Week 11

I am so blessed to be able to serve in this area and to serve at this time! I've never felt so much complete and steady joy in my life and I'm so grateful for that! This is the hardest thing ever, I've been trying to get 1D out of my head for forever now (Satan), but it's absolutely the most rewarding thing ever! Uhhh, I'm in love with being a missionary! I had the picture of me taking my tag off when I get home come to my mind the other day and I completely lost it. I'm trying to enjoy every second of this while I can!

The ward is slowly coming out of the dust and being revamped into missionary work. We've been praying and working so hard with having member present lessons and the devotional with President Zwick has inspired the ward. We've been teaching the Bishop's next store neighbor for a few weeks and they just asked us last Sunday if we would like for them (the Bishop and his wife) to come to a lesson with us. Ahhh, hellur! It was the greatest thing ever to finally get some fellowshipping going on. Bishop pretty much took over the whole lesson and he and Dwayne were talking the entire time - Sister Conley and I barely got 10 words in, it was much needed! That was such an incredible miracle!

We started with our ward's proselyting families. Everyone's so excited and even though it's a huge and difficult task for them, everyone's been so enthusiastic!! It just makes me so happy! So we're hopefully going to get Starke ward rollin on to bigger and better things! It's still a struggle cause the ward's so small and they're not too into missionary work yet, but we're working on that! There's only two of us that can play the piano in the ward, so I play in Relief Society while the other lady plays in Primary. Our Relief Society president is the sweetest lady ever and I just absolutely love her. She got up yesterday and just said that she doesn't know what she's going to do when I leave and is so grateful that I can play piano. So thank you for forcing me into that, the Starke ward thanks you for forcing me to play the piano.

We're still working a lot with the less actives in the ward and we've been seeing a lot of miracles with that!! I don't have a ton of time to write them all, but they're great. I'll leave that cliffhanger for y'all!

I'm getting good at door approaches and just randomly talking to people which was probably one of the hardest things for me to learn how to do, but I'm so grateful that I'm finally adjusting! The South doesn't phase me as much now, which is also such a great blessing, cause I was losing it at the beginning. It's so backwards here. Fun fact: I just found out this week that the city of Keystone's bars were segregated until 2004. That's the kind of people I'm dealing with. It's.... interesting to say the least. But it's great, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else!

Love you all! Enjoy the West Coast!

Sister Carr