Week 59 (Oct 3rd-9th 2017) and Week 60 (Oct 10th-16th 2017)
Ever since the recent hurricanes our opportunities for service have been booming. The past two weeks we and missionaries from several different zones got to assemble in a convention center in Orlando and unite to help put together meal boxes being sent to those in Puerto Rico as apart of the Feeding Children Everywhere initiative. It's been a blast! We have so much fun and love doing it. I always get excited to don my yellow Mormon helping hands shirt and live what we teach as representatives of Jesus Christ. I really feel closer to Heavenly Father as I serve; this is because of the truth we are taught by King Benjamin in Mosiah 2:17, "And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God."
Often I reflect on how blessed and grateful I am to not only live in a time with the wonders of modern technology, but to be in a mission where I am able to utilize it as I serve. Frequently I have thought, "wow, I can't imagine doing this all on paper." or "What would we even do without having all of our area information with us at all times?" However for the past two weeks, I have had a taste.
The Area Book app that we use for our scheduling had always been buggy. There were many things it left to be desired and lots of fun "quirks" we got used to, but it got the job done. Recently we heard that Salt Lake had been developing a revamped version of the app that would update and fix a lot of things wrong with the original. We were ecstatic. Finally! All of those bizarre quirks would be fixed and the work would be hastened! Then Area Book 2.0 was released; and there was a disturbance in the missionary force. I will do my best to not dwell on this or be too negative, but I will say that it has completely and utterly destroyed my life and has actually kickstarted the end of the world. Let me explain.
Many very useful features were taken away and replaced with ones that actually make things much harder. I am one of the last groups of missionaries that got to have an apple iPad before the church changed over to samsung tablets, so within the next year there will be no iPads left. So the new app is geared to work and function much better on the tablets; which of course makes sense, but is a major bummer for the remaining iPad Missionaries. So basically they are waiting for us to die out. It's fine. I'm fine. It's just now a major pain to do anything with area book at all.
Such a pain in fact, that Sister Bullard and I actually switched over and started using our paper planners! It's that bad. It's been interesting to see how different our mission experience would be having to use all paper all the time. However we have had a grand time coloring our schedules to make them cute and easier to read. We feel very "old school".
Another thing that has us kicking it back to old school, we are on bikes again! That's right, Winter Garden is now on car share. We have the car every other week, and are hitting rubber to pavement the weeks in between. I knew that we couldn't get away being full car for very much longer; our mission is having several cars taken away and so almost every area is sharing a car now. I was pleasantly surprised when I came to Winter Garden to find out it was full car. It didn't really make sense for how small geographically our ward boundary is (relatively speaking, we still cover parts of three different cities), but I wasn't going to say anything.
So now we are blessed with the opportunity to work with a lot of different members to coordinate several rides throughout the week! HOORAY! How neat is it that they can have the opportunity to serve the Lords missionaries?! (I've been trying real hard to be positive about it, can you tell?) Honestly it's okay, we're not that bad off, it's just an adjustment getting used to figuring out rides and where and when we can bike and drive etc. So now I feel like a more legitimate missionary, helmet and pocket planner and all.
I really am okay with not driving as often, because I am actually not a fan of being the designated driver. I happen to end up in a lot of situations simply because I'm me. The other day we were driving from a missionary meeting and I noticed a little bird ahead of me in the road. I started getting closer and closer and the bird didn't move. Finally I was about to hit it when I slammed the brakes. I got an aggressive driving check on my tiwi mission driving record. I put on the emergency flashers and burst out of the car and rushed to the little birds side. He let me approach him and start to pick him up, but then he chirped real loud and flew at my ankles and tried to attack them and then darted away. So I still saved him in the end.
We had Zone Conference this week and it was quite well done. We got our shots and were immunized from illness and then received instruction from our leaders and were immunized from the adversary 👊🏻 Sister Bullard was asked to arrange a musical number only a few days before the conference, and so she made a crazy heroic push and put together an angelic arrangement of "Because I have Been Given Much" myself and several other missionaries sang her composition and it was lovely. What a talented companion I have.
Gladys returned from a family trip to Aruba with a virus and has been too sick to come to church or meet with us ☹️ So we went and dropped off some Gatorade and chocolates on her porch and brightened her day ☺️
We had a decent lesson with Brandon and Josette and were able to firmly reestablish our purpose as missionaries. We gave Josette her own copy of the Book of Mormon that a member had marked up with important verses. She was so excited! She had kept our commitment of reading Mosiah 2 and noting everything that King Benjamin counsels us to do in order to have a happy family, she highlighted each one in Brandon's copy! So she was excited to get her own. She's still apprehensive about our beliefs and hers, and our belief in a single prophet, but she's definitely softening.
This upcoming week is the 17th anniversary of the birth of my baby sister, Anna. I am so proud of her holding down the fort and helping to take care of business back at home after my other sisters and I all bailed on missions within 2 months of each other. What a champ. She's such a talented little bean and is endlessly witty and I cherish her so much. Happy Birthday, Anna!
-Sister Olivia Petty🇵🇷
Orlando Cares: Hope for Puerto Rico 10.13.17
Hope for Puerto Rico! 10.6.17
Myself and Bishop Damewood, the temple grounds keeper who used to be the Bishop in the Ward I'm serving in, he's great. 10.5.17
Back on Bikes 10.5.17
Us serving Sister Sharpe cleaning some mold 10.14.17
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