Don't Tell Them About the Potatoes

​We got the pictures back
from our photoshoot
with Sister Purnell
from a couple weeks ago
:D

It literally doesn't make sense in my brain that it's already been another week. We're now in week 11 of the first 12 weeks of Sister Heredia's mission. WHAT. And now everyone in the world is in school again? Yeah that's insane. I swear y'all just got done with school. It's just weird ok?!

In other news we met a guy named Coleslaw this week. That was fun haha We were walking through a park, and this like 70-year-old man was doing tricep dips on a park bench, so we we went over and talked to him. He tried to tell us all about karma and how it works and how Christianity doesn't make sense because people have to be punished for their wrong-doings. We talked a lot about why we need a Savior, why we can't just do it on our own. He didn't seem to be soaking much of it in, but I could definitely see some gears turning in his head.

We accidentally crashed a party on Sunday. We went to go visit a girl in Gateway, but her brother's leaving on a mission in a couple weeks; they were having a big open-house-going-away-party for him. We walked up to the door and her brother that's leaving let us in and after a few seconds of awkward exchange, we realized there was a party happening and he realized we weren't there for the party. He's super nice and invited us in anyways to eat and what have you, but my heavens it was so awkward haha We ate a couple crackers, said hi to a couple people and shuffled back out the door.

Kemi's finally back in town! She's been on vacation for like a month, and she's finally back! I had been kind of throwing myself a little pity party the day we saw her cause I was a little frustrated with the way some things have been going. We went to go stop by and she didn't answer the door to just kind of add to my bummed out-ness. I was about to get in the car when she opened the door and called out to us. I WAS LITERALLY SO HAPPY. Sister Heredia already had the car turned on and was getting ready to drive away when I started running over to Kemi. I had to stop for a second to at least tell Sister Heredia what I was doing, but then I ran across the street and got a Kemi hug :D

​A member bought us frozen burritos
and a JUMBO box of rice krispy treats
from Costco :D

Our singing switched days, but it was great this week :D Tons of people were contacted and my voice was thoroughly dying by the end. Later that night, we went to help a less-active clean her apartment. Any reason to wear pants is an excellent one. She has a little kitten, that the last time we went over had a personal vendetta against my knee. I was a little worried when I was the designated vacuumer that it would only add to this kitty's reasons to attack me, but he was totally chill with it. I've never seen a cat not care so much about a vacuum.

We got to go to another lesson with Trudi this week! She's great. Seriously great. She's so excited to be baptized. There was some complication where they were going to have to maybe move the date, but the Elders told her the 10th was still gonna work and she got so excited she screamed and started dancing around and then threw her copy of The Book of Mormon in the air. She had full intentions to catch it, but was a little too excited to stay focused long enough and it dramatically fell onto the table then to the floor haha

I was telling Sister Heredia about how I used to have a set list for my bedtime songs when I was little and how I always had my mom sing me "My Heavenly Father Loves Me." I've been singing it all week now, so I'm just gonna include the lyrics cause it's still one of my favorites.

1. Whenever I hear the song of a bird
Or look at the blue, blue sky,
Whenever I feel the rain on my face
Or the wind as it rushes by,
Whenever I touch a velvet rose
Or walk by our lilac tree,
I'm glad that I live in this beautiful world
Heav'nly Father created for me.

2. He gave me my eyes that I might see
The color of butterfly wings.
He gave me my ears that I might hear
The magical sound of things.
He gave me my life, my mind, my heart:
I thank him rev'rently
For all his creations, of which I'm a part.
Yes, I know Heav'nly Father loves me.​​

​Peace and Blessings
Sister Hepworth

P.S. One of the benefits of serving in a YSA ward is we get to help at a lot of receptions. The ladies in the kitchen were very particular about how things were to be done and the husbands that were there helping thought it was pretty silly and spent a lot of time teasing everyone haha Something had gone wrong with the potatoes and they had to cut the middle part out. One of the husbands was delivering the tray full of the entree plates for the head table to us and as he handed it over he whipsered, "Don't tell them about the potatoes." Later, the roll basket needed to be refilled in the buffet line, so he told the lady who was going to refill it that she had to take them out one at a time. With tongs. Then when we were going to take out a couple salt and pepper shakers, he had us put them on a GIANT tray (it literally could have held an entire roasted pig) to go deliver them. He got lots of reprimands for his sassiness haha

Chinese Kung Fu

​11 months later...

We'll start with some last week updates I suppose haha Well we lost four investigators. One we decided to stop trying to see because she would never let us in, so we're gonna give her a break. Another wants to just hang out with us and won't let us talk about the gospel, so we're giving her a break for a while as well. The other two moved. It's actually way way sad. Their family kind of fell apart (and by kind of I mean it's real bad) in just a couple days and now we're probably never going to see them again. We don't have their numbers (they don't have any) and they didn't know their new address yet. I think it's probably one of those cases where we just planted some seeds. The one was seriously so ready for the gospel. Missionaries will find her again someday. I know it.

​This is Sister Purnell! :D
She's the one that picked us up
for p-day last week.
She's called to be a church photographer,
so we hiked all over her property
having a photoshoot.
She also took us to a
cute little village
that had in ice cream shop,
so I mean, of course
we got some ice cream.

Happy news though, we finally got to meet with the Spanish lady all the way back from Canada Day! Sister Heredia taught solo cause, well, I don't speak Spanish haha I knew what she was generally talking about for the most part, but from what Sister Heredia told me and what Lucy tried to tell me in her limited English, it went really well haha So we won't be the ones to actually teach her, we need to get her passed over to the Spanish-speaking missionaries in her area of the city, but she is just SO READY. Lucy said (well I should say told Sister Heredia haha) that she's always been curious about mormons and has heard the name Joseph Smith a million times and has wanted to know who he is for a long time. Sister Heredia is an absolute rockstar and is gonna rock this area when I leave.

So to go along with our sudden decrease of investigators, we've put a bit of an emphasis on finding new ones haha So we went for some good old-fashioned door knocking! Ya know, I have to admit. It's one of my least favorite things in the entire world, so I've been avoiding it like the plague. We had zone conference this week though and President Pattison said, "You should be tracting at least once a week. It's good for the soul." Oi. So we did. And we met some super nice people :) None particularly interested in us or the gospel, but my heavens this world has some insanely good people in it.

Some of my homies at zone conference :)
So they're all pretty short.
They were standing on their tip-toes
and I crouched down to take this picture.
The first one we took,
I was literally like a foot taller than all of them.

Speaking of zone conference, I loved it. Seriously loved it so much. Sister Heredia and I went home ready to WORK. President Pattison is such an awesome guy. He was leading his training and someone made a comment and he got a big grin on his face, raised his eyebrows all impressed and said, "That's cool!" Typing this out I realize that this is the most random story to explain how awesome he is. He was writing our answers to one of his questions on the board and he changed the wording one of the answers the Elders gave and said "I don't know how to spell that so I'm gonna write this." He's seriously just great haha

One of the less-actives missionaries have been meeting with for years randomly texted us on Sunday and said she didn't want to meet anymore. We asked if we could just come say bye to her and she said no, we asked what happened to change her mind, and we haven't heard from her since. I've been meeting with her for almost six months now, and it hurt my little heart that someone I've come to love so much just kind of slammed the door. Looking back at the past few lessons we've had with her, it's not entirely out of the blue. She's the one that's been saying for weeks that she "doesn't care." It's still pretty heart-breaking though.

​Just playin with one of my birthday presents :)

BUT HEY. Life is still good and the gospel is true. And there's someone out there that does want to meet with us! We just have to find her! This is just Satan trying to get us down cause something GREAT is coming. I can feel it. I don't remember what the song is or who sings it or if these are even the right words, but there's a song that says something along the lines of: "It's always darkest before the dawn." I have faith in "good things to come" like Elder Holland talks about all the time.

I really seriously just absolutely love this gospel. Every time I read the Book of Mormon, it makes sense. I think a lot of my testimony is in how much sense it makes. Seriously just this morning I was reading about Alma telling his son Corianton about the spirit world and judgement and resurrection and justice and mercy and it just makes so much sense. There's literally no other way I could possibly think of to make it all work.

Peace and Blessings
Sister Hepworth

P.S. The same Elder from Hong Kong in last week's story is the highlight of this week again haha We were eating lunch at zone conference and he called out to Sister Heredia and I. He said, "Look! Chinese kung fu!" Then he threw the plastic knife he had in his hand across the room. He also held the same knife up for the picture of our zone at zone conference. Another exciting tid-bit from zone conference, one of the sisters' that was serving the lunch is literally a clown. Like, her job is literally to be a clown. So she went around teaching people to juggle and cracking all these jokes. On top of it all she's from London (and proud of it), so she has a British accent :D Best clown ever.

P.P.S. Alright one more. We were eating dinner at a member's house and talking about he weird cultural habits that surround mormon dating. One in particular was that people don't know if they're dating until they've had what is affectionately named the DTR (Define the Relationship). One of the member's was venting rather passionately how everyone else in the world generally knows whether or not they're in a relationship. "Hey are you guys dating?" "I don't know we haven't had the talk yet." We laughed for quite a while haha

THIS IS A HAPPY DAY

Hey! Hi! Hello! So this week's email is going to basically not exist. So sorry. We're at a member's house out in the country and there are about a million exciting things we want to do haha ​THEY HAVE A GRAND PIANO. IN THEIR HOUSE. It's going to be a very musical afternoon :D

I'll attach some pictures and will have to fill you in on life next week.

We got to be out in the country all day Thursday and took advantage of the green background

Our new singing crew! I sing tenor every week now and I tell you, my voice was dying the next day. But my range has significantly expanded.

The Mandarin Elders' investigator Jill was baptized on Saturday! She's in Mt. Pleasant so we see her every week and she is seriously just the best. That's where the title's from this week. We were doing the dishes afterwards, talking about how excited we all were for Jill, and an Elder from Hong Kong said, "This is a happy day."

THERE'S A MAPLE LEAF ON THIS OREO. THIS IS THE GREATEST OREO EVER. It somehow made it more delicious.

Sorry I probably won't be able to respond to anyone this week, but I'll getchya next week!

Peace and Blessings
Sister Hepworth

P.S. Just imagine an Elder from Hong Kong doing the hakka (spelling? It's probably so wrong). Literally one of the funniest things I've seen in my life. His arms would come up and he somehow looked like a bird the whole time.

The video is me, Elder Saumweber, and Elder Wu singing I Am A Child of God for Jill's baptism.

So We're Dropping the Bass?

​Our old district leader blew up balloons
with his nose once,
so we wanted to try.
It's really not hard at all haha

I'll just go ahead and start with the title story today. Happy news, we still got to sing this week! Some new people came that like to sing so we're gonna keep doin it! New people means that we need to re-practice everything though, so we spent a bit of time learning the parts on some hymns. We have one Elder that

​Went for the double.

can sing tenor, but doesn't quite have the range for the bass part. We were discussing our options, and we decided that some of us sisters who have a range that goes a bit lower will just join with him on the tenor parts and we'd just skip the bass part. I was about to start plunking everyone's notes when I looked up for confirmation one more time and said, "So we're dropping the bass?" 100% unintentional. I didn't even realize how horrifically punn-y what I had just said was until a solid 5 seconds later.

In other news we're doing great! Tuesday night our zone leaders introduced us to a new investigator and she had us play bean-boozed. Blech. I swore when I played it last Christmas in Tofield and ate the throw up one I would never play again, yet there I was, chewin away on some canned dog food. She's super nice though! She kept saying she has faith, just not in God. In life. I asked her what that means and she said "ya know. Life." Oh right. Silly me haha She said we could come back and teach her about God though.

We went to lunch yesterday
with the Bearspaw and Lakewood sisters!
If you can remember 10 months ago
way back in MTC days
that's Sister Smith in the green!
My (Australian) MTC companion!
She's actually being transferred
to Tofield today :D
(Tofield's the best)

On Friday we went to stop by Ruben and saw her little sister Catherine again! CRAZINESS she's been attending the Christian camp that our investigator Dene's been working at all summer! I asked her if she knew Dene and apparently everyone goes by "camp names." So I had to show her a picture for her to recognize Dene, who she calls "Dreamer" haha It was fun.

We also got to see the less-active that said a few weeks ago that she doesn't "care." We taught her the Restoration and she said probably about 12 more times that she just doesn't care. It didn't have the same effect on me this time though. It still made me sad, but it just made me me want to care more. In her own words, she said that her heart is "hardened" to it. It just makes me think about how eventually "every knee shall bow" and "every tongue confess." And how Alma talked about how it's way better to choose to be humble than to be "compelled to be humble."

Saturday we went to the Whyte Ave booth for the last time, since it's out of our area now that Gateway has moved buildings for church. Sister Heredia and I talked to a guy named Rob who wants to learn and it turns out that he lives in the area that Sister Hill covers! I realize all of you probably don't remember Rob from Tofield, but I'll just say that it's incredibly ironic that now there's a Rob in our lives again.

​We got to make pupusas last Tuesday!!
They're El Salvadorian
and absolutely delicious.

So Mt. Pleasant is at 9 in the morning now and Gateway is at 1 in the afternoon, so we get to go to 6 hour of church on Sundays from here on out! I kind of actually loved it. Like a lot. There are such great people in both wards and I love getting to hear about the gospel, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting to go to both wards every Sunday now.

Let me catch you up on some peoples! Kim, from forever ago, the lady that we only got to meet with once then had to pass her over to the missionaries in her area, who I absolutely LOVED, is doing fabulous. She's on date and is still an absolutely incredible human being. She called us the other day and I asked her what she's most excited about being baptized and she said to have the gift of the Holy Ghost: "It just seems so wonderful to be filled with His light all the time." Melted my little heart. LRT success story right there. Also, Trudi, from back in the tri-pan days is on date as well!! We got to go to a lesson with her last night and watch it happen! Her Elders asked her to be baptized, she said yes, they gave her September 10th as a day to prepare for and she got right up, walked over to her calendar on the fridge and wrote it down! Street contacting success story!

I LOVE BEING A MISSIONARY. I could legitimately probably keep doing this for the rest of my life.

Peace and Blessings
Sister Hepworth

P.S. I wish you could all have come and sat in on the lesson with Trudi last night. She and a lady in the ward are basically bffs now and they are the funniest people you'll ever meet. I don't even have any idea how to even attempt to convey how much we laughed. So this isn't really a funny for all of you, but just an acknowledgement of how insanely funny Trudi and Mary are.

I'm Feelin Twenty-Too

​Just some birffday swingin

It seems like every time someone would ask me my age and I had to say "19," they'd get a sly smile on their face and I could almost read their mind, "Heh. That's cute. You think you're an adult." WELL GUESS WHAT WORLD I'M TWENTY NOW. *channeling inner-Pinocchio-voice* "I'm a real adult!" So there.

In other news it's been a great week! Last Tuesday we were stopping by an investigator and she introduced us to her neighbor. It ended up that we didn't even get to teach our investigator because her mom called her inside, but we sat and talked to her neighbor for a long time. She expressed a lot of

​I woke up to a birthday tree on Sunday :D
I ate the most delicious cupcakes
of my life
for breakfast
that Sister Heredia made
from scratch.

desire to come closer to Christ, but I'm not sure she was convinced we're the ones that can help her do that. She said we could come back though, so back we will go! She was kind of contentious at first actually and was just googling random things about mormons and telling us everything she was reading, which weren't necessarily very positive-feel-good things. We talked and gave her mormon.org and she said she'd definitely check it out haha

This week might be
the last time we get to sing.
Transfers is makin stuff crazy.

We also went to stop by Ruben this week, and her sister answered the door. I thought it was Ruben though and started chatting up a storm with her and asked her if she had time for us to come in. She said "yeah sure" when Sister Heredia finally asked, "Is Ruben home?" I looked at her a bit shocked that she didn't recognize that we were already talking to Ruben and were about to have a lesson with her so I said, "This is Ruben." To which Ruben's sister said, "No, I'm Catherine." Dang it. In my defense, they look strikingly similar, have similar short blue-ish hair, talk the same, have the same mannerisms, but still. We've met with Ruben lots. I should know better. We taught Catherine anyways cause it turned out that Ruben wasn't even home. She's great and next time we'll go over I'll be real careful before I start dropping names.

​Temple selfie I forgot from last week

We've gotten to see several less-active that we haven't seen in a long time this week, so that's happy. With one, she's really struggling with all things church-y, so we've been struggling to know what to teach her to help her progress in the gospel. We finally decided to just take some time to talk about how awesome her family is, how awesome our families are and how much God must love us to give us such great people.

WHICH IS SO DANG TRUE. God loves us so he gives us families to learn how to recognize and understand that love. I love my family. Seriously. I love them. So dang much. They're flippin awesome. Even from a gazillion miles away they made sure to make me feel loved for my birthday. And every other day of the year. I'm glad I get to spend eternity with them :)

​We had a little shindig for the Elders
going home this transfer
after district meeting.

Listen. There a million more things I want to write about, but this is already getting lengthy. So here goes a crash course of some things I've learned this week: you can't drive a parked car (think about it), sometimes when we pray the answer is no (and that's ok!), the world is good (no matter how bad the news makes it seem), and we can choose to be happy regardless of situation/location/timing/influence (even if it seems like you can't).

Peace and Blessings
Sister Hepworth

It seriously rained so hard
that major road by our house flooded
and firemen had to blow up rafts
to rescue the cars that were stuck in the water.

P.S. Fun fact about Alberta summers: there are crazy thunderstorms that just show up whenever they feel like it. Literally almost at random. We've gotten several severe thunderstorms this week. It seriously rains so hard that I would reach down to up the speed the windshield wipers only to discover they're already going as fast as they can. We were just getting home in the middle of the worst part of one of the storms and we only had one umbrella in the car. I told Sister Heredia to take the umbrella and I would just run for it. 5 seconds into my 50-meter dash to our building, light flashed and thunder boomed literally exactly simultaneously. I screamed, my heavens I screamed and sprinted like I've never sprinted before in my life. Through the puddles across the grass, I don't think I've ever run so fast in my life. By the time I got to the building, I was so wet I had to change clothes. Later in the week, there was another storm that we had to run through to get to the building and I was wearing that same dang skirt, and I ended up having to change again because it got so wet. Again.

The video is me singing Families Are Forever when I was...not 20 haha It just seemed fitting for this week AND I'm eating ice cream.

Bonus ice cream picture