The last couple of days have been pretty exciting up here! We received a message from our mission president the other day that said we are not allowed to tract or street contact for the next couple of days because the high is supposed to be -10 degrees Fahrenheit and with the wind chill, between -40 and -55!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can still go to appointments but we just have to limit the time that we are outside so we don't get frostbite.
I hope everyone had a Happy New Years! For New Years Eve we volunteer at the museum from 5:30 to 7:30. They were having a little party for the kids there, and we helped by passing out noise makers and....looking for the lost snake. :0 One of the snakes there got out of its cage during the new years eve celebration so our job was to look for it and make sure the word didn't get out that there was a loose snake. We certainly succeeded at keeping people from finding out and there was no panic but we never did find the snake, in fact, it is still missing...
On Thursday we went out to Gwinn to see our investigators out there. We usually only get to go there once a week because of miles but we went twice this week. While we were out there we had a prompting to go visit a former investigator's house, Melissa, who had moved a couple of weeks ago. We saw that there was a car there and knocked on the door. She was there! Just a little background about her: we taught Melissa the restoration and she was wonderful and even took notes on the reading we gave to her! We had not taught her about the word of wisdom yet and heard about from a friend that you couldn't drink coffee or smoke and didn't like that. We never got to talk to her at all about the word of wisdom because the last time we heard from her she had moved to downstate Michigan. Now that you have the story I'll continue. She was home and invited us in! She apologized for the brief good bye she had given us during our last phone call and explained the hardships that she had been through in the past couple of weeks. She also told us that she and her husband had decided that for their new years resolution they would quit smoking and she already had a plan for it!!!!!!! She has so many good desires and we are SO excited to be teaching her again! The Lord works miracles everyday!
Also, I tried deer meat here for the first time. :) We met at a less actives house for dinner and they had a delicious looking chili with tons of meat in it. The meat was deer meat that they had ground themselves. At first it was fine but I had gotten a HUGE bowl of it and it the meat made the whole soup taste very strongly of deer meat. I tried not to think about it and ate the WHOLE thing but it was a bit challenging, haha. I also tried corn beef with cabbage this week which was absolutely deicious! Also, a Compton favorite is grilled cheese dipped in hot chocolate.
The ward did a sock hop on Friday and we almost got an appointment with a nonmember there. They said they'd love to meet with us though so we are going to set it up with the ward members they are friends with.
Saturday was wonderful! Our investigator is starting to read the Book of Mormon consistently on their own! His wife is a member but he is not and he has been taught by the missionaries off and on since 2006! During this lesson my companion and I set up our lesson differently than usual. I really felt like that we were able to help him through the guidance of the spirit resolve some of the concerns he had and we found out that after all of these years none of the missionaries ever taught him how to pray! We taught him how to pray and committed him to praying to know if what he was reading is true. He expressed to us that he was understanding it more than ever before. His whole countenance changed during this lesson! We are excited for him! Later that evening we stopped by another part member family, with a similar situation. The wife is a member and the husband is not. He is making so much progress though! The church is miraculously true!!
