5/20/2008

Sorry this e-mail took so long, I hope mom didn't call the office. Yesterday was ridiculous. At 7:30 am our landlord shows up and has a cleaning lady with him and says that she has to do general cleaning, and Sora Larsen tried to explain that we didn't need it because we clean our apartment, he said it was in the contract that twice a year a professional comes in. So, after some arguing Sora Larsen broke and agreed. The lady looked pretty sketchy so we didn't feel comfortable leaving, but we were starving and didn't have any food so we decided that we would take 10 minutes and run to the store and get something to eat, we get back and the landlord and his wife are there looking at a hole in a chair and freaking out and saying that our church is going to have to pay for a whole new set of furniture. After that we decided not to leave the lady alone, how long can it take to clean a clean 3 room apartment? Apparently 10 hours. We never left the apartment until well after 6 and were late for an appointment. It was lame.

Besides that, life is great. We have a few more investigators, 6 to be exact. We are a little worried about Magda, she's attempted to quit smoking twice and is at a point where she doesn't understand why just 2 cigerettes are bad. We're working on it. She wants to quit. We taught her the plan of salvation last night, we waited and waited until she could get her whole family there and her husband never showed and her two older kids decided that since dad wasn't there they didn't have to be either. She looked exhausted. I feel so sad for her. I felt so dumb because my part of the lesson was how this life is a blessing from God to prepare and repent to meet him, and right as I am starting Alex her 4 year old started going nuts and wrote all over his face with a pen, (which broke my focus and made it really hard for me not to laugh, but she did not think it was funny) and he started bouncing off the walls. So, she was yelling at him, and mind you she works the night shift at a bank (why a bank has a night shift I am not entirely sure) so she was out of it because she hadn't had a chance to sleep, but wanted us to come over before she went to work, poor lady was dangling on a string that was about to snap. And all i knew how to say was that life is a blessing even when its hard. She just looked at me, and Sora Larsen was laughing at me as soon as we left. It was sad.

Anyway on a funnier note, we had a combined branch activity on Friday, and I was just setting up chairs minding my business when this rather scary girl maybe a little older than me was walking around the church with Georgiana, a convert as of last Sunday, pretty much stuck to her,against her will, the girl (I'm not entirely sure what her name is) comes over to me and grabs my arm and tells me to come with her. Now, mind you she's about 8 inches shorter than me but remarkably strong my shoulder pinned under her arm and as we are walking around she is asking me about my family,I'm a little too frightened to be honest to really concentrate enough to understand, we come back around the church and this girl literally picks me up off the ground and sets me on a chair and tells me to sit there and then wispers something in my ear and the only word I understood was "crying"
and I'm like what the... and I look at Georgiana and she smiles at me and all of the sudden bursts into tears and starts talking to me, and all I catch is that her 21 year old friend died two days ago and she was a sinner and so God isn't going to love her anymore. It was intense.

Okay, maybe that isn't very funny, but the elders were laughing pretty hard, and did basically nothing to help. Good old elders. Anyway, things are going well, I still understand basically nothing, but I'm faking it better Ithink, sadly to say.

Anyway, Sorry I don't have any good stories from this week.

Love ya,
Nicole