crazy to get such a straight forward answer...I gotta go soon because we have a meeting early, but we might be able to get back on later.  We had a baptism yesterday!

p.s. if I don't get back on to email everyone else, could you send this to them.  Sorry I couldn't be on for long today.  Miss and love y'all!