April 29, 2013

Hello Family!

Thank you for sending all the beautiful photos of Julie's Graduation! They are truly gorgeous! I'm so excited and proud of you Julie!! Great Job!!

On Thursday April 25th, Sister England and I traveled down the Iowa City for transfer meeting. While she was in a new trainers meeting I scoped out the new missionaries and determined that a sister in wearing red was going to be Sister England's trainee. I was right! Can you believe it, I'm a grandma! The mission really ages a person fast!

My new companion is Sister Winger, she just completed getting trained and so I am now her "Breaker". I get to break her of her bad habits. She's great and I don't for see any troubles between us. We have been assigned to serve in the Cedar Rapids 3rd Ward. There is a set of Elders in this ward and they have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Sisters. So there are two companionships in this ward which will be common throughout the entire mission. At transfer meeting we welcomed a record number of 42 new missionaries which brought the total of missionaries in our mission to 246! Crazy!! It's fun to have the ward members so excited to have us here. The people are really friendly as well. Our ward mission leader met us at transfer meeting and had us follow him up here, which is about 35 minutes north of Iowa City. He told us he was going to take us by our apartment and so we followed him and he stopped eventually at a gorgeous house. We assumed he was stopping to pick something up, but then he said we had arrived! We live in a member's home and they recently redid a wing of their basement to accommodate us. We have a bedroom with a walk in closet and two new beds complete with bedding. We have our own bath and a small kitchenette. We also have part of the craft room to do studying and eat our meals, which looks out to their backyard where deer are known to roam around. They also have a treadmill and an elliptical! We love it so much and we feel like Queens! They have a three car garage and we are able to park our car inside.

We are opening up this area and so we don't have any investigators currently but we are working on changing that. The Elders did tell us that in our ward there is a less active sister who was baptized several years ago that has a daughter that will be 9yrs old. We are hoping to meet with them today and she may become our first investigator here! This situation and a number of others remind me of some of the areas I've been in previously. This ward has many less active sisters just like my previous area. We're excited to see great miracles happen here.

Our ward is only part of Cedar Rapids, so it is a nice change of pace. The area of our ward that we are over is west of Edgewood St. Oh, the Relief Society President, Sister Peterson (same last name as the Relief Society President in Ankeny 2nd :) funny!) asked if we would teach Relief Society yesterday. We had about a day's notice. The two talks that we were to cover were from last conference, Elder Bednar's Becoming Converted and Sister Dibbs, I know it, I live it, I love it. As I read through Sister Dibb's talk to prepare, I came to the part where she shared an experience of meeting with Sister Wilberger in Eugene, Oregon. It was interesting to be reminded of that story and I thought back to when I had helped search for her daughter.

There are three people in the ward who are deaf and there are two sign language translators, but one was gone yesterday. Sister Winger knows sign language and so during the second hour she translated. She did a great job!

Well, I think that's about all I have for now. I can't wait to talk to everyone over Skype or facetime or Google+ in a couple of weeks. It's crazy how the time is flying, but that's fine with me.

Love,
Sister Tucker