08/14/2018 – Sister Schroeder's Mission Blog

“It’s a good day to be good”

I’m writing on Tuesday this week because our P-Day got switched. We had a special zone conference where a general authority came to speak to us! The zone conference was every missionary from Bakersfield and Ridgecrest, and the general authority was a member of the seventy named Elder Klebingat. If you didn’t understand that sentence, ask your Mormon friends to explain.

Elder Klebingat is from Germany, and right at the beginning of the conference he told us that the American habit of beating around the bush was not one of his habits. That was a very true statement. He was very direct and firm, but it was in a good way. Everything he talked about helped me with things I’ve been struggling with, and it gave me motivation to be the best missionary I can be for the rest of my mission. My subject line is something that he said.

There was some other awesome stuff that happened this week too! The air has been super bad in Bakersfield because of all the fires, so President Layton told us to spend more time in our cars and less time walking from place to place. Problem: we don’t have a car. So we called Sister Layton and asked what we should do about staying out of the bad air (it was making me cough) and she told us that President arranged for us to have a car! 11 areas were closed last transfer and so there were many cars just sitting in the parking lot. Most of the are being sold, but we got one of the 2 that aren’t. We’re not sure how long we will have it, but I’m very thankful that we have it for now! It’s going to be a sad day when they tell us to bring it back though.

I think Sis Stockdale appreciates that we have a car more than I do, because she had an unfortunate incident happen this week with her bike. Since it doesn’t rain very much in Bakersfield, there aren’t many gutters, so when water from sprinklers runs onto the side of the road, it just sits there forever. As it’s sitting there forever, green algae and slime starts to grow in it. It looks nasty! And according to Sis Stockdale, it feels nasty too. We were biking down a street and we had to go through a huge puddle of this disgusting water. I turned and slowed down a lot before going through the puddle so it wouldn’t splash up on me, but Sis Stockdale (who was behind me) didn’t slow down enough. I heard a small yell and scraping sound, and turned around to see her sitting in the giant puddle of water with her bike on the ground next to her. She had biked right over the biggest part of the puddle and the slime took the bike out from under her. We called the sisters to come take us home and Sis Stockdale had bruising all down her leg. It was not a good night for her.

Some other fun stuff that happened was a trio getting put into our district! Sis Williams and Sis Williams are now training Sis Jordan! Sis Jordan had some health issue while in the MTC, so instead of going foreign, she got sent to California. The Williamses didn’t know they would be training until about 5 hours before she arrived. It was quite the scramble for them to get everything ready for her, but they are doing an awesome job. We and the sisters wrote little notes to her and put them on their door. She’s adorable!

I think that’s it for this week. I hope everything it going well at home! If life seems hard and nothing is going your way, this is a really awesome video to watch: https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2012-01-014-the-will-of-god

Ciao,
Sister Schroeder

After Sis Stockdale fell into the lake of death: