Week 40, 7/12/2021

 Waycross➡️ Jacksonville

Yes I am officially a Florida resident. I no longer live in a small town in the middle of Georgia. Am I sad about it?...yes I am a little bit. Georgia and Florida are so different! I'm now serving in the Mandarin 1st ward in Jacksonville Florida. Its a really small area that's mainly just houses, the beach is in our district so that's pretty cool. Here are the main differences I've noticed from Waycross:

-the people here are normal! I'm not insulting the people of Georgia in any way, but they definitely a southern tang to them that I loved. 

-no southern accents or southern hospitality 

-no fresh vegetables from people's farms being delivered to our door

-so far we have no one to teach in our area :( but I'm gonna change that! 

-there's more than 5 restaurants, yay!

-no trains...not one! Its so weird! 

-Not everyone in the ward is related 

This is only the second time I've moved area's on my whole mission so its just really weird to me.  Oh that reminds me....I HIT 9 MONTHS!!! That's right, I'm officially an old missionary now. Its weird to think that my mission is halfway over, so far I feel really good about what I've done and the experiences I've had. I'm just so excited to see what else my mission will bring. 

As far as this week goes, it was super long and weird. There was a hurricane! It basically just rained a lot, but it was super unfortunate because it came the day I was supposed to leave Waycross, so I wasn't able to say goodbye to everyone I had planned to :( but Sister Graf, sister Gamble and I still had a good time. I am seriously going to miss the people in Waycross so much! It's going to be really hard to beat that area. I felt so at home there. 

Saying goodbye to my wonderful Waycross peeps

The Bennetts

Alexis

We officially left Waycross on Thursday and drove to Jacksonville for transfers. I met my new companion sister Horn! She's awesome, and it turns out in going to be in a trio for 3 weeks with Sister Adamson until she goes to Costa Rica. They're both awesome! 

Surviving the Hurricane...you can see we are really traumatized

Something else that's different about this area is I'm called to be the Social Media Specialist for the mission, along with my companion.  I still have pretty much no idea what I'm doing, but after a few days I have a small idea. Our job is to oversee the mission's social media efforts. So we run ads for Bible studies, church tours, book of Mormon requests etc. On Facebook. When someone clicks on the ad we send that referral to the missionaries in their area. We also come up with ideas on how we can better utilize social media in missionary work. Soooo if anyone has any ideas let me know! We have meeting with the other tech specialists, the AP'S, and our mission president every other week and its basically like a business meeting where we bounce ideas off one another. So this whole SMS thing is very different! I'm kind of excited to see a different side of missionary work, but it will take me a while to get used to it for sure. 

My new temporary trio.  Sis Horn is the one with red hair.

I said goodbye to a lot of awesome people this week 😥 but I met a lot of great people and started a new phase of my mission! So a lot of exciting things. This area might be kind of difficult teaching wise, but the ward is amazing and I'm excited to work hard and find people to help and teach. I was reading a talk called "The Fourth Missionary" and it talks about missionary work but I feel like it can relate to everyday life. It talks about how even if we are going about doing good things and helping people, but we aren't doing it for the right reasons (like if we feel like we have to) then it won't be benefitting you in any way and it won't change you.  There was a quote that said, "the most important thing we can do in this life is to change, and to become more like Jesus Christ." How true! We are supposed to change and become better, and a mission will do that to you, but only if you are willing to change. So will life experiences, we have trials for a reason! But if we aren't willing to change and become better, than the trial would have been for no reason. Anyway, change is good! Its what we're meant to do! 

Sorry this email was kind of long, a lot happened this week and I didn't even get to everything. I'll update y'all a little more about my area next week once I get more used to it. But I love and miss y'all! Go wish my momma a happy late birthday cuz she's the beeeest! 

-Sister Bonny❤