8 months????

Hey Fam Bam!

How is everyone doing? This week was beautiful. I wish you could all be here enjoying a Florida Fall on the Gulf. It truly is the most beautiful weather. During the summer I was questioning the sanity of anyone who would choose to live here, but now I understand! BTW I cant believe that its already halfway through October...

We had some fun activities this week! First off we were able to volunteer at a 5K and Walk for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And get this, the race was on the beach!!! So we got to hang out on the beach and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. My area has some of the best beaches in Florida! Sadly, we aren't allowed to go hang out there on P-days. Something about Elders and swimsuits... I guess it just wasn't the best environment :) Darn Elders! But we did get special permission to volunteer at the Beach and it was beautiful!

We also got to go on exchanges. So Sister Chadwick has been given permission to conduct exchanges at any point. So she takes my companion and I take hers. So I got to go out with sister Rhodes for a day and teach all of their investigators! I had forgotten what it was like to actually teach lesson.. ;p She is a hoot! Shes from southern California and I love her to death. So that was pretty exciting. While we were on exchanges we met this guy. We talked to him for a little while and He obviously has a very close relationship to God. But he wasn't really interested in anything we had to say. So we gave him a card and moved on. Come Sunday, there he was sitting on the first row in the chapel in a hideous green Hawaiian shirt and Khaki shorts! He loved the service and now he wants to meet with us! I cant wait to have that conversation with him and ask him what made him come to church:)

That was something that the Sisters and I were talking about last night. Is how the truly prepared people just find the church. They would find it with or without us, but this mission is for us. We are being trained to be like Christ. But Heavenly Father doesn't need us. He could get this work done a lot faster without us getting in the way. But our salvation is just as important to Him as anyone else. And he knows what we need to be like His Son.

We still don't really have any investigators, but we haven't stopped searching for our friends. Sister Rhodes shared a funny analogy with me that really put missionary work into perspective, especially the new way that we are doing it now. We have to be SO BOLD. We ask people to be baptized when we first meet them, and if they don't want to, we move on. It seems a little harsh at first but this analogy helps:

 So I've never been a SpongeBob fan but apparently there is an episode where Squidward gets so tired of SpongeBob and Patrick's shenanigans that he moves into a community of only squids. And everyone of them looks just like him and acts like him; they aren't distinguishable from each other at all. And after awhile he gets tired of it, he decides that he wants SpongeBob and Patrick to find him, because that's his only way out. About the same time SpongBob and Patrick really start to miss him so they decide to go looking for him. They quickly realize that this is going to be a much more difficult task than they had anticipated. But they devise a plan, a question that they can ask that will help them know, without a doubt, which one is Squidward. So they go up one by one and begin asking them, "Are you Squidward?" To which the reply would come, "No." So they were able to quickly move to the next "Are you Squidward?" and so on until they found him. We are, in essence, going up to people on the streets and asking them, "Are you prepared?" If they reply that they are not, then we need to quickly move on to find the one who is Prepared. Because they want to be found!

So that is what we are going to do this week. We are going to find the prepared!

President Cusick emailed us this quote this morning from Elder Holland and I absolutely love it:

“When somebody is coming down to the wire, how much do you want him to have left at the end of a race? Nothing. We don't want anything left. When you hit the tape, you collapse. If you’ve got anything else left, you ran it wrong. If you take anything home from this mission, you haven't done it right. We want to carry you off the airplane. We want an ambulance to meet you at the train station. But you can't have anything left.”

I'm determined to have nothing left. In ten months, you guys better be prepared to carry me off that plane:) Because Heavenly Father and Christ deserve my ALL! And I would challenge you to make this your philosophy in life too.

I love you all so much!!!

Love always, Sister Rowland