February 28, 2013

Hello everyone! This week has been crazy! And it went by so fast! Saturday was my one month missionary birthday! My companion and the girls in the apartment and I celebrated with leftover cake. I cannot believe that I've been a missionary for an entire month! I still wake up every morning and think, wow, I'm a missionary! And being a missionary is absolutely wonderful.

Let's see. I don't even know where to begin! I guess I'll start with tracting...Sister Jepson and I have had some really interesting experiences tracting this week. On Wednesday it was pretty rainy. (Have I mentioned that it's always raining in Virginia? It's always raining. Almost every other day.) We wanted to try and contact some of our referrals that lived on the far side of our area, so we drove up there. Well, not even one person opened the door for us. It's always a little hard to tell if people aren't home, or if they're just ignoring the missionaries, but we decided to stay positive, and we just kept going. At one of the houses, the man was really creepily staring at us from his front window, so we just left a pass-along card in the door and drove away really fast.

After all of our contacting, we decided to tract a little in the last neighborhood we went to. The first house we approached had a car in the driveway and it's license plate said "Holy Mug." It was a little unique, so we noticed it earlier when we were walking to another house and the car drove by. The guy waved at us, and Sister Jepson and I looked at each other and we both thought, why did he wave at us if he didn't answer the door when we were on his doorstep five minutes ago? But, this day of tracting just kept getting more and more interesting.

It had been almost two and a half hours of contacting and tracting, and not even one person had opened the door for us. The first woman to open the door was pretty disinterested, so we left her with a pass along card and moved on. The next lady to open the door was busy tutoring a student, so we just kept knocking doors. We were ready to go home, so we started walking back to our car, when these two huge dogs came out of the house we were parked in front of. We hadn't even thought about knocking on that door, but apparently this family sent their dogs out to chase us away. We were considering just calmly walking to the car, but the dogs began to appear pretty angry, so we turned around and walked the other way. By this point it was raining pretty hard and we didn't have an umbrella. We were continuing to be pretty positive - we knew we were doing everything we could, and it wasn't our fault if no one was interested. Maybe some of these people really needed to look at mormon.org. 

So we knocked on one last house. As we were walking away, a car pulled into the driveway. We looked at each other, and were like, well, this is a little awkward, but we thought that maybe this was why the dogs chased us away - so that we'd be at this house at the perfect time. The woman got out of the car, and it turned out that it wasn't even her house. She was just coming to pick up some friends. By now we were both soaking wet, and pretty exhausted, and we just started laughing. Sister Jepson said, "It's okay, people ignore us all the time. I'm sure they're home and they just didn't answer the door." We both started laughing, and the the lady was so concerned that we got ignored all the time and offered to call her friends. We assured her that it was fine, and gave her a pass along card, then ran back to our car before we drowned in the rain or the dogs got us or both. We drove home laughing so hard. It was great.

For Valentine's day Sister Jepson and I decided to have our own candlelit dinner. We didn't want to make any members sacrifice their Valentine's date to feed us, and we didn't think people would be very receptive if we were knocking on their doors that night, so we bought some candles and made shrimp fettuccine and stayed in together. It was a Valentine's day we'll never forget.

We got to teach Marilyn again, which was amazing. I don't have time to tell about it, but the fast version is that we talked to her for two hours in an Episcopal church and then she came to Sacrament meeting on Sunday.

Oh, I always wish I had more time! I love you all! I pray for you daily! Thank you for all of your love and support!

Love,
Sister Jasperson

Jamie arrives in Virginia

Jamie and Sister Jepson