Sister Morrison takes on the Steel City: 09.07.2015

The week with the gimpy foot.

First off, let me start by saying that the BYU game was the talk of half the members at church yesterday (a lady practically bore her testimony about the hail marry) and it was KIlLING me to not have been able to watch it! I think missing BYU sports is going to be one of the greatest sacrifices for me since I am completely out of the loop now. Elder Gates in my district is a total BYU fan like me, so it is nice that I can talk to someone about it without them getting annoyed, even if it is for only a half hour a week.

This week was a lot better for me than last week. It was hard for me to transition to the mission field, and even though I still have no idea what I am doing 75 percent of the time, I have gotten down the schedule and routine aspect which is huge for me.

Monday we went and played volleyball with a bunch of missionaries. Well, following in Kelly's footsteps I landed funny and needed up with a sprained ankle. I didn't want to seem like a pansy or some wimpy girl so I kept playing as good as I could. It hurt for the rest of the night, but the next day we had planned on doing a lot of tracting so I prayed so hard that night that my foot wouldn't stop me from doing missionary work. I woke up the next morning and I still had the biggest cankle you had ever seen (I can't even put in tennis shoes) with nasty bruises on either side, but it didn't hurt too bad to put pressure on. It was seriously a miracle because the swelling hasn't gone down at all since then, but I have been able to walk around and do everything asked of me so far. My companions made me call Sister Johnson, mission president's wife, to let her know that it was still swollen and she said it could take a couple weeks for the swelling to go down. Hopefully it will get 100 percent better soon!

We don't really have anyone to teach right now so this past week we have been driving to a neighborhood where a less active member or a potential investigator lives. We try to contact them and visit with them, but most of the time no one answers the door. We then walk around and do some old fashioned tracting where we go door to door trying to get any form of life to talk to us. It kinda sucks knowing someone is on the other side of the door but pretends they aren't home, but I figure that we will be blessed for going out and trying to meet people. It also fills in our schedule because we always have huge gaps of time in our schedule that we need to fill.

We had a few cool experiences from this week though. We knocked on a door and met a man named K. We started talking about the Book of Mormon and he said he already had a copy and that he would read it and then we could come back and discuss it with him. Hopefully that works out! We also met a man named B who said that he moved away from God as he advanced in his career and focused more on material things. He asked if we could meet with him next week and I am really happy about that.

Thursday we had exchanges and Sister Johnson came and Sister Malo left. We went tracting in this one area and met a ton of people. It was nice to have Sister Johnson there with us because she is a great missionary who knows what she is doing. Sister Durfee is trying, but she is a little timid and still pretty new, so it was nice to have a more experienced missionary that I could learn a lot from. We met a lady named C and we already went back to teach her. We taught about the Plan of Salvation, and she invited us to come back next Saturday. I hope this goes somewhere because it would be awesome to know that tracting has some success!

Saturday we were teaching a man named Z and right when it was. Time for us to leave it started pouring rain. Sister Durfee had parked a block away from his house for some reason I still don't know, so by the time we got to the car we were dripping from head to foot. I don't think I'll ever get used to this humidity / chance of rain. We went home to eat dinner after that and as we were running inside our neighbors yelled "it's just water!" I started to laugh because, yeah it is just water but who wants to be wet? Not me!

I haven't been getting as carsick, but my anxiety in the car has gone up. Sister Durfee isn't always the best about braking far away and I have started to slam my foot down of the ground on the passenger side like mom does. She also ran over a construction cone; heavens knows how she managed to pull that off. I'm not sure at this point if I would trade my semi-carsick but and high blood pressure for the full blown sick to my stomach feeling I had last week, but I'm hoping that this next week will be much better.

Love you all, and thanks for the prayers!