Another Week in Quantico! 3/11/13

Well here I am another week in Quantico! I'm very glad I survived transfers haha. Elder Eaton was transfered though, that was a bummer. We only got to be comps for 5 weeks haha. But my new companion was quite a surprise. It's Elder Rasmussen! The Same Elder Rasmussen that was my companion in the MTC! How cool is that? We are way stoked to be companions again haha. So far we have gotten along great and are having a great time. We also got to keep our visa waiter, Elder McFadden, who knows how much longer he'll get to stay with us. He's a great guy so we hope he stays awhile haha. It sure has been a hectic week though because of transfers! Our zone changed a lot this past transfer. We had 8 missionaries transferred out and a total of 10 missionaries transferred in. With that we had 1 brand new area opened, 1 area white-washed (both Elders transferred out and 2 new Elders transferred in), and one area being switched to a bike area. So there was a lot of last minute calls for rides and housing and supplies and all sorts of good stuff that we had to make, stressful! But the week itself ended up still being an awesome one! Our ward fasted for help in missionary work this past fast Sunday and man it really worked well. We saw lots of miracles from it. We found some solid new people to teach and had some really great lessons. We had a really awesome miracle that I wanted to spend some time sharing though. So a little over a year ago when I was serving back in Sterling Park, Lauren (who had just recently joined the church) told me that she felt like she needed to give me some money she had. She said she didn't know why but it was a very strong prompting and wanted me to take it, she said that it was not for me but for someone else that I would eventually meet. It was a good amount of money so I told her to pray about it first because there was no way I was just going to take her money haha. She did and her answer was the same, give the money to me. I decided I would take it, fold it up in the back pocket of my wallet and just wait for the time to be right for me to give it to whoever it was for. Well like I said that was over a year ago and I had not thought about it since then. I knew it was there and told myself I'd keep looking for the person who needed it. Of course we meet people that need money all the time but never any of those times did it feel like that was the person who needed the money. Well last night we stopped by a woman's house named Linda. We met her this past week while knocking on some doors in her neighborhood when she was having a rough time and just needed someone to come inside and pray with her. We did and she said she would like to come to church with us on Sunday, she was in need of financial help and wanted to talk to the leaders at our church (something we hear quite often from people), we told her that we couldn't guarantee her anything and the Church's welfare system is built around self sustainability and not so much about just giving people money, she said she understood and would still like to give it a shot. Well two days later, the day after we pick up Elder Rasmussen. We go to park and walk to another appointment. Well parked next to us in a broken down car is Linda. It turns out Elder Rasmussen is a master at fixing cars so he diagnosed the problem we ran to the store and gave her a temporary fix so that she could at least get home. Her car was in too bad of shape to get to church so we came by Sunday night instead. Her rent was due the next morning (today) and she still didn't have the money she needed. She explained that she had spent her entire career working with people in homeless shelters, housing people in need, she had lost 2 sons to accidents of one sort or another, she had always been raised a God-fearing Christian and was starting to doubt her faith, she had been praying and praying for help and knew God would provide a way but just wasn't sure how or if he would still pull through. We asked her how much exactly she was short. It was almost exactly the amount of money that Lauren had given me! I felt very strongly that Linda was the one that money was for. So we gave her the money and explained where it had come from and how it had been saved for her, because God answered a prayer over a year ago, for her. She started to tear up and told us how she knew all the times that we had just happened to show up in her time of need couldn't have been a coincidence and she knew that we had been sent by God. Man what a feeling! It was an experience that I will never forget. It's things like that that make being a missionary worth every minute of the 2 years. God is awesome! Well sorry that went a little long, that was our miraculous week! I hope you have all had great weeks as well! I love and miss all of you!