Biking Up Hills

It was another adventure filled week in Gretna! OK, well, not near as exciting as getting locked out of our house and the toilet overflowing, but we set a baptism date with Debbie, the wife of the recent convert that we've been teaching! It's been so amazing to see how she's changed. It seems like the real turning point was when they started doing family prayer every night. And I think that has also been the turning point for their 13 year old son. We would barely see him before; he'd just be back in his room playing video games. Then he'd start coming in and out, and now he stays and participates in the lessons and told us the other day that he is "beginning to believe" and really likes when we come over. Both Debbie and their son came to church on Sunday and had a really good experience. We were worried about how Christian would like it because there are absolutely no youth in the branch. But he actually told his mom that he was glad he came. We didn't know what to do with him, so he ended up just going to all the adult classes with his parents. When we were discussing it as a companionship before he came to church and worrying about him not having the support he needs in the branch, we just came to the conclusion, well, if the Church is true, it's true, and he will feel it and Heavenly Father will provide a way for things to work out. So who knows? Maybe Christian will be baptized with his mom on Easter! That's a great day for a baptism, don't you think?

The weather here has not been able to make up its mind. It's been really rainy and cold, and then it's 70 degrees for a couple days, then goes back to the rain. But yesterday, it was a really nice day, and we went on a bike riding adventure! You see, we are really low on our miles on our car this month, so we were pondering what our options were for the last few days of the month and what people we could see and what we could do without driving too far. Then we thought we'd give some of our investigators a call who had offered to loan us bikes, and asked if we could come over in the morning and borrow them. But instead they delivered them to our house that night. So funny, you would love these two, they are a crack up. I think every time we go over there they give us something. One time it was a bunch of old clothes in case any of it fit us and we had quite the fashion show that night...

But anyway, Bill brought over the bikes complete with helmets, and we donned them the next morning along with our backpacks, we packed a lunch and strapped it to the little platform on the back, armed ourselves with safety pins to keep our skirts from blowing up, and away we went. We thought we might be able to make it up to this area where we'd left off some tracting, but we quickly realized that biking in Virginia is not the same as biking in Arizona or California. We forgot that "this here be hill country." So we ended up walking our bikes up a lot of hills and zooming down them on the other side. It was amazing. And we only made it about halfway before we realized we had to stop in order to be able to get back for our dinner appointment that night. We did a bit of tracting around where we stopped, and then picked a nice grassy spot along side this country road to eat our tuna sandwiches and apples.

I then made some off hand comment, that I think someone should just stop and talk to us about the gospel because they felt impressed to. Then, lo and behold, we see a man walking up the street toward us. He asks if we need any help, and explained he lived in the house that was kind of across and down from where we were sitting, and he saw us on our bikes, and he wasn't used to seeing people on bikes around there and wanted to come talk to us. He then asks who we are and what we were doing and we were more than happy to tell him, and he accepted a Book of Mormon and was really interested to read it. We're going to go back and see him and his wife on Saturday, so we'll see what happens.

We then proceeded on our journey home which included riding our bike across the highway, because there was no other street that went where we needed to go. It was so nice. But I've discovered I'm not in very good shape anymore. I wasn't sore though, at all, only my behind because of the seat... I'm sure we looked quite the sight for all the Gretnans.

Maybe we'll have time to ride them more and I can get a little bit back in shape before I come home. :) But it sounds like you are still busy, busy, and happy. That's all really interesting about the common wealth school and those classes, I think that might be something I'd really like to do. But again, I'm running out of time, talk to you all later! I love you all!

~Melissa