Letter from Sarah:
SO! We have reached day of preparation once again! 

Today's plan is!

First: spend every second we have available writing home!

Second: Go with the Sister Training Leaders to the Vicksburg military park! (I’m excited to go and send Papa pictures!)

Third:  GO ON EXSKRANGES!! (exskranges=exchanges) so I am going to spend 24 hours in Jackson, MS and will temporarily be companions with Sister Keyes! I am really excited! Sister Keyes and her companion picked Sister Hill and I up from the airport, they are very sweet.

            Just a little bit of explanation of "exskranges" down her in the South, in a  state almost completely populated with African Americans, the people speak something called Ebonics. So anyway any opportunity to practice our Ebonics “don hur on dah skreets,” we take it!

            I love teaching African Americans, they value big leaps of faith and really believe that God will respond in kind. So when I tell them that God the Father, and The Son appeared to Joseph Smith: They. LOVE. It. When we were tracting yesterday we taught this 17 year-old girl about not only the restoration of Christ’s church, BUT about Christ! That was definitely a first! It was so perfect because she wanted to know why Mary had to be a virgin, I bore my testimony to her that God ALWAYS gives us signs when great things are about to come to pass, but that we have to decide if we are going to be like Joseph and stand by them and witness that they are truly signs from God. She LOVED that (it helped that she was only seventeen). Which was perfect because we know that when God and our Savior appeared to Joseph Smith it was a sign of great things that would come to pass! So we taught her the first vision. We decided as a companionship to always pause after the first vision so the investigator could pay attention to how they are feeling. We paused and she looked at us and started to cry, she told us she didn't know if God was real, "But that proves it! He came to him! He was actually was there! That means God is real!" It was amazing.  We are going to teach her next Wednesday and I am so excited to find out what she thinks about the Book of Mormon! 

            There is nothing wrong with teaching white people, BUT usually they are VERY, VERY, VERY devout Baptists. Mississippi College (Baptist college) holds free classes teaching "What the Mormons REALLY believe" and I am not joking one bit, and  "How to handle Mormon Missionaries.”

            I am going to tell you a quick story before I tell you about MC one of the white Baptists we are teaching. The Elders are teaching a Math professor at Mississippi College who is from some other area of the world (I am sorry I do not remember where) who REALLY wants to be baptized, but he knows that if anyone at the college finds out he was baptized he WILL be fired. At first the Missionaries told him that they knew if he was fired the Lord would eventually find him another job, BUT if he is fired he will lose his Visa. And if he returns to his home country a Christian he says they will kill his family. So we are all praying that he will find another job.

            But anyway, MC thinks that what we are teaching him isn't true, purely (well, other things, too) because of how flashy everything is to him. He can't wrap his head around the fact that no record (that we know of) in the Bible was ever written on gold. I told him what Daddy always has told me that, "If you are going to put a sacred record in the ground for hundreds of years it is not going be written on anything that corrodes or would easily wear away!" The Book of Mormon was not recorded on gold because it was more “valuable than the Ten Commandments!! But I know that once he has a testimony of prophets, little details like that don't matter. BUT MOM, GUESS WHAT!? Our first visit, and I AM NOT EXAGGERATING-- AT ALL! HE ASKED ME TO RECITE THE ARTICLES OF FAITH!! We went through all thirteen and explained them to him. He thinks that the tenth proves that our church is false. Haha, oh MC...He can't comprehend that a Prophet has the right to receive revelation on behalf of the world, SO IT MAKES SENSE THAT GOD MIGHT TELL HIM THAT THE NEW JERUSALEM WILL BE ON THE AMERICAN CONTINENT!! So we have to teach him with scriptures from the Bible, which is time consuming and not very effective. 

            Dear family of mine, maybe you all know this...But, what the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints believes is that we are the restored church of Jesus Christ—SO, we are the same church that Jesus Christ came to this earth and set up. We can prove that because we have a prophet of God on the earth right now, but God also gave us the Book of Mormon so we could have something that we could touch and read to prove that Joseph Smith RESTORED, not reformed, Christ’s Church. I do not know why I had to go on a mission to realize that we could summarize what we believe into one sentence BUT WE CAN, and that is AWESOME, because that means we can tell everyone we meet about it!

            I do not have much news because we have just been busy, busy, busy teaching. The past two weeks have been crazy! We only had an hour to write home last Monday because our week was so filled up that we had to schedule lessons on our P-day. We find out on Saturday about transfers, so we will find out if Sister Walker will still be training me! It is almost guaranteed that I will be staying in Vicksburg though.

            We are in the safer area of Vicksburg. They haven't had an incident in five years (only because we are Sisters ---LAME!). I need to be more wary of tornadoes than dangerous druggies. Besides I have the Holy Ghost who will always protect me. We have rules and standards that keep us safe, so we don't ever enter situations where we would be in danger. Also I have entered into every covenant I need in order to live with my heavenly father...so basically whatever happens---I will be happy!