Happy Birthday to ME!! and other important stuff

8-25-14

Dearest Family of mine!!!

Opened Birthday package first thing!

Well Happy Burfday tooooooo meeeeeeee!!!!! Hahah. Thank you soooooo much for the birthday package! It was awesome!!! I loved all of it and I'm so thankful!You are all the best! I'm so thankful for your love and support! Our land lady made us pancakes today for breakfast which was super sweet of her and she also got me some earrings and a necklace. She is the sweetest  woman ever! Love Sis Brighton... 
YAY FOR BABY DAVEY!!! :) I was soooooooooo excited when I found out!! I showed everyone his little picture :) He is a cutie-patootie! Weird to think he'll be 8 months by the time I get home.... If he had been born on my birthday his name would have been baby Mudge..... heheh :) Lucky duck....
          So this week has been a good one! 


"Cheese" for her yummy birthday cake>

Last Monday I told you about sour patch bowling right? We had a huge bag of sour patch kids and you had to grab one out of the bag and depending on what color it was you had to bowl a certain way! There was backwards, left handed, granny, on your stomach,  crab, and a bunch of other silly ways! We had a really good laugh and a lot of fun! After Bowling, we just sat on the top of a hill and drank juice and joked around with the Elders. One of them brought a billion gummy bears and we started throwing them at each other and catching them in our mouths. It was really funny to watch them run around like chickens with their heads cut off as they threw the bears super high up and tried to catch them. They were running into each other and losing them in the grass. And when we were down to the last gummy bear I decided to get in on it and was running around trying to catch it in my mouth. When I did all the elders instantly fell to the ground laughing really hard and I spit the bear out really fast! They hadn't told me, but the bear had already been in two of the elders mouths and had grass stuck to it!!! It was soooooooooooo gross!!!! But we had a really good laugh and it was a super fun day! 
Later that night we had an early birthday party with Dusty and his parents and sister and niece and nephews. They made me a rockin awesome dinner of rice and back straps and fruit and ice cream cookie cake that was really rich! We had fun and his mom who is so sweet gave me a piano cd specifically for sister missionaries. They are the best! 

Rainbow after lots of rain storms this week.

      Tuesday was a really loooong day. We had lessons all day long and didn't get home until late.  We were so tired after such a long day,  when suddenly sis McMurray sat up really fast and was like "Guess what I just realized?!" and I was like "What?" in a really mumbled voice because I was face down in my pillow... "We didn't have a single person cancel on us today!!!" YAY! That like never happens. We always have something fall through. Wednesday we went to the Fausetts and helped can carrots. Their daughter Misty is serving in California and doing an awesome job! We met with S which is a young mother who we've been teaching for a long time. A couple weeks ago she had a bunch of concerns finally come out on the table when I asked her if she had prayed about baptism yet. (She has been turning us down every time we invite her to be baptized and says she's not ready) She told us about being scared of being judged by her family, and not being ready to change and she doesn't want to pray because she knows the answer will probably be that she needs to be baptized and she doesn’t want to! haha oh goodness...so we've been working with her. And Wednesday we read the Story of the Currant Bush with her and the importance of accepting God's will. I told her how before my mission I didn't really want to go. I was terrified. I didn't want to pray and ask God if a mission was right for me because I knew already what his answer would be and I didn't want to.... but after 5 months of back and forth I finally prayed...and got the answer to serve...and now I've never looked back and wouldn’t trade this experience for the world. My mission means everything to me and I've learned so much from it and have been so blessed. I promised her that she would feel the same if she got baptized and invited her to pray about it. She began talking about her baptism...and now it's not a matter of if but more of a matter of when! YES! 
      Thursday we went to a chicken fry out in the middle of nowhere at a place called Bacon Park...if it's going to be named bacon park there should be bacon growing on the trees or something! but no....no bacon... just a bunch of chicken. It was really good...

Showing some frustration when people
don't want to see them on Saturdays

     The rest of this week was just teaching teaching teaching.... It has been a good one and there have been a zillion lightning and thunder storms. I almost wet my pants in bed last night because one crack of lightning and thunder happened all at once and lit up our whole room and I totally jumped and let out a little squeak! My heart felt like it had flown into my mouth! Scared me soooo bad! haha! It took me forever to get to sleep last night... I thought I was going to get struck...and Sis McMurray was knocked out tired and slept thru the whole thing. 
    I've just been so thankful this week and happy. Life is so good. I am so blessed and grateful and I can't contain it all. We were singing I know that My Redeemer Lives in church yesterday and I just sang it at the top of my lungs and was so happy and just....it was great. The Gospel is SO so soooooo good. I want everyone to just feel this way all the time. We had a bunch of people come to church yesterday that we had been trying to get to come and they finally made it! It just made yesterday dandy! Choosing to be happy is just so much better. You should try it .... happiness is a choice and if there is one think I regret in my life it's that I didn’t just let myself be happy. It's so worth it. :)
     I'm so happy that you guys are having fun and hope you guys have fun as school starts back up! Tell Kelsy that she is so lucky to have those jobs!  Happy late birthday to Boo Boo Ezra :) Love you all so much and miss you!
Love Forever,
  Sister Lenise Diane Volmer