I arrived safely in Minnesota on Wednesday and was greeted at the airport by my cute Mission President and his wife. They are the nicest people! We went to the mission home and had lunch and got to meet our trainers! My companion is Sister Heiner and she is amazing! She's super cute and suuuuper dedicated and hard working! We are in the Rochester 4th Ward and it's been good! A cool thing about Rochester is it's the headquarter for the Mayo Clinic. Most of the people in our area aren't from Minnesota. It's mostly young families who are doing their residencies at the Mayo Clinic. So we're surrounded by super smart doctors. There's so many young families, sacrament meeting is loud, but I love it! Sister Heiner was actually in this area a transfer ago, then some Elders were in the area, and now we're here! It's been a little weird trying to figure out what the Elders have been doing the last 6 weeks in the area, also half of the people they were teaching only speak Khmer because there was a Cambodian elder soooo.. that's not very helpful haha! But we've actually found a pretty good amount of people to teach. We have had some pretty amazing experiences! God is definitely guiding us to where we need to go! My mission is often referred to as the land of Many Mighty Miracles because of MMM (Minnesota Minneapolis Mission) and it's definitely true!
As missionaries we often hear the saying, "Obedience brings blessings, but exact obedience brings miracles" The first miracle I'm going to tell you about my mom will especially appreciate. We got the elders old apartment and when we got there we could definitely tell that guys had been living there. It was not very clean and so unorganized and empty. Well, the miracle is I've been the one to clean the apartment and reorganize everything. If you know me pretty well, you'll know that I hate cleaning. But I actually really enjoy it here and I clean the apartment every day haha. It's definitely been weird. (This really is a miracle! hahaha)
The next couple of miracles are actually missionary related ;)
When my companion was here a couple of months ago they ran into a girl in a parking lot of an apartment complex. She told them that she wasn't religious but had a lot of people in her life die recently. One of her friends had died earlier that day. She told them that in times like this she wants to pray and turn to God. The missionaries prayed with her and shared a short message about the Plan of Salvation. Sadly, they didn't get what apartment number she lived in so they couldn't contact her again. All they knew about her was her name, Sierra. My companion had told me about her and last night I felt like we should try to find her. We went to her apartment building and knocked on one door and no one answered. I said that I thought we should go to the second floor so everyone on the whole floor didn't keep hearing our loud knocks. So we went upstairs and picked a door to knock on. A young guy came to the door and we told him we were missionaries and we go around sharing a message about Jesus Christ. He said he had the sink running and was busy cleaning and didn't have time to listen to us. Sister Heiner asked if there was a better time we could come by and he said, "Yeah my girlfriend will be home tomorrow afternoon, you can come back then." Sister Heiner asked for his name and he said it was Shawn. Then I felt the need to ask for his girlfriends name.... you guessed it.... SIERRA!!! God is amazing and definitely guided us there. We're going to visit her today and hopefully get to teach her more about the Gospel. When he said her name my chin almost dropped to the floor haha it was crazy.
Another cool thing that has happened, we have gone tracting twice (knocking on doors) and the first time, the first door we knocked on a lady answered and we ended up teaching her the whole Restoration lesson on her doorstep. Who knows if anything will happen with her, but she listened and seemed pretty receptive. The second time we went, we knocked on a door and no one answered. So we went to the next door and this man who is, I kid you not, 7 feet tall, answered the door. It was a little intimidating but he was super nice and we taught him the whole Restoration on his doorstep! We talked for a good 30 minutes and he had a lot of questions about our beliefs and we answered them and he agreed to all of them. We gave him a Book of Mormon and our card, we hope he will get in contact with us so we can teach him. But apparently it's not very common to actually teach people while tracting. My companion was amazed haha.
Minnesota is getting cold pretty quick! We can't figure out how to turn our heat on in our apartment so we freeze in the mornings! I need to get some winter gear because I have a feeling it's going to be here before I know it!
Ooh another random thing. Our car is a cute little Subaru Legacy. We have fun with it!
Sorry this email is so long! I love you all! God is good. The church is true.
-Sister Brooklyn Hermansen
Here's a couple of pictures I took yesterday. They're from my iPad so they're pretty low quality Sorry about that. I'll take some more interesting pictures for next week! I thought this sunset was super pretty! Then the other picture is showing some water towers. There's water towers everywhere you look here and I love it. I have a slight obsession of water towers because of the scene in Aquamarine when she swims in one! Haha!
(We actually told Brooklyn that the scenery pictures are nice, but we want to see pictures of HER!)
No comments:
Post a Comment