Notes from September 1 2014

Okay we had a pretty crazy week! On Monday to Tuesday, we had an exchange. I stayed here in Poolesville, and Sister Scow came here. We ate over at a member's home, and their cute 9 year-old daughter who has special needs was having trouble pronouncing Sister Steenhoek. Her mom was like, "it's -hook, like Captain Hook." The daughter then thought she was sitting across from Captain Hook all throughout dinner and would make it known to the table periodically. To make our exchanges even more memorable, we were driving to the hospital the next morning to go to a blessing that was going to be given to our investigator's grandma, but the GPS took us out of our mission.... We accidentally drove into Virginia!! Whoops. My exchange companion was calm and collected, and I was feeling adventurous as well as overwhelmed at the fact that we were late to the hospital. My life is a movie. Even as a missionary! Later in the day, we have a sisters only outing in downtown DC with the 40ish sisters in our mission. We went to the Library of Congress as well as the Botanic Gradens. We switched talking with sisters after a few minutes and got to know many more of the DC North Sisters! So we met this older Chinese woman named Joyce Wu a few weeks ago at the Poolesville Library, and she thought we were teaching an iPad class because we were sitting there with our iPads. We told her unfortunately we weren't, but that we'd be happy to help her with her iPad anyway! We went over to her house last week and showed her how to use her iPad. She entertained us with her tai chi moves right there in her living room while were were about to walk out the front door! She suddenly pulled out a sword and started going at it. She then pulled out her fan and opened it with a big WHIP. After a few minutes of showing us her tai chi moves, we thought she was awesome haha. We are going to come back to her place and teach her about the gospel! We met Kane on Saturday night at about 8:25pm, a miracle! He is from Senegal Africa!  He speaks very broken English but great French! We invited him to church, and he committed to the next day. Our church starts at 11:30am, and he texted us at 11:20 saying he was outside, but to come get him. We ended up walking 3 blocks to the grocery store where he was waiting and 3 blocks back to church, 30 minutes late and all sweaty. I bet the members were probably pretty confused....But we retrieved Kane!! He was pretty confused during the meeting, but thank goodness for the Gospel Principles manual in French on our iPads! We are going to pass him to the French-speaking missionaries in our stake. Our investigator Dee's mom is coming into town to visit! Dee is doing a wonderful job at being a missionary herself, and she even wrote out her testimony and gave it to her mom. Wow! She isn't even a member, but it am sure it will have an incredible impact on her mom. Sister Taggart and I were talking, and missionaries are a combination of many different things: a visiting/home teacher, a detective, and a therapist. Wow! Whoever runs into us must be so lucky(: We went the the Visitors center with Will from Cameroon, and we watched the Restoration movie. I love that movie soo much!! It was exciting to see that afterwards, he expressed to us that he loved it as well. He will be coming to church with us in the next couple of weeks. We did service with Laura this past week. Laura moved to Rockville:( we helped move a pile of trash to the trash compactor. It was many many loads, up and down 3 flights of stairs. we will miss her, but we hope to get her in touch with missionaries over there! I was studying out of chapter 4 of Preach My Gospel, and I hope all that are reading this will take some time this week to look that chapter over. It is a very revelatory experience. I was reading about the Light of Christ, and D&C 84:46 says this: "...the Spirit enlighteneth every man through the world, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit." I love that it says, sure all men have the light of Christ, but it is those who listen to the influence of the Holy Ghost that will be led to the Gospel. I love you all! Let me know your favorite part of Preach My Gospel chapter 4! Sister Steenhoek