Leaving the Missionary Training Center - Off to California (for now) - Bonus Encounter with Brad and Sandy Harris

Bom dia!

    Today is P-Day because we leave tomorrow! I cannot believe ya'll had such a crazy ice-storm! That's kind of awesome though. I'm sure there was lots of "Walking Dead" and "Gossip Girl" in the house the past couple days. I heard the airport got closed down too and one of the sisters in our district (Sister Beazer) got re-assigned to Dallas, so she was worried about not being able to fly out this morning, but I'm sure they got it up and running asap.

   So this week was awesome. Did ya'll get a chance to watch the Christmas devotional yesterday? If you didn't you should definitely look it up on lds.org. It was super good. 

    I think I'm going to try to send some stuff home today so that my suitcases are lighter and because I won't need a lot of my heavy winter stuff in California. 

   Oh by the way! I've heard of a TON of people going through the Houston consulate getting their visas this week. And a lot of them turned in their application after me and didn't even have to do fingerprints or anything!! I've learned to just stop talking to people about visas because it always gets me flustered...it's just better to not think about it.

Debbie and Sister Allred

    My district and I sang a musical number at Church, my companion and I arranged a combo of "Lead Kindly Light" and "I Need Thee Every Hour". It was soooo good! :) 

   Also, I'm so excited to just get out to the field!! I bought a Book of Mormon with the mission funds they give us every week and am determined to give it to the person next to me on the plane. Also I have a couple pass along cards to get rid of a the airport :) Yay for REAL missionary work! 

   Miracle of the week! So Sister Allred and I have been teaching our teacher, Irmao Smith (pronounced Smitch in Portuguese hahahah William and Giancarlo will like that), anyway, he picked an investigator that he taught on his mission to pretend to be while we taught him and tried to act like him and stuff like that. His investigator is named David and he's 18. Well Irmao still keeps in contact with him and unfortunately David has stopped going to Church. He has a pretty tough family situation at home and his dad doesn't let him go to Church a lot of the time, anyway, in previous Skype lessons we've taught Irmao made appointments for us to teach the REAL David, but they fell through both times. 

   This week he didn't make any plans with David, but we didn't have enough people in Brazil to skype with, so Irmao got on his facebook and lo and behold, David was on facebook, and Irmao asked if he wanted to skype with us. He agreed. WELL, before our Skype lesson Sister Allred and I didn't think we were going to teach David, but we prepared a lesson about receiving revelation at Church and were going to commit whoever we taught (unless the Spirit directed otherwise) to think of a way to better recieve personal revelation at Church, share that with us, and then commit to actually do it. 

Brad and Sandy Harris - Nice Surprise

  Well, we ended up getting to teach David, unfortunately his camera and microphone weren't working, but he could see and hear us, so we talked and he typed back to us on the chat. It was actually pretty cool and incredible that we could feel the Spirit even in that very strange form of communication. Anyway, he shared with us why he wasn't going to Church and the different struggles he's been having and when we asked him to commit to go to Church on Sunday he said "If it works out" which we were taught means NO in Brazilian Portuguese, so we talked a little more and he eventually agreed to actually go to Church. 

   It was AWESOME! I hope he actually does go. Apparently his ward is a really tough one and so the missionaries don't visit it too often and kinda neglect it.... WHAT?! I'm so mad at them. They need to go and help David!! I wish I could go to his area....anyway, he's awesome.  And I'm so glad we actually got to talk to him. I haven't met him or even seen him, but I feel like I just love him so much and I want so badly for his life to get better.

   I get to talk to ya'll tomorrow, so I'm gonna go e-mail some other people. I'm SO EXCITED to talk to ya'll real early tomorrow! :) I miss you and I love you! 

<3 Sister Byrne

Clearly, Debbie hasn't changed much!