An Apostle!!

HELLO!

Wow was this week an awesome crazy week!  We started it off with St. Patrick’s Day on Monday and Sister Olson and I got asked to give the lesson for family home evening. We gave a fun St. Patrick’s Day lesson and then got to play volleyball and Dance Dance Revolution with them all and some of our recent converts that came! They have the funnest things here for activities it is so easy for them to invite their non-member friends out to them. This week we prepared to meet elder Anderson at the end of the week. President Patrick gave us some talks to study and ponder about so we could be prepared. We left for Montreal on Friday around 2:30 with the sisters we live with to tackle the 2 1/2 hour drive ahead of us. They took us to the temple because we got asked if we wanted to go because we haven’t gone this transfer yet. There were tons of missionaries at the temple, but Sister Olson and I were the only sisters. The temple was amazing and it was so great to be able to go. You feel so much peace when your there and you just feel at home. When we got out of the temple we didn’t realize that it was so late but it was 9:30.  The other sisters told us we had to hurry because we were suppose to be on the other side of Montréal by now at the place we were staying at for the night. Sister Olson’s gps broke and we did not have a Montréal map so we became so lost. We were clear on the east side of Montreal when we were suppose to be on the southern west side of Montreal. Caleb our recent convert happened to call us and he was able to look up directions on his phone and direct us to a road that looked familiar. The zone leaders kept texting us and telling us to buy a map that would of been a good idea if there was even a store in sight! We finally made it to our destination down town Montréal and took another half an hour trying to find parking. Montreal is like a whole new world, I felt like all of us coming out of Ottawa looked like folks coming out of the country! We stayed with the Montreal Young single adult sisters and we finally all got to bed by 12! The morning was interesting trying to have six sisters getting ready all at once, but we managed to all be ready by eight and running out the door with dry pancakes in our mouths. As we pulled into the big stake center parking lot of Montreal there was just a sea of missionaries. Having been stuck in Ottawa for six months I felt like I didn’t recognize very many. I did get to see my whole MTC district though, which was so cool. We tried to catch up on all of our crazy story’s from these past few months but it was impossible! I just want one of them to come to Ottawa and serve by me. A cool thing was a Sister came up to Sister Olson and asked where I was she grabbed me and said “right here” she told me she recognized Sister Olson from my blog because she has been reading it and she has only been out one transfer! It was so cool to see that people have been reading my blog and I’m not just talking to myself when I write these! The Conference was beyond amazing When we first got there president Patrick told us that he really didn’t know what was going to go down all he knew was that Elder Anderson was in charge. It started off with Elder Anderson introducing him self and everyone who was there in FRENCH. Who knew that he could speak French, but apparently he was a mission president in France. Then he had all of us come up and shake each one of their hands. It was so cool and special! Then he had Bishop Gerald Causse of the presiding bishopric speak in French because he is from Paris. I could understand a lot of it, but for sure not all of it! Then Elder Donald L. Hallstrom one of the Presidents of the first quorum of the seventy spoke, and Elder David Homer the Area Seventy who supervises our mission. Elder Anderson then called random people that he wanted to bare their testimonies.  One of them was President Patrick’s son who just got called on a mission to Tahiti, French speaking he was sooo nervous standing next to an apostle! Finally Elder Anderson spoke and little did we know how funny he is! He told us that the apostles are so old that they have one foot in this world and the other in the next and we have to keep pulling them back to this one. He was saying all sorts of funny things, but as soon as he started to talk about our Savior Jesus Christ it was like this literal wave of the spirit just smacked us all in the face it was so intense. He talked to us a lot about the atonement and how we should get more and more familiar with it. He challenged us to know more about it in the Book of Mormon and it was amazing how many scriptures he could just say off the top of his head! He told us how they decide where missionaries go on their missions and how they put a lot of thought into it because it changes your life forever! All of the speakers put a big press on knowing that right now as missionary’s we should not have any regrets because this is the only time that we will be serving 24/7 and when we get back from our missions we will have lives but right now we should put everything we have into our missionary work. It was so amazing to get to hear wisdom from our amazing leaders and from a witness of Jesus Christ. It got me so excited for general conference coming up! On the way home from the conference I was reading a letter I got from my bishop from Hawaii and read that a friend I knew in Hawaii passed away in December it was so sad to hear and helped my testimony of the plan of salvation grow even stronger. I know that we will get to see him someday and I will always remember his service to me!  Sunday was so great Taylor gave the lesson in Relief Society which was sooo good, Caleb got the Priesthood and that was such a neat experience to witness him receiving the authority to act in gods name, and another recent convert we teach taught priesthood, and another talked in sacrament, so it was an amazing Sunday as you could see.  This week is going to be sad because it is Sister Olson’s last week on the mission. She has to start saying goodbye to everyone and she is not ready to, but who is ever ready to say good-bye? We also get to go to the temple with Caleb this Saturday for him to do baptisms for his ancestors. We get transfer calls this Saturday and I am excited to see who my next companion will be. I am really hoping that I get to stay here at least another transfer because I really don’t want both Sister Olson and I to leave this area with all of our amazing new converts. I know that Heavenly Father will take care of this area no matter what! I love you all

-Sister Dick