Feb 17

Howdee,

Happy Presidents Day. I guess school wasn't canceled today because I live next to a school bus parking lot and they all left this morning. Its been a crazy week. I feel like I ran a marathon! So I am now in Cypress, TX serving in the Bridgeland ward. My new companion is Sister Heaps, she's from Maryland and is really nice. She's a way good missionary but she's a waiting for a visa to go to Brazil so I'm not sure how long she'll be here. 

Anyway its been so crazy because Sister Heaps and I are whitewashing (we replaced elders) but it feels more like we opened up the area. The first few days it was really hard not to be frustrated with the elders who served here because there are hardly any records in our area book (and the apartment was a little scary (dirty)). The last time a progress record (a list of less-active and investigators seen in the week) was filled out was in 2011. Basically, we have no idea what the elders have been doing here for the past years. In the white handbook it says to not say anything negative about your area or other missionaries so I'll just say...this is a going to be a great opprotunity to figure out the people in this ward and area with a white slate :) ! 

It really isn't too bad because the Bridgeland ward is every missionary's dream ward. The bishop is a convert to the church and is super missionary-minded, the ward mission leader is great, and the ward missionaries actually help us. Yesterday was ward conference and it was all about missionary work. My favorite topic! The elders only passed on one investigator to us because they baptized all their other investigators. So the ratio of investigators that get baptized is pretty good. The bishop was saying that they try to match up people from the ward with investigators so that they can have lds friends with similar interests. Our one investigator is Jonny and everyone thinks that he'll be baptized. His wife is a member who just recently became re-active. Jonny is pretty quite but he says that so far he has liked everything he has learned about the church.

The ward is really friendly and willing to do anything to help the missionaries. They haven't had sister missionaries for 6+ years so everyone was pretty excited to see us, maybe a little too excited. The area is kind of weird. The ward is kind of split up into two sections, one part is super crazy wealthy and the other part is normal. We actually live out of the ward boundaries on the southern end so it takes about 20 minutes to get to the northern end. The church building is even further, its about a 25 minute drive. Thank goodness we have a car! The elders actually just got the car the transfer before us, I can't believe they used to bike this area.

Sister Heaps and I are mostly trying to build our investigator pool right via part-member families, contacting, referrals. Its been a bit of a struggle, probably just because we don't really know that many people. Give it another week and I think we'll be doing mucho better.

My new address is:

7202 Barker Cypress Rd. #8304

Cypress,TX 77433

I love you

-Sister Davis