A New England Fall!

Hey everyone!

This week was so great! It was full of surprises and new experiences!

We enjoy this season way too much ...

So the first new experience we had was on Wednesday. We were asked to help out with serving lunch to the construction workers at the Hartford Temple site! It was so much fun! We got to meet all the people who are building the Temple, and show our appreciation for them! Also, most of them are not members of the church so it was really cool to be able to meet them and talk to them :)

We also had some great success on the Digital mission that day! We picked up a new investigator. She's from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her name is Beatriz. We taught her the Restoration, and invited her to pray about what we taught her. We're excited to talk to her again this week!

Oh another thing that happened on Wednesday...we found another mouse! It was outside this time, and it was already dead. Sister Egan decided to get rid of it by scooping it up on our snow shovel and then proceeded to catapult it into the forest beside our house. It was pretty hilarious!

On Friday we had a crazy District Meeting. We were all just waiting for District meeting to start, then the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders walk in and that was fine. Then a few minutes later the AP's walk in and we're all like "What is happening???". It was fine though. It was great to have them all there. We had a great District meeting. We learned about creating the perfect teaching environment so that the spirit can be there. Because after all, "if ye receive not the spirit ye shall not teach." (D&C 42:14)

Later on Friday we had a really cool experience. After our dinner appointment we decided to stop by to meet a less active guy in the area, Alex. We stopped by his house and there was a man outside. We asked if he was Alex and he said "No Alex doesn't live here anymore, but his Mom is inside if you want to talk to her." We took that offer, and we went inside to talk to his Mom. Her name is Olga. She is such a sweet lady and she was really excited to see us. She said "Oh I remember when the missionaries used to come over. We loved it!" She also told us that she always used to drop her son off at church every Sunday, but she never came in. We invited her to our Ward Halloween activity next week, and we also asked her if she'd like to learn more about the church. she said "YES!" We know we were led there for a reason.

We stopped at the Irish store to buy some Irish chocolate for Sister Egan!

On Saturday we went to visit a ton of people! We had a girl from the ward with us pretty much all day so we visited EVERYONE! One person we met was a guy on our ward list who is 96 years old! His name is Brother Pond. He is so sweet! When he opened the door he let us in right away. He was a bit confused as to who we were though. After about 5 minutes of explaining who we are, he understood. Then he told us all about his life, and we got to read the scriptures with him. It was great! Bless his soul. He was very hard of hearing. At one point he asked who the Bishop in our ward is now. This is how the conversation went:

Me: It's Bishop Steele.

Brother Pond: WHO??

Me: Bishop Steele.

Brother Pond: KEELE???

Sister Egan: Steele! Like a steel bar?

Brother Pond: Oh yeah! Jim!

Sister Egan: Yeah! Jim Steele!

Brother Pond: Jim Keele.

He's the sweetest. Bless his soul.

Then yesterday we had an amazing day at church! Well our day started off weird. We were doing our studies in the morning and we heard a really loud "BANG" outside our house. It sounded like the trash cans had fallen over or like something fell on them or something. There's been acorns falling on our house for weeks now so we thought "It's probably just that". I started joking to Sister Egan saying "What if it's a bear out there??!" She was like "If there's a bear out there, we're moving!" Well later on, when we were leaving to go to church, we came outside, and our trash can had fallen over, and there was nothing in it. We looked up into the forest and our trash was all up there. A bear came and rooted through our trash, and took it away into the forest. WELCOME TO AVON, CONNECTICUT!

But the rest of our day was fantastic. Sacrament meeting was amazing. One of the Primary kids did a musical number and it was beautiful. She sang, and the spirit was just so strong! Then during Relief society, one of the women in the ward asked us if we had a dinner appointment that night. We didn't, but she invited us to have dinner with their family. They are the sweetest family. We were so grateful. It was such a blessing.

This place is amazing. I'm so grateful that I get to serve here and be an instrument in the Lord's hands. I love doing His work! I love this gospel with all my heart! The church is true!

I hope you all had an amazing week!

I love you all!

Love,

Sister Rebekah Barrett