I hope that y'alls week was great! Our was good but boy are we busy! For starters on Monday we finally got the area book planner app for our iPads! This is exciting but it also means that we have to input ALL of the information for our hand written area books into the iPads. We have an hour a day for this, which doesn't sound like much, but when you add in the fact that I am still in training, a big chunk of our day is spent inside working on this or that haha! Luckily we don't have too much cabin fever yet! But I am super excited for the iPad area book! Putting all the information in has really helped me to get to know the area even better and when it is all done it will be great!! But we've still got a ways to go haha!
The other thing that was busy this week was that we had Zone Conference! This was a lot of fun! We started off with car inspections. The senior missionary that is over cars is also on Fort Jackson and is over bikes! So I've gotten to know him and his wife (who is over housing) really well! They are kind of like my mission grandparents! I got to see them also on Thursday when we had to go to the mission office to get a replacement phone because ours randomly stopped receiving texts. Unfortunately they go home in November, but they live in Utah so I'm sure I'll see them again someday! After car inspections this senior couple did a training. We had to watch a bike safety video because of the bike accidents and stolen bikes (cough cough) in the last quarter! Everyone made sure Sister Webb and I were paying attention during the part on how not to get your bike stolen haha! After that we had trainings by President on having the vision to baptize and exercising faith as a power! We also had a training by the STL's on making every planning session a revelatory experience so it was a good day!
One fun thing about this week is since my ward/area covers Fort Jackson we got to go on post and have dinner with members there! That was really crazy because Fort Jackson is like it's own little world! It was way fun to see more of the post though! Sister Webb and I are laughing because literally everyone we are teaching right now has a connection to the military. Either their parent(s) are in the military or are retired military, or their spouse is a drill sergeant haha! I'm learning way more about the army than I ever thought I would! It also leads to funny commitments such as Sister Webb doing push ups everyday to get one of the drill sergeants to commit to pray everyday! It was really cool because this drill sergeant, Jacob, is rarely home, so we don't get to teach him very much or follow up with commitments we leave him. So we committed him to pray everyday on Monday and on Tuesday we had dinner with a family on post. We pulled into a parking lot and we looked next to us and we were parked right next to Jacob's truck. He then came walking up to get in his car and we were able to talk to him a few minutes and follow up with him! It was a way cool experience and we learned that sometimes the Lord leads you to a specific parking spot without you even realizing it haha!
Also Fort Jackson is as good as ever. We didn't have a baptism this week, but we all worked our hardest to reach out to even more soldiers and we put quite a few on date! This week I got to teach a class to soldiers that covered both lessons two and three (which is the Plan of Salvation and the Gospel of Jesus Christ). It's a little crazy teaching both of those lessons in like 15 minutes, but it really helps me to know the lessons and teach simply haha!
Other than that the only other thing that really happened this week is members in our ward got a call about two blue bikes for sale and they first thought they were our two stolen blue bikes and they were going to buy them back for us until they got there and saw they were two blue kids bikes! We thought it was really cool that they were willing to buy our bikes back for us! As far as our bikes go, luckily the mission office was able to find two extra bikes sitting in some back dark corner. Unfortunately they both have problems so we can't actually ride them yet haha! So we'll see what ends up happening there!
But yeah, life is good over here in Columbia, South Carolina! Adventures happen every day, and the Lord really guides the work! A spiritual thought I want to quickly share is from a talk in Sacrament meeting yesterday. The speaker was talking about all the different identities we have (for example our Child of God identity, our dancer identity, our sibling identity, our student identity, etc.) and how they are all good identities and ways to balance them all out. It was a really cool talk! But one line he said that really stuck out to me was "Our eternal identity would not mean so much if it weren't for the atonement." I thought that was a really cool way of stating how as Children of God we all have so much potential. We all are born with the ability to become like God and inherit eternal life. But if we did not have the atonement. If Christ did not prepare a way back for us, none of that would matter. So this week I want y'all to pay more attention to how you use the atonement daily, because we all do!
I love y'all so much and I hope y'all have a blessed week!
Love always,
Sister Amy Bennett :)
Serving here in South Carolina with heart!
Sister Webb and Sister Bennett
Zone Conference!
Sister Webb, Sister Bennett and a cute little doll
Helping serve... putting together a little kitchen set.
