love, serve, teach: 9-29

Dear Family,

Thank you for the emails!!! Wow, it sounds like you've had an awesome week! That is SO funny we got a pig!!! Hahaha, I love the picture of Adam with her. That is so hilarious! That is also so amazing that your able to showcase artwork in the store :) I would LOVE to do that when I come home!! That is amazing! I felt so sad for Hannah... I'm sorry that was so awkward for her. That is so awesome she is going to join that committee and doing all these things, no matter what other people think of her. I just hope she always remembers that she is AMAZING. Seriously. She is one of the strongest, brightest, funnest, most intelligent girls I've ever met. Her value does NOT lie in what kids at school see in her. Hannah, how they view you is a reflection of who THEY are, not of who you are. You are important, you are kind, you are incredible, and you are sooo loved, by your whole family, by me, by your Heavenly Father. You are incredible. You choose to be happy and do your best, and you'll someday find true friends who will see you for who you really are. You hang in there. :)

Ew, I am soooo glad I'm missing stink bug season!! Haha, that gives me the shivers just thinking about it. Their so gross!! I would rather deal with scorpions any day ;)

It's so fun to see how beautiful home is! The leaves, the crisp cool air... man, Virginia is so beautiful! I'm so happy your all doing well :) I also loved Adam's testimony! He is the sweetest! And I'm happy to hear about the sheep and the wool!! And I LOVE the cute folksy sheep paintings! That is so fun! :)

Well, this week has been CRAZY! Haha, but SO awesome!!! I got transferred to..... South Phoenix!!!! :D Yay, I'm back in Phoenix!!! I was seriously so excited!! I was hoping to go back to a more humble area, and this area is even more humble than my last area in Phoenix. It is going to be an amazing transfer! We found out on Thursday where we're being transferred to, and all the mission gathers together to find our new companions and find out our new areas. My new companion is named Sister D :) And she is from West Jordan, Utah! Small world! She is awesome. She's been out for a year, and we're both the sister training leaders for our zone. So we'll be going on exchanges with all the sisters, attending mission leadership counsel this Thursday, and doing trainings and stuff. I'm pretty nervous. But I'm also really excited. :) It's going to be fun, and a great opportunity to love and serve and grow.

This past week has been super awesome :) I forgot to tell you last Monday, last week before Elder Christofferson our zone got to eat on the Native American reservation for lunch!! An Indian family made us frybread tacos, and they were sooooo delicious! We took a bunch of pictures and had a great time. The Gilbert zone is AWESOME, I'm so happy I was so blessed to be able to serve there :)

Monday was great. We had to wait in our apt until we got transfer calls (they always call us and just tell us whether we're leaving or staying, they don't tell us anything else haha. ) So I got the call to be a sister training leader... it was crazy!! I was so nervous I was shaking hahaha. But it was exciting! Sister W stayed in Gilbert, but she's switching wards. So that was a good day! Tuesday we had district meetings, and just went to say goodbye to everyone. A gave us a poem about smiling when he said goodbye :) It was so sweet. And we said goodbye to B, and that was so sad!! He said the closing prayer, and at the end he started crying when he said goodbye to us. It was so sweet! I really hope the elders continue to work with him, and that B keeps learning more about the gospel. I think he will. We'll see what happens. We actually had to pack up and move Tuesday, and it was so funny - all the elders were moving in after us. Well, the other sisters we lived with have a member who is a hoarder, and their helping her get rid of stuff. So she gave them some pink/peach sheets and ruffly bed curtains... and so we left all the beds with bright pink/peach stuff for the elders haha. It was a fun joke :) We left it so nice and sparkling clean for them! So that was good!

Thursday we had transfer meetings, and that was so crazy!!! They changed it, so now we all meet at the mission home, and just look at a posted list, and then we have to find our new companion on our own. They used to announce it in front of everyone, so it was a huge change! But I met Sister D and she's AWESOME, and we found out we are actually covering two wards in Phoenix South! So we'll be in charge of two wards... oh man, it's such a change! Neither of us have done it before. It means two coordination meetings, six hours of church Sundays, and tons and tons of people to see. It's going to be super busy!!! I'm super excited because it will mean there's a ton of work to do! It will definitely be nonstop for a while. So that's awesome!

I got to meet some of the people we're teaching, and it's very humbling. The people here are amazing. There is a young man named A who wants to be baptized, but can't be until he turns 18. However he LOVES the gospel, and wants to learn. He made us a strawberry chocolate cake because he loves cooking :) It was so sweet! He is incredible! We're also teaching an older lady named C... she lives in a care home, it kind of feels like a hospital. She is the sweetest person ever. She's been excommunicated, but wants to be rebaptized again. She's working so hard on quitting smoking, and she called us twice yesterday to tell us proudly that she hadn't smoked any cigarettes. That was AWESOME :) She is so, so sweet!

We've also had the craziest experiences!! Oh man! So Thursday we got a text from one of our investigators that said "Sorry to ask this, but did one of your missionaries get shot?" We, of course, kind of freaked out. We texted and called her to find out what was going on... she said another lady we're teaching had told her that a missionary had gotten shot. Well, we went to her house to see what happened, and if it was true, and we told the zone leaders and everything, and they were contacted everyone to make sure their okay. We talked with the lady, and she told us that it happened yesterday in Phoenix, that a missionary had been shot but that their companion was okay. Well, we thought it must have been the Phoenix mission, so we were really sad but glad all our missionaries were okay. Well, a hour or two later, a member called us, and we asked him about it. It turns out he attends the addiction recovery program with our investigator... and it turns out that an old man was telling an experience he had 40 years ago in Germany where someone - not even a missionary - was shot. Somehow our investigator took that to mean a missionary was shot yesterday in Phoenix hahaha. It was so crazy! We were super embarassed, because everyone was wondering what happened... and it ended up being super long ago in Germany :) Haha, shows how a story can be changed very quickly! So that was funny and pretty crazy!

People here are so funny. Another day we tried calling our investigator. This person answered, and had a British accent, and it sounded like a woman. They were saying all these weird things, and we were so confused... and then the person started laughing! Turns out it was a teenage boy in the investigator's family, just answering the phone with random accents! Haha that was super funny too!

We also had a HUGE RAINSTORM! Oh man... we were standing outside, talking to this lady, and the thunder was so loud it hurt my ears, and I saw the biggest lightning bolt I've ever seen in my life. It was crazy! It's been raining a ton, and the weather is so nice and cool. We are absolutely loving it :) We had to drive to women's conference through the rainstrom, and the streets were soooo flooded!!! I felt like we were in a third world country! We had to drive through it, and I was SO SCARED we were going to break the car. It was insane haha!! But the women's conference was incredible!! I'll send pics so you can see :)

Well, that pretty much describes this week. Sunday we had 6 hours of church, and that was an adventure ::) I love both of our wards though. I'm so excited to serve with them! A guy in our ward got baptized on Saturday, so we helped with the presentation in his baptism. It was really neat to see :) The work is definitley moving along here.

Well, I love you guys! Thanks for everything!! I can't wait to send you all the stories, serving in Phoenix again :) I LOVE it here!! It feels like home! I love the people and my companion so much.

Hope you guys have a fantastic week :D I'll try and write more later! Love you all!

love, Sister Whitney Morris

PS I met Sister R's family!!! They came over and gave us cookies, and they were so nice!!! :) It was awesome!! They were in my district leader's ward, so they were super close to us in Gilbert. You'll have to tell her they say hi! :)
gilbert zone!!

#GilbertRocks!!