Oh my goodness!!!!!

[The beginning of Marie's email this week is out of context if you don't know that her cousin, Aaron Bardsley, just received his mission call to her mission and will be a spanish-speaking missionary like her.  Marie and Aaron have only met when they were quite young, and do not know each other now.  That is why she says she is sure she will get to meet him.  So, for 6 months the mission will have an Hermana Bardsley and an Elder Bardsley!]

Okay, first of all! That is sooooooooooo cool about Aaron! Tell him
congratulations from me and that he is coming to the coolest mission
ever! Since he is a Spanish speaking missionary I will almost
certainly get to meet him! Tell him that he is coming to the mission
that has no cars, has iPads, and the coolest mission president ever! Well
he will only get to be with president becerra for a month, but it will
be the president he comes in with. And president becerra is the
coooolest guy ever! I want to be him when I grow up! Hey if you guys
could get me his email I'd love to email him!

Man that is so exciting. He is definitely going to hear some very
strange things about me when people find out he is my cousin. You
could say I have a reputation for extremely obnoxious jokes that is
mission wide. He is probably not going to want to be my cousin haha.
Now at meetings if there is a spare moment president makes me get up
and tell a joke. At zone conference this last week I told the whale
joke. Pretty sure the whole mission hates me by now haha!

As for this week, it was pretty intense. The week or so before someone
gets baptized is always insane. With Aurora it started about two weeks
before she was to get baptized. I'm not going to go into a ton of
detail, sufficeth to say, priesthood blessings are amazing. After her
blessing she was like "si se puede" and decided that she thinks she
can make it and now she is on track to get baptized this Sunday again.
But she needs a lot of prayers. The devil is like clawing from every
angle. On top of everything else that has happened she is sick with
the flu and couldn't even come to church because she had a fever. It
has been crazy and we have just had to be constantly on our guard.

Well, I don't know what else to say. Pretty much the rest of our time
has been solely devoted to uploading our entire area books into our
iPads. Which is extraordinarily time consuming. But the church is
true. Baptism is that first covenant we make with god and the one that
allows him to pour out a ton of blessings upon us and to be free of
our past lives. It is super cool that we get to renew that every week
as we take the sacrament.


Con amor,
Hermana bardsley