Celestial Coffee

Hey yall!! 

I hope you had the greatest New Year. It's crazy to think that just last year I was in school, stressing about projects and grades, and working on my mission papers. Now I'm here in Georgia and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. <3

The weather is Georgia is ridiculous. Christmas Day it was sunny and 75. This week has been nothing but heavy rain showers and dark skies. My favorite! So, with all the rain comes mud and flooding and more mud and the possibility of getting your car stuck. While missionaries in Colorado are getting their cars stuck in deep snow, our pretty and white Chevy Cruz gets stuck in mud. Soooo many times!! Poor Sister Foster had so much mud on her. Welcome to the mission?? 

We are making great progress with our part member family, Trevor and Anna. I love them so much! This week we knew we needed to address the word of wisdom lesson, and being in the south everyone loves their sweet tea. We were also a little nervous about coffee, so we made Celestial Coffee. We took packets of instant hot coco, tied them with a string, and wrote 'celestial coffee' on the front. Ta-da. We are too clever. They loved it. Anna was so concerned with letting her sweet tea go but kept saying she would try. Trevor also told us that his addiction to Coke definitely needed to end. They committed to try getting back on track with word of wisdom standards. We were so happy.

We were not able to find any new investigators this week and none of the investigators that said  they would be at church came. It was really disappointing to us. During companionship study on Sunday morning we were talking about how we could truly turn our whole hearts to the Lord and have complete trust in him. We recognized it's hard, but once we do this, we will become happier missionaries, and happier people in general. When NONE of our investigators or less actives showed up to church, our hearts broke. We were sad. While we were singing the sacrament hymn (I can't remember what one at the moment) it hit us both. It talked about how we needed to follow God's will. We both looked at each other and we knew that our investigators weren't supposed to come to church that day. Our Heavenly Father knows what He is doing. If He wanted them there, they would've come. Of course, it's disappointing, because WE wanted them there. But sometimes the things that WE want and the things that GOD wants, are different. Once we realized that, we were able to have a really happy and productive day. I'm really grateful for that experience. 

Like I have mentioned before, Athens 1st ward is really focused on getting back and helping out less actives. Several times a week we make attempts to meet several of them. We have been working on meeting with an older couple that was on high priority, meaning they had the greatest likelihood of easily coming back into church activity. We were in the area and decided to try them again and they were home. We were so excited. It was raining...it was pouring. So the sweet sister let us in from the rain and chatted with us. She seemed so awesome right off the bat! Her and her husband grew up in Idaho, went to BYU, and came to Georgia for work. We let her know of the time change for the new year and asked if we would see her this week, she very casually said 'Probably not this week. The new year and stuff.' And in our minds we totally were like yeah, sweet, next week for sure! As part of our purpose in helping them come back, we usually inquire why they stopped attending. Most people are totally open and honest about it and it is great. As soon as we asked if there was a specific reason to their inactivity, the room felt instantly Spirit-less. She said very coldly 'of course there's a reason. There's a reason o everything we do but it's none of your business.' Obviously we know that. And we are totally fine if they would rather not answer, we are just there to help them. We thought she was going to kick us out right then, after she found out why we really were there (like it was some secret though. Honestly, if you are inactive and missionaries stop by your house, it's pretty unlikely they stopped by just to say hi.) but instead, she kept going on and proceeded to tell us that 'we had no right to probe but that the tip of the iceberg was when she and her husband attended BYU and they got offended by a remark made by a member about them not having any kids yet'. Obviously that wasn't the full reasoning, but like she said it isn't any of our business. It was so sad to me to see that her family had missed out on all the amazing blessings of the gospel because something that was said was out of line. She had kids and grandkids who never experienced the wonderful blessings that come from growing as a family in the church.

This experience really made me think how important it is for us to be so personally converted to the gospel that we are never offended by anyone or anything. We need to forgive and look forward! I hope with the new year that all of you will take this opportunity to look forward and set goals and make a plan to reach them. Be kind, say your prayers, read your scriptures, and smile. Your day will be brighter and so will someone else's.

I love y'all! Stay bright (:

Love, Sister Merritt