Email March 17, 2014

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I Hope you guys are wearing green, it's weird out here all the days kind of blend together and you're always busy so it's hard to remember holidays haha. I have learned a lot of things since coming here. 1. Everyone here has a dog no matter what size living in their house. 2. People here are very impatient, there was a car coming out of a driveway and we were all stopped at a red light so no one could go anywhere or let him in. He got mad and drove up and over the sidewalk to get onto the road haha. 3. Everybody yells here. The people in our apartment building that live right below us are constantly yelling. All day every day we hear them yelling at each other, there has been a lot of nights where we fall asleep to them swearing at each other. Haha it makes me never want to yell at my kids or husband ever, if I ever do someone should slap me. We always hear sirens here too everyday. But I'm still loving it here, you can tell everyone needs the gospel in order to be happy. The gospel is in every aspect of our lives and it keeps us happy, they just don't know it yet. Which is why I'm here! spreading the word of God. Sister Mickelsen and I have kind of had a slow week, we didn't get to see any of our families at all because they're either sick or out of town. I don't know what Glenn is doing so I hope we get to see him sometime this week, he doesn't have a phone or a car so it's hard to get in touch with him. The Webb family didn't come to church, they're still a little nervous but we'll keep working with them. Latreice is struggling with depression, we think she's lonely because she just sits home all day. She works at home and she doesn't have a husband and all she does is sleep so it's been hard. We took Aliece to YW last week and she had a lot of fun, there's not a lot of YW in the ward so there were like 3 girls there but it was good for Aliece, I think a bigger group would've made her nervous. Nothing has happened with Rose so far, we can't get in contact with her but we had a funny thing happen there. We went to go see Rose but she didn't answer the door so we were going to leave and we pulled through this road with a bunch of apartments and there were three black guys standing in the parking lot talking, they kind of looked scary and they were a little drunk. We started driving past them but sister Mickelsen said we should talk to them, I looked at her like she was crazy and she told me she was scared too but she felt the prompting to go and talk to them. Both of us were confused but we told Heavenly Father we didn't know what he was thinking but we would be obedient haha. We stopped and went up to them and started telling them about the gospel, we found out their names were Ajan, Deaonjrae, and Pete (don't ask me to pronounce them because I have no idea, Pete is the only name I know how to say haha.) They were surprised we talked to them but the were very accepting and listened to what we were saying. We gave them our cards and told them we would love to talk to them again, Ajan was the youngest out of all of them, he was 30, but he said he knew that what we were saying had to be true because of our smiles. He said that people don't smile a lot in Michigan because it's a very messed up place but he said that he couldn't stop smiling because he knew that our smiles were genuine. God works in mysterious ways I'll tell you but that just proves that we're all children of our Heavenly Father and he loves all of us equally. The ward is still super small, we've been working with a lot of less actives so that's mostly what we've been doing these last couple days. Last week there was about 40 to 50 people there so that was good, they were only there because it was ward conference. The people in the ward love having sister's though, all the little kids act like we're famous haha it's so cute. Sister Mickelsen and I are speaking in church this week about the Book Of Mormon (I'm nervous but kind of excited.) On P-day's we usually go shopping and clean our apartment and sometimes we hang out with the other sisters in the North Shores area, they're pretty awesome. Everyone thinks Sister Auna and I look alike and we kind of do haha. I hope you're all doing well and I miss you all so much, the days are going so freaking fast! But I'm loving it here, have a great green day and I hope to hear from you all soon! Love, Sister Gordon