called to serve AZ a MESAnary: "Marco" "Polo"

We moved into our new apartment this week and there is a cat that wanders around the area that has apparently been named Marco. One of our roommates was trying to call him over while standing at the door and was like, "MARCO!" I responded quietly, "Polo." Sister Leavitt thought it was funny.

Anyways, this week was filled with its ups and downs.

To start with the ups: We have 2 new investigators who are pretty awesome and solid. They actually come into the VC trying to find and learn more about God. They have been through a lot, but they really want to change. They are so ready to hear and accept the gospel. They said they would want to be baptized, but they will have to work hard in order to achieve that. But they are awesome. They even came to church for the first time and liked it! Skylar is still solid and working towards baptism on November 26. If everything goes the way it should, he should have no problem being ready by then. We also now live in our area, and that makes life easier. It's also nice because we can walk/jog around the the temple in the morning for our workout since we live across the street from it. If we don't do that, we go to pioneer park around the corner and workout there.

Downs: We had an investigator walk out of a lesson last night... He has been struggling with Word of Wisdom issues and at the beginning of the lesson, we were indirectly talking about it and overcoming it. Then we hit it head on and I think he got overwhelmed or something and kinda stormed out of the member's home we were at... the spirit left pretty quickly when that happened. We also went finding and went to a potential investigators house, and as we were about to knock on the door, a neighbor told us no one lived there. We reacted and the neighbor asked if we were looking for Rick. We said yeah. He responded, "yeah, he died on Tuesday." We were shocked. That's something you don't expect to happen.

Something that I really liked though from church yesterday is a talk our bishop gave in one of our wards. Trying to be brief, he basically made three points with some stories he told: 1. Babies cry. 2. Tires go flat. 3. Life is hard. He then talked about how there are some things we just cannot control. Some things just happen. We all have adversity in our lives, but the Atonement makes it possible to get through it and grow and progress. It's important to remember that we all will have hard times, but it is how we choose to go through them that matters. We also can't improve and grow without those hard times.

Love y'all!

Sister Smith