June 10, 2014

I know I don't share enough spiritual stories (literally, it is because they happen so often that I can't write them all) but here is one! Cool story about the Women's Garden. A youth group came in from Richfield, Utah, and Sister Etherington and I started talking to a group of 6 girls. We invited them on a tour of the Women's Garden and they readily accepted. We talked to them a lot about becoming that "virtuous woman" that the scriptures talk about- and about how that foundation that they are building right now will support them throughout the rest of their lives. We got to the Courtship for Eternity statue and I felt prompted to share my philosophy on marriage- that it is not "he completes me". They are not half of anything. They are lovely, upstanding, whole daughters of God and that they should look for other lovely, upstanding, whole sons of God. We talked to them about one more statue and explained to them that if they continued to the end of the garden and looked back, they would see the Savior standing there, and he had been there the whole time. We let them have that moment by themselves and we went inside. A few minutes later, they came back in the Visitor's Center to find us and half of them were in tears, they said they felt the Spirit so strongly. We got a picture with them. It was so sweet!
A couple days later, we were assigned to Pioneer Pastimes, which is where we play games that the pioneers once played, and I met a girl whose aunt and uncle were in my ward in Texas! Cool coincidence.  That same day, it started pouring so badly that we had to shut it down and a sweet family helped us pack up very quickly so we all could get out of there. We got quite wet.
A group from BYU called the Living Legends came. They do Native American, Polynesian, and Latin American cultural dances- it's amazing! Their performance is centered around the pride cycle in the Book of Mormon. The Polynesians have a unique yell (and each one of them is different, ie Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, etc) and Sister Maile was doing it during the Polynesian dances- it was so cool. The night after we got home from seeing them, she taught all of us how to shake our hips like they do, but of course we're all a little too white to do it right. Living Legends also did a sociable for us and sang. It was interesting- looking at all the women in the group, I could see which ones had been on missions and which ones hadn't. The ones that had, had something "more" about them. It was verrrrry interesting. 

Yesterday, we did service- cleaning the motel rooms that the pageant casts stay in. Sister Etherington and I weeded for three hours. The seniors we were working with fed us Casey's (a gas station that is famous for it's pizza, seriously, it is so good) pizza a root beer floats. I can count on one hand how many times I've had a root beer float in my life, which is a shame because they are dang good.