Jessie set her own date to be baptized!! Yippee!

Emailing with my best buddy

Happy last week of September! 

Holy cow time is flying by so darn fast! I can't believe this. I feel like September just started and this transfer just started as well. But we only have 2 more weeks left. I can't believe it. Time goes by fast when you're having fun! This week has been amazing. It started out a little slow but by the middle of the week, Sister Fitt and I couldn't stop smiling. We have been able to see so many amazing miracles. 

   Our investigator Stefano is doing great.  We have been meeting with him pretty regularly. He came to family home evening and institute this week. The ward has been so amazing with fellowshipping our investigators. When he comes, he has a lot of people coming to him and introducing themselves. It is so amazing to have them help fellowship our investigators. It's very helpful and makes gaining friendships so much easier. He didn't come to church sadly, but we will hopefully be meeting with him soon. He has a lot of potential; we just don't know how much he is truly grasping right now. 

    I can't remember if I have talked about Malcolm before but he is the greatest. Malcolm has been meeting with missionaries for over a year now. He had his baptism interview last November and due to some complications, he had to wait a year to be baptized. He is on date for December 3 and that date is very solid. He really has such a strong desire to be better. He has received all of the lessons multiple times, so now we are doing reviews and having him teach us. It's pretty awesome. As we were leaving the VCU library after his lesson, we walked outside and there was a huge crowd of people and this guy standing on a box preaching about the Bible and people cheering and screaming at him. We couldn't help but watch for a second. It was very interesting to see! This school is very liberal and opinionated; it makes every day a little more interesting cause you never know what you're going to get. 

  Okay, biggest miracle of all is about Jessie!!! She texted us at the beginning of the week asking us if we could meet with her. Jessie has been very busy because she was just got a teaching job at a high school. She said she needed to talk to us and got a member for the lesson and everything. Long story short, she told us her journey of coming to the Mormon Church and how she was teaching youth ministry at the time but just kept getting feelings she needed to come here. She has been coming here for almost 2 years now. (Sorry, I can't remember how much I have told y'all about her) She even said she wants to raise her kids Mormon. She was about to finish the story when she looked at us and said, "Sisters, I'm going to be a Mormon. I have been praying about it and I even had a dream about it, I'm going to be baptized November 11!!" This was such a huge miracle. From not wanting to meet with us 5 weeks ago to saying she wants to be baptized and giving us her own date and everything was absolutely amazing. I seriously love Jessie to death. We have been able to get very close to her these last 4 weeks and have such a strong bond with her. I know I was sent here to Chippenham to meet her. She has such an amazing strong spirit about her. I have been able to see such a big change in her as well. She is incredible!! Half the ward already thinks she is a member and the other half knows her well and freaked out (happy) when they found out she was on date. It was such a good way to start the second half of the week :) 

     The Woman's broadcast was amazing! (Every time I watch it, I just have so many memories of when Mom, Mikelle, and I went to the conference center for the General Young Women’s Conference. That was one of the best moments of my life and very special to me. I will never forget that day :)) We watched it at the institute building, the church right next to VCU campus. It was only going to be broadcasted at the stake center, but Emma Claire wasn't able to make it on time and we didn't want to drive 30 minutes, so the Elders were very kind and set up their laptop for us to watch it.

Watching woman broadcast. Emma Claire wasn't there yet. 

  Today we are going to Powhatan to help one of the Sisters pack. She has been sick a majority of her mission and she is just getting worse. It is so sad. She is amazing. She has such a love for missionary work and is one of the smartest people I know. I am so sad to see her go :( but I'm excited to go to Powhatan again! Yay! 

Scripture of the week: Luke 8:5-11, this is the parable of the sower. (Read it, it’s good) We need to plant our seeds where they can be nourished and strong. I know if we have that strong foundation, life will be a lot easier and when trials come, we can come out stronger! 

I love y'all so much! I hope you have a wonderful conference weekend! I can't wait to watch it!! This week is going to be great. We have a week full of meetings, so it's going to be very spiritually uplifting :) I love y'all! 

Love Sister Brooks :)

We made a little light canopy over our bed. 

 We wanted to take a picture of our little light canopy and it wouldn't work
unless we put our iPad on the wall and taped it hahaha  

This is from walking to our car after getting groceries. It dumped on us. 

Beautiful sunset #VCU

We thought this was pretty cool, couldn't pass it up. 

Murals 

We had dinner with Cristhian, a recent convert and this was his little dog Achilles.
Lilly came too because we needed a 3rd female to go into his house :)

Funny sign Cristhian had 

During Gospel Principles class. Photobombing the Eders iPads.
 Shaquan is on the left, the Elders investigator, Sean on our right,
Cristhian is the one taking the picture.