Sister Riley Dorrance's California Arcadia Mission: Week 61

Sister Smith and I usually remember that we don't take a lot of pictures while we're in the car.

Hi team! This week was hard! It was cool though because I have a feeling it's going to be a super funny email.

The week started out with three of our solid people dropping us in two days. So that's super duper sad, but we still worked hard and tried our best and pranked the sisters we live with to make us feel better! It worked! We flipped all of the pictures on their walls upside down and their mattresses and it was wonderful. We also hid all of the sodas in her 12 pack around the apartment. And we froze some deodorant in a bucket of water

they put Vaseline on our door handles and stole all of our pens and they froze our skittles and all of my rings and put post-its all over our mirror. It's been very eventful in the Cameron pad.

We had a sisters conference this week which was really cool! We got to do Zumba in the morning and I'm terrible at Zumba, but boy did I try. It was awesome. We talked about a ton of super cool stuff that helps with missionary work and it was really nice to have in the middle of a week that could have been worse!

Not very many people were super excited to talk to us, but we managed to teach a couple of them which was super nice. It's literally the greatest thing to teach people about the gospel. But we'll get into the meat of the email because that's why you're all actually reading this.

I had the literal worst sacrament meeting of my whole life yesterday. I may be acting a little dramatic, but it was not my most favorite way to spend the Lord's day. So we start out with ward council. Our stake president was spending his Sabbath in our ward so he was there and that was all sorts of fine and dandy but we left that early so that we could go and wake up one of our pals for church! She was supposed to be getting baptized this coming Sunday and she said that she was going to be at church yesterday but she bailed. She wasn't even at her house. It was so sad. So now we have to push her date, but she's still so cool because she knows the church is true and wants to Follow Christ's example! Except not by going to church yesterday. It's all good though. So moving on. We're teaching this other lady named Cassandra and she's super cool. She wants to get baptized too, but her husband isn't super interested and so it's hard for her to come to church because she has a 2 month old and a 2 year old and her little baby has been sick. But we got her to church yesterday! Cassandra is a referral from a member named Cynthia and Cynthia has two kids. A 5 year old girl and a 2 year old boy. These kids are literally insane. Actually all three of these children might actually be completely crazy. Or they were just on one yesterday. Who knows. So we get to sacrament meeting and were all sitting there and everything gets started. Cassandras son starts getting antsy because he's not used to sitting still at church. It's understandable, I get antsy too, but Cassandra gives him her phone and he finds a YouTube video and decides to turn the volume all the way up. Not super great, but she turns it down and then he turns it up and I don't know why she didn't take the phone away, but I'm not a parent so I can't judge that kind of thing. He did this a few times. Sister Smith got her tablet out though and let him do some finger coloring though which was awesome but he got out of the pew and he started walking up the aisle. Not a problem, but then it just got worse. Cynthia's kids joined in and then someone got a rubix cube and these kids literally started yelling at each other in the middle of the aisle. They threw sister Smith's tablet, which thankfully had a case on it, and started hitting each other. So Cassandra, holding her 2 month old baby, started chasing them around the chapel, and she wouldn't let anyone else hold her baby. Eventually they chilled out with the fighting, but they started playing and all three of these children were running in the chapel and laughing and yelling and Cassandra was trying so hard to quiet them down all while holding her infant, and Cynthia LITERALLY DID NOTHING. She just sat and let her kids run and yell in the chapel during sacrament meeting. It was awful. A lady in the Ward told Cassandra to go out and sit in the foyer. And she wouldn't, and then another child from the Ward joined in and the stake president was talking and these kids were going over and under the pews and yelling and one started running up onto the stand, but he didn't make it all the way and we're just missionaries so we cant throw them over our shoulder and drag them out so we just hoped that stickers would help but they didn't. It was actually terrible. It was so loud. But Cassandra came to church which was good even if she left after second hour. But we all took the sacrament and that's what matters. But it was pretty hard. So we went home after church and just sat for a little bit. It was rough. But this week is gonna be great. Promise. After much tribulation comes the blessings!

We had a good lesson with David yesterday though! He's awesome and he's going to get baptized soon. This area is truly blessed! I hope you all enjoyed this story!