Halloween & Humbling

November 4, 2013

Hey y'all,

I'm about out of time, but it's been a wonderful week! Here are a few highlights from the week.

HALLOWEEN. The night before Halloween was our ward's Fall Festival. It was held at a member's home, and okay. It's basically a palace. Everyone parked on the front lawn (barely took up a fourth of the front yard, or shall I say, front field? palace gardens?) and then walked around back, where a luxurious pool, huge field surrounded by gorgeous trees, and the back view of their ginormous gorgeous house awaited our view. I'm not describing this very poetically, but catch my drift. It was really gorgeous. 

We met a ton of the members, socialized, and even met some non members that had been invited. There was a lot of food and fun to be had! Everyone did dress up, but since we can't really dress up to the nines as missionaries, Sis. Buhler and I were super creative and went as "greenies". We wore matching green outfits and put our "dork dots" (orange dots that mark you as a first day missionary at the MTC) on our tags. People thought it was hilarious. We felt pretty clever.

Halloween night, four companionships of missionaries, us included, went to the stake president's house for a Halloween party! We would have had to go home by six, but we got to party and eat LOTS of gourmet food and candy instead. Lucky us ;) We ate, played trivia (Sis. Buhler and I TOTALLY owned. Go us, we are so smart. and humble), and had a ping pong and fuzball tournament. So much fun. 

I had a humbling experience while we were tracting. A nice, tall black guy invited us in named Harold. We ended up talking to him for about an hour, but we shouldn't have. He was really nice and very open to talk about religion with us, and he had a lot of questions-- but he wasn't prepared. His heart wasn't open. That was fairly obvious, but I overlooked it and while I didn't argue, I tried to answer all of his questions, and not from having my heart in the right place. I wanted to be right, I guess. I realized I was doing this after a few minutes, then I tried to respond purely from love and by the Spirit. The Spirit told me to bear testimony of the Book of Mormon and leave, but I didn't. It was a subtle prompting and I didn't realize I had blatantly overlooked it till we left. But I should have been willing to leave earlier and I didn't. That was my bad. We probably could have been more effective somewhere else. Harold was a funny guy, though. My favorite line of his--"You Mormons are like the hip hop of religion. And Joseph Smith is like Jay-Z!" (Worldy reference, JayZ is a famous rapper, not the likes of which you would like much, mom). I found that amusing and somewhat humorous. It's going on my quote wall. ;)

We had some really amazing experiences at dinner appointments with members. The dinner messages we prepared (a scripture and thought, usually) often were exactly what they needed to hear, and the experiences were edifying for all of us. When we're constantly serving as missionaries, it's nice to see the fruits of our labors right away, so to speak. I loved those experiences.

I could share much more but I'm out of time and you're probably done reading! :) It's been a good week. I feel much better about me and my mission. One prompting I had this week-- "You're in the right place doing the right thing. All you have to do is work." I'm trying to take my mission one  day at a time instead of eighteen months at a time. It's helping a lot! The time flies, and I'm beginning to understand the importance of using our time wisely. We don't have much of it.

I love you all so much! I would LOVE a snail mail from you! :)

Love,

Sister Christa Taylor