Awesome Week!

Well it was quite an awesome week here in Sterling. We had such a good time seeing Granny and Pa this past Thursday. They both looked great and it was so awesome to get to talk to them about how their mission was. We went up to Macaroni Grill for lunch then we made our way up to the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian in DC (we got lost a good number of times haha), then we headed back to my old area of McLean 2nd to have dinner with the members there that are distant cousins of ours. Such a good time! We took lots of great pictures too, unfortunately I didn't get to take very many because my camera was almost dead and it turns out I left the charger in the Mclean 2 apartment :/ so hopefully I'll be able to get that back from them before too long. But the natural history museum is huge! We were there for a good 2 hours and didn't even get to see a fraction of what all was there. We did make our way through the dinosaur exhibit, the oceans (ancient and modern), and the minerals and gems exhibits though and man was that cool. It was just so surreal being with Granny and Pa again though! I was thinking about it and I'm pretty sure that's the longest I've ever gone without seeing them before, so crazy! So obviously that was a pretty awesome part of the week haha. The day before though was exchanges so I stayed here in Sterling with our district leader Elder Lieu from Malasia (I think there's supposed to be a Y in that somewhere but I'm not sure) and we had a good time. We got to get some good use out of the bikes for once because my companion Elder Johnson has some medical problems with the glands in his eyes that make it so he can't ride in the cold weather. So Elder Lieu and I were able to reach some of the extremities of the area and try some new door approaches. We had a pretty crazy first time experience though. We were looking for someone to talk to because every door we had knocked on wasn't home so far and Elder Lieu was saying "There has to be somebody here for us to talk to, we didn't go this far up here for nothing" then immediately afterwards we hear someone whistling a little ways away and Elder Lieu was like "Oh my gosh that's the person! We've got to find them." So this was like 8 o clock at night and there were no street lights in this part of the area so it was very dark, but we managed to see a silhouette of a lady walking her dogs down a long trail not to far from us who must have been the one whistling, so we went to start talking to her and as soon as we had finished introducing ourselves she shook our hands and said "Hi I'm Samantha" in one of the deepest manliest voices I'd ever heard, so really we were both pretty startled and surprised but she proceeded that she was what the Native Americans called "two-spirited" or trans-gender... and he had recently gone through surgery to become this way and wasn't much interested in what we had to say. It was probably one of the weirdest things I'd ever experienced haha. So he shared with us some scriptures out of the Bible that talked about Eunichs and sent us on our way haha. Elder Lieu was pretty disappointed that that wasn't the person we were supposed to find and talk to haha. So that was a pretty crazy experience. This weekend went quite well though, our investigator Lauren has decided that she wants to move her baptism to an even earlier date and so that will now be not this weekend but next weekend. So we are very excited for that and she is as well. We are still trying our hardest to find more people to teach though, currently we only have Lauren and a lady named Bonnie who is really hard to set up times to meet with because she's so busy all the time. But we will find someone eventually! All we have to do is give it our best and the Lord will take care of the rest haha. Man this has been quite a long email so I'm almost out of time already. It was a very eventful week though haha. I hope all is well and I miss all of you guys!