Hermana McKay Hadley: "Baptized by Water, Fire...or Pie Filling"

Hola everybody!!! This week has been an adventure!!! Lots of amazing things are happening in our area! Our branch is amazing and has been the biggest support to our investigators. We have many coming to church which is so important and we are very happy about it. Anyways, well you know me and of course I have a few fun stories from this week!!

It was an AWESOME Valentine’s Day! It also happened to be Hermana Jensen's 20th birthday! It started off with me making her pink pancakes for breakfast and our District Leader Elder Wynne and Anderson came by and dropped off a birthday cake that was so good! Then we had weekly planning. So during that time I decided to conquer a quest.

Every year for Hermana Jensen's birthday her mom makes her a Strawberry pie... ya had I ever made a strawberry pie before, nope. To simplify the amount of work that needed to be done I bought strawberry pie filling and thought this is going to be easy. I just have to dump this into a pie crust and put whipped cream on top. It wasn't that easy.

We opened up the can which was a little sketch. The filling itself tasted so good but... the brownish strawberries they had put in it were disgusting. So we handpicked each strawberry out of the filling. It was a huge sticky mess but I was pretty impressed we were able to get all of the strawberries out of the filling and put fresh strawberries in it. I made the best strawberry pie ever;) and it turned out really good. That night we went to the Hermana's apartment for heart-shaped meatloaf with pink mashed potatoes and our strawberry pie!!!

Thursday we went and had dinner with the Familia Bran in our branch and they taught us how to make Pupusas! Pupusas are from El Salvador and are made with thick cornmeal dough stuffed with cheese, pork and refried beans. They are cooked on a flat griddle and are not fried. They are very good and we loved them so much. They are really hard to make so we were glad we had Hermana Bran's help.

Earlier this week we also had a fun little experience of having to evacuate our apartment. It has been raining nonstop and when you walked outside the streets were full of water. We were in our apartment finishing our studies when all of a sudden the fire alarms started going off. At the time we were in the middle of also making cookies for our investigators so my first reaction was I burnt the cookies! But we looked at them and they were just fine.

We looked outside and ALL of the alarms were going off in the whole building. So us being missionaries, we grabbed our bags, scriptures, and the area book and got in our car. We then went to a parking lot and finished planning for the day then drove by our apartment to find out the alarms were still going off. So we called our manager and they told us that the alarm system had flooded so that is why they started to go off. There has been so much rain and I am convinced that California is falling into the ocean.

On a more spiritual side for this week, Sunday we had an amazing lesson in Relief Society about the word "Becoming". We talked about how every moment we should be working on what we can become. My favorite area that we talked about was "Becoming His" and it hit home to me.

We have a loving Heavenly Father who loves us so much and he wants us to grow closer to him every single day. We need to try to align our will with His and put our trust in him even when times are hard. They shared the scripture D&C 78: 17-18 so I invite all of you to go look up that scripture!

Mom Note:

17 Verily, Verily, I say unto you, ye are little Children, and ye have not as yet understood how great blessings the Father hath in his own hands and prepared for you;

18 And ye cannot bear all things now; nevertheless, be of good cheer, for I will lead you along. The kingdom is yours and the blessings thereof are yours, and the riches of eternity are yours.

I hope you all have such a great week! Le quiero!

-Hermana Hadley