17  29 August 2016

CAROLINA BEACH

Our senior missionary friends were busy this last "PDay" so Lane and I spent a wonderful 3 hours on Carolina Beach. The day was warm and so was the sea.

SAFETY IN THE SHADE

The sun was really hot so Lane and I sat on our new beach chairs in the shade of our faithful old black umbrella. Here Lane is holding the umbrella with Carolina Beach in the background.

SEAGULLS 

The seagulls hung around us because Lane kept feeding them our cookies.

DISTRICT MEETING

Companionships preparing presentations at our last District Meteting.

ENJOYING LUNCH

Here the sisters and elders are enjoying bbq pulled pork on torta rolls with salad and fruit. We also had key lime pie for dessert. Once a month Lane and I provide lunch for everyone. The missionaries must have enjoyed the food as there was very little left over. Thank you Costco!

PIGGLY WIGGLY

We learned from members that the Piggly Wiggly is the place to buy our meat. It is all freshly cut and of good quality. I love the cute name.

OUR CONDOMINIUM POOL

We try to spend an hour at our condo pool every week to get a little vitamin D and exercise. The water is pleasantly warm and we enjoy floating around on our pink and blue noodles.

FAITHFUL FRIEND

Just in closing, our faithful little friend now swims across the pond to meet us when we visit him. This is not usual and we are sure someone is feeding him and he thinks we have food for him. As he gets bigger this may become a problem. We still have not seen the baby alligator which is said to be in the pond?

MISSIONARY WORK

We have fallen into a pattern with our missionary work. We have found very few folks home in the morning and that late afternoons and evenings are our best time to find anyone to visit. We also make a few visits to active members so that we can get to know everyone in the ward. Armed with an outdated ward list we pick a number of addresses to call on and then set off in our faithful Santa Fe with our GPS on my cell phone at the ready. We find many of those listed on the list have moved away. We try to get new addresses but most of the time no one knows where the previous residents have located to. This week we did find a young couple that we want to start visiting. We found the young man home. His work requires 3 days on and 3 days off. We caught him on one of his days off. He is a returned missionary and invited us in. We had a good discussion with him and he admitted that they had discussed starting to attend church again. She was raised in the church and her dad was a bishop. We did not get to meet her as she was at work. We will visit both of them in the coming week some time. Hopefully we can have some success helping them get their lives back on track. We also got to see a retired lady we have been trying to visit for some time now. She was happy to see us and we answered a few questions she had about the gospel. She also told us about her children who are all inactive. We returned the next day to visit two of them but found no one home. We will go back again. We met an old man who lives quite far out in the woods who has not been to church for 5 years and he said he was not interested. He was like a hermit living by himself with no friends. What a lonely life. We offered him a packet of cookies but he said he had diabetes and wouldn't be able to eat them. We left him one of our pamphlets with our name and number, in the event he needed our help with something. On Saturday we felt like we needed a bit of an uplift so we baked bread and delivered loaves to two active families. Today, at church, we found out that our Elder Chiu has been transferred to Beaver Creek, near Raleigh. He has been in Leland just over 4 months. Tuesday we will be leaving at 5 am to take our two missionaries to Raleigh for the transfer. Elder Rawlins will get a "greenie" companion, fresh out of the MTC!

President Monson Quote: "May we ever choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong."