If Cloud 9 is the happy one, Cloud 2 must be the one with all the rain -Sister Howard

Howdy!

Transfers are tomorrow, and it looks like I'll be saying farewell to Hollywood. I'm heading off to a place called Westchester, in the Inglewood zone. I've never been there, and don't know tons about it, but I've heard good things. (Fun fact about Inglewood: the Savex lip balm that my family uses so obsessively is actually made there, haha.) Something super fun about it is that I'll be in the same zone as Sister Pinter for her last transfer! It also looks like I'll be whitewashing again, because I am training a new Sister. I'll meet her tomorrow. Sister Howard is also training (and so is Sister Pinter, haha); she gets to train a Sister from Kazakhstan who can be her new Russian-speaking companion! I know that she'll do a great job. : )

As much as we've struggled with this area, I think that I will miss it more than I expected. Sister Howard has been an amazing companion. I've learned so much from her. We may not have had tons of success working with nonmembers, but there are so many recent converts and less actives we got to work with that I feel like we needed to be here for. I hope that they all keep progressing and continue on their journey closer to Christ. And even as an English missionary, I'm glad I got to work in the International zone, in the Russian program. It's an experience that most people don't get to have, and I learned a lot from it!

Anyway, on to the week...

Favorite Spiritual Thought:

I loved this week's chapter in Come Follow Me, John 1. It was so cool to read so many people's short testimonies of Jesus Christ as the Savior. It made me think about how Christ is the light of the world, and the "ye are the light of the world" part comes from us sharing His light with others through our testimonies of Him. And those testimonies don't just have to be in Sacrament Meeting on Fast Sundays! We are always disciples of Jesus Christ. We should always be witnesses of Him.

Favorite Spiritual Moment:

Yesterday after church, Sister Howard and I were sitting outside of an apartment complex with this Ukrainian member of our ward, Irayida. I was just chillin', looking around since I couldn't contribute to the conversation in any way. While I was watching, there was this guy who biked past us. I didn't even notice him the first time, but apparently he stopped, turned around, and then came up to me and asked if we spoke Russian. I directed him to Sister Howard, so he parked his bike and sat down by us. Sister Howard and Irayida started talking to him until Irayida had to go. Sister Howard got his name (Yurii) and number, and talked to him some more until we had to go too. Afterwards, I asked her what that was all about, and she said he'd told her that while he was biking past, something had told him to go back and talk to us. He didn't know what it was, but he listened anyway. I know that it must have been the Spirit. It was so cool to see how he had recognized that Spiritual prompting and acted on it. He is going to come to the ward FHE tonight, and Sister Howard says she thinks he's super prepared for the gospel, so hopefully we'll get to teach him too!

Favorite Miracle:

We had so many miracles at the end of the week that I don't even know where to begin!

First, we are teaching this guy named Bradly over the phone because he is in Boston right now, and he's been progressing super well. He wants to get baptized! We still have to figure out the details of how we can make that happen since he is out of town so much, but we want to make sure we do everything we can for him. It's been so cool to see him go from being so downtrodden, knowing so little about God and just seeking peace, to trusting in his Heavenly Father with full purpose of heart. He loves the Book of Mormon!

We also found two new people to teach this week! One was a referral named Nic. He's definitely a little different than what you'd expect from someone who's learning about the church - he's in the film and music industry, is a military vet with a bad leg, has a mostly Jewish background (although he's also been taking his son to a few Indian churches or something like that lately), asks questions about crazy topics like seer stones, and dresses like he's in a biker gang - but he's super cool and actually seems genuinely interested in learning about the church and even becoming a part of it. The other one is this girl named Raven, who came to church with her boyfriend (who is also not a member), for her boyfriend's nephew's priesthood ordination. She loved the Spirit she felt at church, and told us she wants to learn more about everything we talked about on Sunday. We have our first lesson with her today after P-day. : )

Favorite Funny Thing:

We got super soaked this week, and the rain definitely does not help LA traffic. Especially in Hollywood. There was one night when we had an appointment with a member at an ice cream shop on the Elders' side of the area. We had to drive all the way across town, and it was so wet and dark that no one could even see the lines for the lanes. Traffic was pretty bad. When we got part of the way there, the GPS started leading us into this random mountain section called Silver Lake, so all the sudden we were going down these windy dirt roads that had turned into mud. There also was like, no one around anywhere, so if we died, no one would have even known. It took us through this crazy neighborhood, and then we found ourselves at the top of this ridiculous hill. It was literally the steepest hill I've ever driven down in my life. You know the hill the Bountiful temple is on? Yeah, multiply that level of steepness by about three, add rain, and then put a giant lake at the bottom, right after a stop sign and you've got the water slide we were supposed to be driving down. We survived it, and eventually found the ice cream shop, 40 minutes late because of the adventure of driving in this area, eventually travelling home a completely different way. We ended up on the freeway, with just as much rain and just as much traffic as before. When we were almost home, Sister Howard just commented, "Wow, driving in Hollywood is like driving in Hell." And she's right. ; ) I am so glad I don't have to drive here anymore. ; )

Also, we went to this English conversation class as a service project this week, hoping to meet a few more Russian-speakers. We did. To start the class, the teacher explained a game where each of the students, all of which were really old and had probably lived in the former Soviet Union, that they were going to get a slip of paper with a word on it, and then they could provide either a synonym, and antonym, or a rhyming word to help everyone else to guess it. It was super hilarious to watch. They got into an argument with almost every single word about whether the clue should count as a synonym or not. ; ) One lady had the word "drink," so she said "juice," and at the end of it, this old guy next to her got all fired up about how a better synonym would have been "booze" or something like that. I have never seen so many competitive old people in my entire life. ; )

I hope that all of you are paying attention to the little miracles you're experiencing in your lives also. God is always a God of miracles. I know that without Him and the miracles He blessed us with, the things we were able to accomplish together these two transfers would have never happened. 

Have a good week, everybody!

Love,

Sister Garfield

We both were craving "real" Mexican food (as in, the only kind you can get when you're in Utah or Washington)

District Picture: front - me, Sister Howard, Elder Swipe, Elder Sheen. Back- Elder Cheon, Elder Peterson, Elder Evans, Elder Stratford, Elder Sands

These are awful pictures, but it's the best we could do to show how much rain we got at the beginning of the week. It rained for four straight days, maybe longer but I can't remember now. Our parking pond expanded by a third, and I was literally standing in 6 inches of water in those pictures

Us trying to check out the blood moon (and failing, haha)