Sister Whitney Mikell Sorensen
2701 Longmire #1008
College Station, TX 77845
In fact, even if I had typed the e-mail correctly last week, I had the address wrong, so it's probably best that I didn't get you the right one until just now. Plus, they recommend that you always send packages and such to the Mission Office because they forward them on. And, yes, I did get your package and the lovely Texas card. Well, it's certainly hot here--there's no denying it. We have access to a car, but some elders in our district needed to use it twice last weekend, each time for a 120 mile trip to a town they are supposed to cover. Thus, we are in the last week of the month with only twenty miles allotted to us for the next five days. Which means we've already been enjoying plenty of long walks--naturally, lathered in sunscreen and drinking plenty of water--that make us sweatier than a bucking rodeo bronco. You just keep walking. Only my feet have been the victims of evident tan lines. To contrast with the heat, the water heater at our apartment has been on the fritz. Somedays it works fine, but usually within two or three, it's stopped working again. Of course, the bathroom bears a frightening resemblance to the Psycho shower, so hot water is the least of our worries. I've noticed a lot of critters around. I killed a small beetle/roach in the bathroom, but that's the only one I've noticed so far. Often in the mornings we awake to newly-woven spiderwebs that you don't notice until you walk right through them. I think of them as part of a Mutt Williams-Jones adventure. The trees everywhere are filled with the sounds of locusts (a favorite food of John the Baptist--apparently they taste like shrimp according to the Bible Dictionary, but I'll never be curious enough to find out). They chirp and chatter and create a cacophany of wing flaps that often crescendos to an insect orchestra finale. But I rarely see them; however, they often leave behind entire exoskeletons in prominent places: window screens, attached to siding. We can hear owls hooting in the early hours of the morning, like when we were walking to church yesterday. We even saw a dead frog, dried up like a sponge, resting forever on the curbside yesterday. The strangest yet: a dead opossum in a pile of leaves. The sky is still the grandest thing about Texas, particularly the clouds. With so much sky, it can never be without a cloud. The sun seems to set in five minutes here, but the light paints those canvasy clouds so that even from the ground you can see every crevase and detail of each one. The other night, Sister Davis and I witnessed a strange cloud phenomenon. One lone cloud was carrying flashes of lighting around with it. They weren't even hitting the ground, but at random intervals we could see a flash of light dance for a second in the cloud, revealing its depths and shadows. Of course, that's nothing compared to the storm of the century we had on Monday evening. We went to dinner with two elders at the home of President McMullin and his wife, from the Stake Presidency. As dinner was wrapping up, we could hear thunder rumbling nearby, and by the time we left it was a torrential downpour. During the ten minute drive to our next appointment, lightning lit up the sky all around us, as if heaven were flipping the light switch on College Station to the "ON" position. I've never seen so much lightning. Fireworks from heaven. I loved it. And you know, God really was speaking that night. Our appointment was with a less-active recent convert in the elders' ward. They read a chapter from the Book of Mormon with him every day, and we often accompany them. That night, we never got to read, because Gil's cousin was there, and we ended up teaching him the whole story of the Restoration. Our teaching has been going well--we taught 24 lessons last week. We set the goal to aim for thirty, but 24 is still great because the mission-wide goal is twenty per week. I finally met one of our most serious investigators, Pai-shan from Taipei, Taiwan. She is a getting her Ph.D. at Texas A&M in economics. We really need to help her understand how to feel the Holy Ghost and what the importance of baptism is, but I think she could choose to make that step quickly. It's funny. We teach a lot of Chinese students here. Even if they are going back without being baptized, President Hansen has counseled us to teach them and send them back with lots of church materials. We're preparing the way for China to open. Another investigator, Yuanfa, says he cannot be baptized because in order to become a professor he can be a member of the Communist Party only, no other groups or organizations. Sister Davis is good at teaching them, partially because she has several adopted siblings from China, but she says I'm really good at teaching simply. Sometimes I wonder, since I feel like I should/could speak up more during lessons, but I know in time I'll get better, so for now I just have to keep all those dissenting voices out of my head. Also, I keep thinking about Uncle Randy, wondering if he's helping me teach these Chinese people. For them, the biggest hurdle is accepting that there is a God. They easily acc
ept concepts like the Apostasy and the Restoration. I don't have much more space/time (according to Einstein, they're the same thing), so expect more details in my handwritten letter. Sorry I can't respond to everyone individually, but know that I love y'all the same. (I don't think I used "y'all" correctly there.)Looking up at the same big sky,
Sister Whitney Sorensen
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