Royal Palm Beach August 21, 2017

Hi everyone!

It has been a great week! It started off with the usual transfer day of craziness. We all pack up our stuff, and the whole mission meets at a church near the mission home to exchange. The next hour is full of greeting old companions, finding your new companion, and then trying to transfer all of your belongings (including your bike) from one car to the other. It's a lot of fun.

I met my new companion Sister Peterson, and she is great! She is from Bountiful, Utah. She went to Utah State before the mission to study Biomedical engineering. She has been out on her mission the same amount of time as me, so we go home at the same time. We live with two other sisters, Sister Oliverson and Sister Long. They are crazy, but super fun. Sister Oliverson goes home at the end of this transfer, and Sister Long has been out for 4 transfers.

It has been lots of fun being an STL so far, it is weird how much I love the sisters, even though I haven't met most of them yet! We did meet 2 of them during a fire exchange this week (we meet up and knock doors for 1 hour together). It was fun to get to know them.

We are working with an adorable little family of investigators! I love them! Their names are Freddy and Darlyne, and then they have 3 little kids (Jaylene-7, Freddy-4, Elijah-2 months). They live in a sketchy trailer park, and are really struggling right now. They are working to quit smoking, but that has been a real struggle for them, so we are working on that! They are also trying to get married, but Darlyne was married when she was 18 and then separated that same year. She was never legally divorced, but she has no idea where her husband is which makes it tricky to finalize everything. They can't get married until they get her other divorce finalized, so we are praying that everything will be able to work out with the court this week. Darlyne grew up as a Catholic, and she is from Puerto Rico. She speaks both Spanish and English (yay!). Freddy is from New York and has no religious background, so everything is very new for him. They are both so humble and ready to learn. We have met with them several times this week, and they came to church yesterday!

We also had the chance to bring our bishop with us to a lesson so that he could bless their home. They have been seeing spirits and things in there, so they asked for a blessing on the home and for themselves as well. After the bishop gave them a blessing they asked if he could bless all their kids too, they loved it, and the spirit was really strong. A cool experience that happened was on Saturday we got a text from Darlyne saying that Freddy wasn't feeling good so they wouldn't be able to make it to church. We were bummed. However, around 10:20 at night we get a call from them and they are really freaked out because they think the spirits are back in their home again. We told them to say a prayer together as a family, and to turn on some hymns. They decided that they could not afford to miss church the next day, and that they would come no matter what. I guess it was a blessing in disguise, but they have been feeling a lot better since church. I really think that we will be able to help them have the gospel in their lives, and they need it!

Yesterday was great being able to meet the ward. They are all really nice. Last night we ate dinner at our ward mission leaders house, and his wife is from Honduras. She made us baleadas, so I was pretty much in heaven.

I'm so grateful to be here, and to serving as a representative of our Savior. I know He lives, and loves us!

Love, Sister Monson