Week #43 - Ronald McDonald

The cat in our car and it ate some of the cookies      Playing at a park

Good ole service 

 A cute little place by our apartment that I want to take all my friends to. Hailey Barker defs has  

The Flowers we got for May Day

In a field with another cat                                                                The Ronald head 

 Hello Friends!

This week has been quality! We had exchanges, talked to a hippie man, got flowers, it was 80 degrees out, ate ice cream, msf refilled, and so much more that I can't remember.

Exchanges were a party! I got to go with Sister Gravin, who was my STL back in when I was in Alliance. It was great to be back with her! She is such a solid missionary! She also love Pooh bear so you know we are like BFFS! Like we should go to Claires and buy necklace. On exchanges we were able to pick up an old investigators and we are going to get the old Elders that taught her in on lessons. Technology is amazing man!

Funnies! We were contacting down main st in good ole Norwalk and we saw this lady with flowers and we are like we want some. She told us to go into this shop to get some. We walk in to this cute like store and this guy comes up with the coolest glasses I have seen and gave us some flowers. It was great, but then we still had like a bit of time. We just contacted with flowers on our way, there was this abandoned flower shop with a ton of cats in it. We asked a random person what it was about and they just were like oh it's been that way for years. Hahahahaha. Another time while we were contacting down main st on the other side we were walking down and randomly Sister Golden jumped and screamed a little. It was because of this creepy Ronald McDonald head in a shop. Hahahahaha the head is creepy! Oh one more! We had a cat get in our car. We were at a members house and we were about to leave, but then we forgot something. We accidentally left the car door open and one of their cats got in the car. I went to go back up and I just hear meowing. Hahahaha don't worry we got the cat out!

That's it for this week bc am gonna go play basketball 🤗

Love,

Sister Barrow 

 

Enjoy 😃

Week #42 - Temple!!!!

 

Hello Everyone!

Sorry this is going to be short. We went to the temple today and what a blessing it was. I loved being back there and feeling the peace that is felt there. The temple is truly the house of God! I am grateful that we have temples and that we can go to such a holy place to worship. Now all you that are in Utah GO to the temple! You have them so close to you! Go and enjoy the blessings that come from the temple. Make time to go!

Funnies and cool things:

• A bird pooped on me
• We knocked on a wrong door. We thought it was a member’s house and it defs wasn't.... she helped us out though.
• I held a chameleon
• I was in a tree house with the Basaldua kids
• I ate cactus this week

That's it for this week! Sorry not that great! Missionary work is awesome! I love it out here! The Church is true, and the book is blue.

Hope all y'all have a great week!

Love,

Sister Barrow 

 

Week # 41 - The Shot Heard Around the World.....

 

 

Hello people of the sane world!

Okay so first off if you think your week has been crazy just hold up and you probs will change your mind. This is start of my second week in Sandusky…. Which means we are two weeks into the transfer and I now have a new companion.....Sister Ramsay went home because of personal issues. We were planning on her leaving at the end of the transfer, but God had other ideas. She fully decided on Thursday that it was best she went home and she was home on Saturday. We didn't know she was leaving until Friday afternoon. It was a mess and super stressful and it's been all around just stressful. I have a new companion, Sister Golden. She is great! It has been a crazy week! We are basically whitewashing an area. Which means we both are new to the area. It is fun time! God is good too because I get to drive! What a blessing!

Just some tender mercies of this week is that I got to see Sister Wadley! On Saturday Sister Golden and I took some investigators up to Kirtland. It was a party! Sister Wadley was able to give us a tour which was a bonus. It was really great to see her. Another one is with social media now we were able to chat with past sisters to help us get some background on the area. Social Media is such a blessing! We also have some amazing STL's who give us some quality pep talks. One example of this is Sister Larsen made us go to a mirror and look at ourselves and tell ourselves that are buns are hot and then wink at ourselves 😂😂😂 missions are a quality time! Wouldn't trade it for the world. 

Hope y'all have a great week!

Love ya!

Sister Barrow 

Ps y'all should send me some mail 😊

246 W Main St Apt D

Norwalk OH 44857

 

Week # 40 - Tangy Pee?

 Sister Ramsay Sister Barrow and Sister Wadley

 Leaving Youngstown

 Y Town all packed up

UMMMMMM

 

Hello friends!

This week has been a crazy. Sister Ramsay is cool. She reminds me of my little sister Keaton which is fun. She is about as sassy and sarcastic. It is a good time. 

This week has just been weird. It's always kind of rough adjusting to a new place, but God looks out for us. Just a cool little story from this week is Sister Ramsay and I were out knocking on doors on a quality Sunday afternoon when we randomly get this call while we are at a door. On accident Sister Ramsay answered the call then the person we knocked on opened their door. You can just hear in the background as we talk to the guy at the door a British man saying hello, slightly awkward. 😂😂😂 We called the British man back and learned that his name was Elder Cook. He is a senior missionary from the SLC mission. He called us to ask about a guy we were meeting. We talked with him for a bit and he asked where we were from and all of that. I randomly asked him if he knew my mom. He did! He says that he sees her quite often. He was able to tell me how she was doing and that she has lost a ton of weight. Just how great she is! It was such a tender mercy because it is a bit rough adjusting and it just help me to feel at peace that my mom was all good. God is amazing and let that happen. God loves us and will do anything for us even if it is just a simple phone call who happens to know your mom.

Other funny things that happened this week was that Sister Ramsay got a UTI. Legit my first day here in Sandusky. She is like I have to pee, and the closest bathroom was our apartment, so we go back there. As she is in the bathroom she yells out to me, "is it natural if it burns as I pee" 😂😂😂 We call doctor Lewis (mission doc). He tells her she has a UTI basically and that she needs to go to the doctor. Luckily however we have a doctor in the ward and we were able to get her some meds to fix everything, but they make her pee a tangy orange. 

Oh, we also met this super cool lady named Teressa and she has Celiac. It was fun talking with her she was so cool! We were instant BFF like go to Claire's and get some matching necklaces. We were able to share Alma 7:11 with her. Which explains how Christ knows us and all the struggles we go through. I was able to connect with her about Celiac and how Christ understands that and the pain that comes from it. God is good, and it was amazing to be able to share that with her.

That's it for this week.

Love ya!

Sister Barrow

 

 

Week #39 - God Rest Everyone

 

 

Hello!

 

Once again A LOT has changed. Conference was BOMB all of those changes are awesome! Then President Brown decided to take a leaf out of President Nelson book and do a ton of changes. One of them being that he is shutting down the Youngstown East area….. There will no longer be Sisters in the area that I am in! Right now there are us the Sisters and the Elders in the ward. As of tomorrow there will just be Elders that cover the whole ward. With that being said Sister Wadley and I both are leaving. Sister Wadley is going up to Shaker Heights aka going back to the Kirtland sites. I am going to miss her she is an amazing human being and I love her lots! Then I am going to Sandusky, which is right dab in the middle of the mission. It also is in the Cleveland stake, so I am breaking free of the Youngstown stake and going straight to Cleveland! My new comp will be Sister Ramsay. She has been in my zone before, so I know who she is, but I don't really know her though. I am excited to be companions with her! She also is a site sister so I am going for round two on the site sister, so it definitely will be a party!

Honestly, I can't think of anything else besides conference and transfer calls that happened this week. Since Sunday we have been working on saying bye to people and transferring all the people we are teaching over to the Elders, cleaning our apartment. It has been crazy! I love the mission though! I wouldn't want to be doing anything else!

This week we have been working on data entry. Which means we are just putting the records we have into our phones. One thing that we use to make it go faster is voice text, but you have say all the punctuation. For example if you are saying the sentence, "Our lesson with Kyle went well, we talked about the Plan of Salvation." You would have to say, "our lesson with Kyle went well comma we talked about the plan of Salvation period" we have been doing that bunch. Yesterday we were doing some calls and we called Sister Pander to change our appointment, so we could see more people. She didn't answer and Sister Wadley left a message and this is word for word what she said, "Hi Sister Pander it's the Sisters comma (long pause realizing what she said) we were wondering..." hahahahahahahahaha 😂😂😂😂 man I am going to miss Sister Wadley.

Sorry this email is sub-par, but got a lot to get done today!

Love all y'all

Sister Barrow

 

Week #38 - The Animal District

 

 

HELLO EVERYONE!  🦎🐋🦅🐱🐪🐒🐿🦆

A lot has happened this week. Layed down sticky paper for one of our investigators Vivian, got smartphones, plus Facebook, and we went on exchanges this week. This has been at pretty hectic week lot of junk has been happening, but it's been a really fun time! We are all just trying to figure out how to do all this stuff now. With the smartphones and Facebook, we don't have a ton of rules on it we're just kind of going by the spirit on what we should be doing and what fulfills our purpose as missionaries, so we are just winging it with the spirit. Which means that every missionary is going to do it differently so just because one missionary does something doesn't mean that I'm going to be doing that just because I'm doing something that doesnt mean another missionary is going to be doing that. There is one rule that all y'all should know and that is we aren't allowed to chat over Facebook messenger with family and friends even on preparation day. However, we are allowed to respond to comments within reason, but no chatting. If any of you have questions on what I can and can't do please email me!

Now after that spiel let's talk about a cool little spiritual moment that happened this week. We were on exchanges with the STL's this time I got to go with Sister Richards and we were stopping by this lady's house and that they gave a book of Mormon to about a week ago and to grab her number, so we could get an appointment and not just show up on her. We stop by and she is cool. We chat with her for a little bit and we get her number and we ask her if she has our number and she says that it was written in The Book of Mormon we gave her. She shows it to us and I look at it and it was my handwriting and it was a Book of Mormon that I put the number in back in Alliance, so it had the Alliance number in it. Which is one digit off the STL's number and Sister Richards didn't even notice the difference and the only reason I did was it was my handwriting. It was cool though because we were able to get it all switched and if any other Sister went they probs won't have notice. It just shows how God truly is in the little details in our lives and how He wants to make things a little easier. If she called the Alliance Sisters it wouldn't have been that big of a deal they just would have given her the STL's number, but it made it easier He just sent us over there to fix it. God is good all the time and even in the littlest of ways.

Funnies:
• We went to out investigators Viviane house to lay down this sticky paper in one of her cupboards. It took us 2 HOURS to put it in. It was one of the hardest things I have done on my mission yet. You should have seen Sister Wadley and I trying to get it in there. At one point both of us had like half of our bodies in this tiny cupboard. Hahahahaha 😂😂 after about 2 hours though we finished and got the cupboard done
• We brought our area book to district meeting because we need to start putting the teaching records into our phones. Some Elders in our district accidentally took our area book. Which I don't understand because they didn’t even bring theirs in. Anyways, we had to meet them at Youngstown State University to get it back. They told us to park somewhere and they would find us.... It's a college campus so you must pay to park and it is in like downtown Youngstown so it's busy. I am driving around trying to figure out where to park being a frazzled mess. Well I turn down this one place that says public parking thinking it would be all good, but no you had to pay to get in, but tender mercy of the Lord the guy let us go in for free! We were able to call the Elders and get our area book. We ended up meeting them at this random church. We got some weird looks from college kids, but it was good.
• Last one from exchanges. Sister Richards and I are going and knocking on doors having a good time. We see this group of little boys running around the street and stuff. We eventually make it up to the houses where the boys are playing and as we are walking up the drive this little boy is YELLING, "PATRICK THE COOTIES ARE COMING" over and over again. We didn't really know what to do. We just knocked and then the rest of the boys coming running out. Eventually we talked to the adult that was in charge and it was all good. As we were leaving though Patrick yells, "BYE LADIES!" 😂😂😂
Missions are a good time! I have had a total blast! I have felt more joy out here than I ever have and it has been so amazing to be able to share this gospel! This church is true and it blesses and changes lives. It just up to us to read and pray about The Book of Mormon. If we do that and act on our answer I can promise it will change your life for the better. Just give it a try.

Also, it's conference this weekend! Watch it with me at lds.org 😁 

 

 

Love all y'all!

 

Sister Barrow 

 

 

 

Week #37 - Meeting Elder Christofferson

 

 

Hello Everyone!

 

We got to go in about 5 minutes so, this is probs going to be junk but, mission life is good! Ohio and PA are great! Sister Wadley is 10/10 companion. Youngstown is the town and miracles happen everyday!  Oh and I met an apostle of Lord this week so, it has been a FANTASTIC week. Oh and we made a pit stop at Kirtland after meeting Elder Christofferson and got our own personal tour from Sister Wadley. 

 

Some cool things from meeting Elder Christofferson first is that he is an awesome guy and you just feel so comfortable around him. At one point when he was talking with us he just opened it up and had us ask him questions. IT WAS AWESOME!! One thing he really focused on was The Book of Mormon and how it is a great tool of the Lord and it is evidence of the Restoration. That this church isn't just another church it is Christ church back on the Earth again and that the Book of Mormon is just more knowledge for us so, that we can make it back to our Heavenly Father. It was really good and I wish I had time to explain more of it but, I don't. You can get a taste of it is like by watching conference that is coming up in a week. I am so excited for it! Conference is always 10/10! 

 

Now onto some funnies. First one is one day Sister Wadley and I were just talking to people at Buhl park and we started talking to this like 90 year old man named Jerry. Well, he actually just talked to Sister Wadley... He had like a little crush on Sister Wadley. I tried to talk with him and he legit looked at me and said two things then looked back at Sister Wadley and talked with her. He even invited her to go on a walk with her one day. hahahahahahaha PA man it is a good time. 

 

Sorry that is it for this week!

 

Love ya!

 

Sister Barrow