Mission Week 3: Getting Chased by Men ...and Spiders

 First off welcome Brother Kerr and Sister Cole to the most chaotic first transfer EVER (hopefully my title was good enough for brother kerr) I've just been replying to my previous emails so yall can scroll back if you want (you should they are really good, the one from April 14 is titled "the curse of brother kerr" so pretty interesting)

You all may be thinking "Sister Merritt, how can your transfer get crazier", I promise it can. On Wednesday our district cleaned a church building that wasn't in use and we all wanted to get lunch after, the elders being lame did NOT join us, so it was just the Sisters. We went to Jolibee and it was BOMB, but we're just chilling and this guy comes up to us and starts talking to sister Porter. When he's talking to sister Loris, sister p turns to me and mouths Rebecca AGAIN so we get outta there. I find out that this is "red star micheal" he's a convert that became very infatuated with sister Porter. Like VERY, like he was sending poems to her about them strolling the aisles of Safeway. So we get in our cars and get ready to leave when we see him come out scanning like you can tell he's on a mission so we haul out. We're at a red light and hes BEHIND US. Me and Sister Porter both got the feeling not to go home so we start going in circles, we're making turns that don't make sense, switching lanes randomly and hes right there the whole time after a while we finally lost him. Sooo now we have a code word with our ZLs and DLs 👍🏼

The other story is just as scary, there was a MASSIVE spider in our apartment,  you may think I'm exaggerating,  I'm not. We are both chickens so we called our STLs because they live like 2 minutes away and they came and took care of it, but we still have no idea what kind of spider it was. Anyways they came over and actually sprayed our whole apartment with this spray that prevents spiders and bugs in our apartments. 

This week we did A TON of service! On Saturday we got the opportunity to help a food kitchen in Oakland, they get a lot of donated food from places like Costco and trader Joe's. We got to go through and sort expired from good, it was honestly so sad to see how much food was going to waste. Yesterday we went to a park and helped our family ward pass out food to the homeless, it was super fun! We got to meet some people and I got to meet two more elders in our mission!

On Tuesday I had my first full exchange with sister elledge!! Guys she so amazing. It was a blast! We went finding a lot and we didn't find anyone wanting to learn right now BUT we had a member dinner that night. Guys... for days I had been telling sister Porter how badly I wanted a steak. This family took us to a Brazilian steakhouse. I don't remember the name of it but it's ultimately jusy rodizigios (? I think I spelled it right) just unlimited meat, it was such a blessing!

On Friday we went to the temple as a zone and it was such a good experience! We did an endowment session and baptisms for the dead. When I was in the celestial room I read 3 Nephi 11 (jesus coming to the americas) and it was so... I cant even explain it. Highly highly recommend!

I've started to feel the missionary weight this week, it's getting a little hard but we're making some progress! Every day that I'm out here I see the blessings in the work. I've been seeing myself grow and become more in tune with the spirit. I'm weirdly already so comfortable with a lot of people here, missionaries and members, it's so insane to see how the lord had blessed me in the small time I've been out!