Sincerely Sister Smith

Dear Loved Ones,  This Saturday I had the opportunity to see someone I have been teaching be baptized. Her name is Taylor, and she is 20 years old. I just swooped in at the end when she had already been taught pretty much everything, but I'm crediting her as my first. Her face shone with such joy as she came up from the water. That made me feel joy as well and I was proud of the part I was able to play and grateful to be a missionary. Sometimes I think everyone's okay during this life if they have some religion that lets them believe in a God who loves them and teaches them good moral standards and we can always try to get people to our own faith in the next life. But seeing the joy it brought Taylor reminded me why I'm here, why this is all worth it. I am so grateful every day to finally be a missionary. I gave a talk in church this Sunday on Come Follow Me. I like that CFM is rooted in the New Testament this year so we can hand it out to people with an interest in ...

Dear Loved Ones, I went to the Boise temple today for the first time. The motif on the benches, ceiling, and stained glass is the Idaho state flower, the syringa. I think the temple procedures are much the same, only more efficient. My companion and I made little origami hearts with a bible verse, 1 John 4:11, which is about love, on them so we can hand those out to people. We handed one to a lady on the street who said she is from Iraq and her religion is Azadi, or something like that. That's a faith I've never heard of. I also met with a Sikh family this week and learned many fascinating things about that religion. Their version of a baptism is not being immersed or sprinkled in water, but drinking a bowl of it mixed with sugar. They also have "articles of faith" that are not written articles, but articles of clothing or accessories, such as a comb or dagger. I wonder if the shared term "article" is a coincidence of language ambiguity since article...

This week for service, we: Painted a laundry room for a family moving into a new house Called bingo at a retirement center (Bingo is the single most mind numbing game. Why do people like it? Because it's simple and you can adjust for group size easily?) Cleaned up a yard belonging to that old woman I mentioned last week who thought chewing gum was a way of patching a tire. We brought by a man we've been teaching named Joseph because he likes doing service. He is the nicest guy. He was raised in India by a devout Christian mother and wandered into our church one Sunday because he was looking for a church to attend.  This week for teaching, we taught a married couple who haven't been attending church in a long time. Then we had a lesson with Joseph where the topic was chastity. Awkward teaching that to a man. Then we met with an elderly lady who would come to church if she could but she and her husband and are old and have health problems, so we gave her a N...

Dear Loved Ones, Idaho is entirely populated by potatoes. They gave us potato shaped candy at orientation. Root is pronounced to rhyme with foot and the locals act like they're all exotic because they don't live in Utah, even though the mountains and landscape look exactly the same. A little miracle happened this morning. A member was driving us over to Meridian to do emailing and shopping and her tire went flat. She was all, "We can patch this up with chewing gum like I did to my radiator in '85," and I was like, "No, we're gonna call roadside assistance." Triple A said they would take an hour, and while we were waiting, this mechanic rolled up in his full mechanic truck and patched it for us. Little miracles!  Our big successes this week were getting a twelve year old girl to come to church and talking about baptism with this twenty year old.  We're in a biking area and biking sucks. If you want to send up some prayers, pray that I...