April 9, 2011

"Temple Square Guest Services, this is Sister Nelson!" I say that about 100 times a day, but what is bad is when I forget which phone is ringing and say the wrong opening line on the phone. So if people call "inbound" that means they want a Book of Mormon or a DVD from the Church which I answer by saying, "Thank you for calling The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is Karly". We have to be careful about using our first or last names for security reasons and we CANNOT mention where we are located. Yes, if you couldn't tell I think I've broken this rule, on accident, of course, about ten times. Oops. Oh well, people in our society today don't pay attention to what anyone says so no biggie.

General Conference!!!!! Here is the procedure for every Sister missionary on Temple Square about a week before:

1) Stare at closet in frustration because nothing is cute.

2) Ask every Sister missionary within sight opinions on potential outfits.

3) Try on 50 outfits and ask opinions from everyone what they think.

4) Ditch everyone's opinion and wear what you want to wear that they didn't know you wanted to wear but randomly had this brilliant idea/revelation from God about what you could wear to make you as good looking as possible for people we cannot date let alone touch for the next 18 months.

5) Wake up 2 hours before we have to be on the Square to get ready for the fastest flying 14 hours of our missions.

So that is General Conference in a nutshell. I am pleased to say I did not follow the above procedure but simply went shopping for new clothes. Hello, this could be the photograph in the Ensign magazine we are talking about. Big deal!

But anyway conference was great! We set a mission goal of 6,000 potentials (member referrals)! Needless to say Saturday was great weather, tons of people; our goal seemed in reach. Sunday was a snowstorm, cold, nobody on the Square. Uh-oh. We only study in Guest Services for four hours each day and when we were free we literally ran up the stairs (after praying, of course) and talked to people. I really love conference because everyone is more willing to have a spiritually uplifting conversation with you. This inevitably leads to discussing someone who could benefit from knowing more about the Church! It is a game that we must play so, believe it or not, everyone getting potentials from members is an art that I honestly am still working on. We spent hours role playing it to get ready for conference. But anyway, just keep that in mind if any of you go to Temple Square.

We met cool people though! Sister Despain and I contacted this man that was 100-years-old! He was hilarious and even pretended to die during our conversation with him. We saw lots of old friends! It was nice to see everyone. It is weird to see people I know because I feel like life has stopped and I think that theirs should as well but nope not at all. We worked really hard through the rain and snow and called ourselves the Willie and Martin handcart pioneers all day. I was getting really nervous about reaching our goal because the way we tracked our referrals was to put stickers up on the walls decorated to look like Temple Square so when the stickers ran out we reached our goal. But they weren't running out and the box was far from empty. We talked to anyone that moved (kinda felt bad but we just tried not to think about it). After Conference we had our mission meeting that was open to the public (and none of you attended; how dare you!) and we got 6,455!!! Miracles seriously because NOBODY was on the Square.

Because we reached our goal we got to sleep in till 9 a.m. (amazing!) and we had a mission dinner/movie-watching extravaganza from 5-8! We watched a real movie too! It is called Secretariat about a race horse. It was really good I would say you should go see it but I am sure it is old news by now. So yeah, you should all go watch it!

Quick miracles because this letter is forever long: Took a spanish couple through God's Plan for His Family and they referred and they also gave 10 potentials to call!! So great! I love having a companion that speaks Spanish, I am failing at learning that language but at least I now know that saying, "El Libro de Mormon is verde" is a lie because it is actually "azul" but more importantly it is "verdad" as any Spanish speakers can translate that for you all. I got an inbound call from a man from Iraq asking for a Book of Mormon. Cool huh?! He wants to know more about Jesus Christ. He said he isn't Muslim so we can send it to the missionaries. It is still dangerous though because he could die. Lastly our investigator told us about a dream she had where she was invited to a really fancy party. But she had another commitment somewhere else so she went to that instead. She said the entire time she felt like she missed out on something important in her life and lost the opportunity. She interpreted it to mean that she needed to keep learning about this Church. Now she just needs to break the news to her husband.

Oh...and we passed cleaning checks (yes, that is a miracle). Ok, gotta go! Transfers are on Wednesday so I don't know when I will be writing you again but honestly it will probably be on Saturday... or Wednesday since I most likely will not leave Guest Services. Bye!