New Transfer!!!!!

Hey Everyone!!! 

    This his been a pretty good week!! My new companion is Sister Greene and she is awesome!!! She has been out for 13 months and goes home in July! She and I get a long great and have already had just a lot of fun together and it is only week one!!! This transfer is going to be great! 

Monday: Sister Whipple and I were running around everywhere just trying to get everything done before she left for her new area. By the way she is doing great in Holland and she is enjoying the massive amounts of snow that she receives being on the coast of Lake Michigan. 

Tuesday: I picked up Sister Greene!!! The first day is always a little weird, but we hit it off pretty well! We did service for a member; guess what the service was..... we helped take down their Christmas tree! Isn't that great! It is weird here because you can really get away with having Christmas looking decorations up because it actually snows a lot and it just feels like winter here all the time!!! 

Wednesday: Oh my goodness! We ate dinner at a members house and this member Brother Quast, plays the base. He played his base for us while we were eating dinner with his family. It was so fun! We had dinner and a show! He is actually really good! He went to school and was in a few symphonies but then it started to get hard traveling around the state to play so he just plays it to relax. 

Thursday: Nothing too crazy happened... we just weekly planned and that is always exciting. 

Friday: We taught Austin this day and Sister Greene was like you are so patient with him! I took it as a wonderful compliment! It is tough teaching him sometimes, but I have a lot more respect for those who teach teenagers and who have raised them. I feel very blessed to have the ability to be patient it is probably the love that I have developed for him. Also we had Valentines dinner with members from our ward named the Lawrence-Harpers and it was great because we ate with the elders and a holiday in the mission field never really feels like a holiday, but it was fun to celebrate the day of love and give a spiritual message about the love of Christ! 

Saturday: Sister Greene and I kicked a chunk of ice all the way down this road! It is so intense and I am a little surprised that we did not get hit by a car, but we were out in the boonies area so not a lot of cars pass by. It is crazy how many simple things entertain me... haha! 

Sunday: Sister Greene and I were out kind of in the middle of no where and there was this man walking down the street and we passed him to go to a house to see a less active. Once we were done at the less active's home we were driving back down the same street and the man was in the middle of the road and I tried to move out of the way, but then he moved in front of the car and I moved again and he moved with the car! I thought I was going to hit him and it was seriously something from the scary movies. Sister Greene compared it to the wolverine movie where the evil guy with the nails come and stops the woman's car and then grabs her. Yeah it was pretty intense.... 

Spiritual Thought: I just wanted to have a quick thought. I wanted to talk about looking at the eternities. It seems like a lot of us made decisions on how it will affect us now here in this life when really this isn't it. We have so much more after this life and we need to make decisions based on what will affect us for the eternities. This is something that I have learned a lot while on my mission. We sometimes compare the plan to a play. We are in the 2nd act of a 3 act play and decisions we make in this act will effect the ones in the 3rd act. We need to think about how we will be effected in the eternities and make decisions that will make us eternally happy and not temporally happy. We need to seek things that will help us both here and after. A quote that I love is "Think about the end in the beginning." We need to always have an eternal perspective. I know that as we have an eternal perspective it will be easier for us to make decisions that will bring us true and lasting happiness instead of temporal happiness. I know that there is so much more that Heavenly Father has to offer for us and that we need to make decisions here in this life that will help us gain eternal life!! I promise that as we have an eternal perspective it will be truly happy! 

I love you all and hope that you have a great week and make sure to have an eternal perspective! 

Love Always,
Sister Miranda Smith

In the funny picture Elder Derricott is doing a duck face and it is great!  

Sister Green and I made Elder Derricott a birthday crown!