August 5, 2013

Funny thing with Sister Priday. As noted from my last email, we are very similar. So similar that we really started getting on each others nerves this past week after our crazy happy first two-ish days. We both like being leaders where we kind of tell the other person what to do and don't like being told what to do. I'm learning a lot. I have been praying really, really hard every day to be meek and charitable because, obviously, none of this is just her. It's been a really good learning experience. Thursday, we did the dreaded "companionship inventory" and talked about this tangible but unspoken annoyed feelings we have been having and weird sensitive stress moments that I don't catch on to at first and don't understand, so we decided that we need to become more "chill." We sat on the floor in our apartment for almost an hour, just sitting there and trying to figure out how to do it. We made sticky notes in our apartment all over that say stuff like "don't stress." "be chill" "'Ere you left your room this morning, did you think to be chill?" "got chill?" etc. We even got a form of companionship counseling from the other sisters--Sister Brandt (MTC companion) and Sister Palmer, who we get along really well with. They told us we needed to be more humble. So true. Anyway, I've been learning to just tone it down and be relaxed and real. It has been good--always a work in progress, though.

 

Sister Priday and I have been using a great tool to teach--singing. We have sung at the end of all of our appointments and awesome things have happened! We helped a less-active in the ward go visit teach her less-active teachee and sang at the end. Without us having alluded at all to missionary work, the teachee leaned over to her teacher and said "we need to introduce these sisters to ____ and _____," (two of their non-member neighbors!) "but I don't know how to do it." We brainstormed ideas of how with her and then roleplayed with her how she would go about it. Sooo awesome.

Our neighbor, _____, introduced himself to us this week. He looks like a big bull-dog, complete with shaved off head, stocky figure, "arms like tree trunks," and even a New Juhsey accent. From the start, he said "Hey, if you guhls (I mean sistehs) need any help, if you need me to go beat someone up for yuh, you just cawl me. I'm your guy for da job." then he gave this big, crooked-toothed smile. It was great!

 

We've been busy dividing up the area book and having companionship inventory this week, in addition to a couple of training meetings and things, so we haven't done a whole lot of teaching. We helped an older lady clean out her house this past week. She admits to both having ADD and being a compulsive buyer, and, after we had finished cleaning out her home for about an hour we spent the next half hour with her unloading a bunch of stuff to us: blenders, fresh vegetables, cans of probably expired foods, surprisingly really cute youthful new clothes from Forever 21 and a bunch of other stuff. It was so nice! We could use a lot of it.

 

Thanks for keeping in touch!

 

Love, Sister Schmutz