Oooommmmmm...

Namaste. I hope you are all enjoying the sharp mountain air flowing through your paths and continually rejuvenating the life force that is within you. Feed your essence. Let your thoughts lift and soar like tiny, jagged ice shards in the winter winds... Ooommmmmm... Well. HELLO! If you can't tell, I've become a yoga master this past week. Thank you Mama Bear for sending me Shiva Rea's finest! I am totally finding my inner zen. Seriously, I'm as cool as a cucumber this week. Yoga is changing my life! It will change yours also. So will the gospel. More importantly, the gospel will change your life. Stick to that. But some yoga wouldn't hurt either!

This week was seriously a blur! So many good things on the horizon. :) I'll start with transfer day. My oh my. WHAT a day! Transfers are the worst and best days of the mission. The worst because you have to say goodbye to your other half, the BEST because you get to give big old fat hugs and loves to all of your other old halves! Aaah! I got to see my baby Sister Orozco, which was like HEAVEN on earth! She is training too this transfer, so I stuck to her side every minute of the day. Saying goodbye to Sister Rios was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. We had three months together, so to say I was attached is a bit of an understatement. But like all babies, sooner or later they need to leave the nest, even if Mama Cutler's nest is better than the rest. And it is, for the record. Anyway. Basically, transfers was just one hot mess of me running around hugging everyone I knew. In fact, I hugged so many sisters that when I was saying goodbye to one of my favorite elders, I NEARLY threw him a big old bear hug! Uhhh... can you say AWKWARD? Something saved me at the last minute, thank goodness.

So.... drumroll... my new greenie.... is... Hermana Guevara! Aaaah yeah! My Latina request came true! She is just about the sweetest, bubbliest, panda-loving, tree-hugging hippie I know! The cutest cutie pie in the world. I am BLESSED, I tell you! Super blessed. We're chillin like villains out here. I can tell there are good things to come. She's from LA, but no worries, she's not a regular at the clubs or anything. ;) Just the world's sweetest missionary to ever walk the face of the earth! We've had crazy adventures already. To start...

One day we were trying to track down a referral that the Ste Foy sisters had given us. The woman had enthusiastically set up an appointment with the other sisters, so we were surprised when we showed up and she wasn't there! Smurfed, as we would say in the CMM. Hate that word, but that's what we say when someone bomb and ditches us and hides in their apartment when we show up for a lesson. Anyway, we bopped around and waited around her hood to see if she would come back later. Knocked some doors. Did our missionary thing. So I have this fear of contacting people when they are sitting in their cars, and I was like, "Okay. Today's the day we're going to get over that fear." The whole time we were knockin and boppin around, this fancy looking man was just chilling in his car watching us for like half an hour. Jokingly I said to my companion, "I bet you anything he's an undercover cop, and he's about to arrest us for disturbing the peace." We had a good laugh, then continued doing our stalker/missionary thing. Finally, somehow, I got up the courage to just go talk to him. And ohhhh my, I am so glad I did! He was hilarious! We chatted him up for a good twenty minutes. He knew about the church, but wasn't interested. Then I asked him what he was doing. Turns out... He's a private investigator! Ha ha we were so right. And I totally blew his cover. I told him that we suspected he was up to something like that. So he's going to improve his stalker game! He really should take missionary advice. We're like the world's biggest stalkers, and my goodness, we're good at it. We climbin in yo windows, snatchin yo people up. Tryin to convert them! And we do! Sometimes. Anyway, that was a cool experience. I left him some reading material entitled, "Le Retablissement." Good stuff. We'll see what happens!

So the next day, we're boppin around, looking for that woman AGAIN. Still, nowhere to be found! Later in the evening we had our sweet member Catherine come with us to teach one of our amis, and low and behold, the dude wasn't there. Surprise! So I'm thinking, "Man. I'm tired of all of our appointments falling through." But I was on the Lord's errand, you know? So we moved to our back-up plan, which was to track down that woman one last time. We got to her house, and the note we had left her was STILL there! After more than 24 hours. We were getting nervous. I honestly thought she had died in her apartment. No joke. So we knocked the door across from us to ask her neighbor if he thought she might be dead. When he came out, I was trying to explain to him in my crappy French that I thought his neighbor might be dead, yada yada, when he's like, "I speak English, eh?" FIRST miracle! Turns out he knew about our church. And I was like, "You should totally come to church with us tomorrow!" And he's like, "Well, does your church need a keyboard player?" And I was like, "What the what?" And he's like, "I play the keyboards, eh? Fairly well there." I have NO idea what possessed me, but suddenly I'm just like, "Will you play some tunes for us?" Ha ha this guy had NOOOOO idea what was going on, but he TOTALLY let us in! Stalker move number one. Success! I was seriously having WAAAAY too much fun! The guy plays everything by ear! He serenaded us for twenty minutes with some Elton John and some John Lennon. I requested that he play "Daniel," and I wept silently to myself remembering that I have a brother back home. Anyway, after the poor man had worked up a good sweat playing keyboards for us, he somehow miraculously opened up and told us that he's been searching for a church. The Catholic church had really disappointed him in his life, but he was really touched that three strange girls would show up at his door and listen to him play the keyboard. Ha ha! The gospel is true! He frantically wrote down all of his contact info for us. I'll let you know how it goes! He's just the absolute sweetest. We honestly could not believe how the whole thing went down. Seriously though, I know without a doubt that Heavenly Father puts these people in our paths if we have the courage to be loving and share with those around us.

Well, that was my week! It was incredibly, to say the least. Plenty of great adventures for my greenie! I'm excited for her. Quebec City is the perfect place to be a missionary, especially if you're just starting out. I hope everyone is doing just fabulous! I miss you all terribly and hope you all realize that on a daily basis. Because it is 100 percent true, even if I act like I don't have time for anyone out there on the home front. My prayers are always with you! I love and miss you all to the fullest moon and back! Peace and blessings! Namaste.

Love,

Your Favorite Soeur