Aloooooha everyone!
This past week was full of all kinds of surprises. The first of these was we were surprised with a new investigator! Her name is Sarah. She's the grand daughter of our branch mission leader, and one day when we went to pick up a member that lives in the same house, he mentioned that Sarah wasn't a member. She comes to church almost every week so we hadn't even thought to ask if she was a member or not. She accepted our invitation to start taking the missionary lessons and seems pretty excited about learning more!
One of the more sad surprises we got came from Miko's sister Tiko. She's 17 years old and told us that she has lung cancer. She's not sure exactly how bad it is, but seems to be dealing with it pretty well. If I received that news I'd be crushed, but she's just playing it off like it's no big deal and carrying on with life as usual. I felt bad because when she told us the story neither of us really knew what to say at first. I think we were dealing with the initial shock of someone that young having cancer without ever having smoked or done anything damaging to her lungs. After a period of silence, I told her that, although we don't really know how she feels, because we haven't been in that situation, we're here to help in any way and with anything that she needs.
A few days after that meeting, we were teaching Miko and Tiko again and they invited us back to play volleyball that night with a bunch of Marshallese people. That was really interesting. It was funny because the average height of the people there, excluding my companion and I, was probably 5'3. They'd set on the second hit almost all the way back in the court, then someone else would do this weird spike from way below the net that basically rainbowed over. When they saw my companion and I (both around 6'1) I think they were terrified. Especially once we started spiking. I thought we were playing for fun, but these little brown people were serious. They called us out every time we accidentally nicked the net. Like what is this the NVA? But we had lots of fun and got to meet a lot of new Marshallese people. They're surprisingly good for people half the height of the net.
We also met with Mary and Catherine again. We actually went to see Maria, who lives in the same house, but she was sleeping. So we walked back to our car and as we were driving away we saw Mary. She waved to us as we drove away on our way to another appointment. I had this feeling that we should turn around a teach her, so I asked my companion if he wanted to go back. He said "why not?" so we flipped around and taught them the Restoration. I was really impressed at how much they remembered, considering they're 8 and 9 years old. The only thing they didn't really remember was the apostasy, but they remembered all of Christ's earthly ministry and the whole Joseph Smith story.
I hope you guys all have a great week and, like Tiko, make the best of it no matter what comes your way. Love you all!
-Elder Merrill
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