1/14/2013
Dear Family,
Our
trip to Banff was amazing!! Of course my camera is in my other bag at
home, so hopefully I will be able to send pictures next week. Banff is a
very mountainous area that was cover with snow and packed with pine
trees. We drop past Two Jack Lake, stopped at Lake M or W something
(haha) and took a few pictures and then we went to Johnston Lake.
Sister McIntyre's daughter drove us and she brought her family. While
we walked on the lake and around it the children went sledding. Yes, I
did walk on a lake. :) It was frozen over, but it was still neat. We
then headed over to the Banff Springs Hotel. There is a little ice rink
in front of the hotel, so the children continued to sled and ice stake
while we checked out the hotel and took many pictures. :) Sister Little
warned everyone that we were going to look like tourists while we were
there. It was so peaceful and nice not to be rushed going places. We
walked up to a castle looking restaurant that over looks the ice rink
and it was so pretty! It looked like a very classy winter wonderland
puzzle or post card with all of the people ice staking and giant snow
covered mountains in the background. We did drive to the main street in
Banff and spent a little bit of time looking at some of the shops. We
got fudge at this famous candy store. I've been saving mine since I am
still working on the mountain of candy I got for Christmas. ;) I am
looking forward to going back in the summer time. And...we would like
to go again. We shall see what we can arrange. There is this hike
through Johnston Canyon to some waterfalls and I think it goes up to
Lake Lousie. I cannot describe how wonderful it was, but it was
probably one of my most favorite p-days ever.
We stopped by two potential investigators and we talked
about families. They both said that we could come back on Saturday.
We did and neither one of them were home. Yeah for people having lives
and wanting to do things with their children. No worries, we will catch
them another day.
Okay my mind got blown TWICE this week. We had a zone
meeting and the zone leaders told us about the projected numbers for in
coming missionaries for the summer. The elders will increase by about
40, there will be two more Mandarin Elders, I think Spanish missionaries
will increase by four - two of which will be SISTERS! And...are you
ready for this? There are saying that there will be SIXTY
sisters by the summer. I just about had an ulcer when they said that. I
could feel my blood pressure rising. Then we had interviews with
President Nicholas and he said that five sisters will be coming out next
transfer and there will be FOURTEEN coming out the following transfer.
Yikes. It's super exciting, but it most likely means that I will be
training two sisters at the same times. President asked how my Spanish
was....yeah...I am going to pray that I will not train the Spanish
sisters (the two come out at different transfers).
We had a lesson with Heather. We went over the
Restoration and we really tried to emphasize on priesthood authority and
how the gospel blesses families. It was kind of hard to concentrate
because her child was watching a movie and the volume was very loud. I
will be better about asking people to turn off all distractions or at
least turning the volume down. After our lesson Heather told us that she
sees a lot of parallels between our religion and her culture so she
does not see a need for her to change. :( I was really bummed after she
told us that. She did schedule an appointment for next week....so we
shall see what will happen.
Thursday was Sister Little's Birthday. Thursday is
when we do our weekly planning so we thankfully spent most of the day
inside. I'm trying to remember if that was the day we had a big snow
storm or it was cold. I think it was rather cold that day. It was
really funny that the weather said we would have "flurries for a few
hours". Yeah...it was near white out conditions at times and we ended
up getting close to 5 inches of snow in two days. It was great. It is
snowing again today, but we have a Chinook coming our way. It's suppose
to be in the 40s later on this week. I'm trying to brace myself for
when we get our week of -30 to -40. I think every one's prayers are
working if it hasn't been to bad yet. Thank you! :)
We were invited over to Binithi's house the day after
her birthday. One of the family friends were over and she asked us a
lot of questions about being a missionary. It's great when people think
that we are nuns. She many of her questions were about mission rules,
so we tried to help her understand that we don't live these standards
for the rest of our lives.
The baptism went well. I think 1/3 of the ward showed
up. :) We had the service in the chapel because there were so many
people there. We did have joint baptism with a child of record. I am
so grateful for all of the ward support we had. It was a little crazy,
but everything worked out. Hopefully it will be a day they both
remember.
Hopefully we will be able to get in with the rest of our investigators. Scheduling seems to be our challenge right now.
Love you lots and I hope you don't freeze down there!
-Sister Douglass
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