Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places: Week 3 - Inman, SC

It's been awhile since I've been able to write home... So I'm pretty grateful that today's P-Day! I have so much to say in such a short amount of time so I'll try to do this quickly!

I made it here to South Carolina safely :) I absolutely love it! It's so green! I don't miss the mountains too much yet just because the trees are so tall that I can't see how flat South Carolina really is. The humidity here is pretty crazy though! It's been raining a lot so when the sun comes out, it's basically death because the humidity is so bad!

The first few days were pretty nice because President and Sister Holm were easing us in to being missionaries. It was just a lot of trainings and discussions. Last Tuesday, we started off our day with going into a "Sacred Grove" that President Holm made for the missionaries here. It was so peaceful and green! It was basically the greatest thing ever! Then we started to leave and it turns out that we were right outside of the Columbia Temple! It was seriously the greatest! We didn't do a session but we did get to go inside to the waiting room and hear from the Temple President and the Temple Matron! It was such a cool way to start the day.

Later, I ended up having my first experience with tracting. It was... Interesting. The last door my temporary companion and I knocked on ended up being a Bible teacher and he was super nice. We prayed with him and he asked if he could leave us with a treat. I thought the "treat" was going to be like a bottle of water or something... No. It was a Christian rap. It was the greatest thing of my life!

Anyway, my companion is Sister Sarah Craig. She's 19 and from St. George. It's really weird for me to have someone younger than me training me... But she's way cool. We get along pretty well so far. We are opening up the Boiling Springs area for sisters and it has been a pretty cool experience being here because apparently this mission hasn't had sister missionaries for over 30 years! We visited a member, who's a 29 year old widow living in this area her whole life, and her two daughters a few days ago and she told us that we were the first sister missionaries she's ever seen! Then the teenage girls in the ward are just going nuts over us because they want to serve as well. It's just a good time to be a sister missionary.

Funny story! Sister Craig and I were driving Benji (our car named after King Benjamin) and pulled off the side of the road so we could go knock on some doors. The roads here are very narrow so we just pulled off onto a dirt hill. I got out of the car and saw how it was parked and thought it was funny so I took a picture by it. When we came back from knocking we tried to get out of the dirt... And we were stuck big time! The reason we were stuck is because the dirt was so wet from the rain and Benji kind of sunk into the mud. So we said a prayer and a few seconds later some nice man helped tow us out! True story!

I'm sorry for such the long email but so much happened that I had to tell! Hopefully next week's email isn't nearly as long! Love you all :)