Monday - we visited Br. Willie Garcia, with special permission to travel outside of our zone's area. He now lives in a care facility, that is located basically right on the border of mexico. The retirement care system down here is rather jankey - the facility was not well kept and the people down there are just waiting to pass away. But Willie was in good spirits. During the visit we were also approached by two other less active members of the church who were visiting their parents - in both cases we were able to say a prayer and just get to know the families, it was definitely a highlight. This week we also came up with some awesome new games and scripture stories to act out. We created our own full armor of god attire, super adorable to see the kids put it all on. One of our members gave me a recipe for scripture cookies and cakes - like you have to look up in the scriptures each ingredient to see what it is, super funny as a missionary. Big news came this week, on thursday we had a companionship study with our district leader and he told us that our 'unity' was not at its full potential and "the windows of heaven were closed to us, until we resolved the issue". This resulted in a full heart-to-heart with Sis. Barton later that day, while riding our bikes we stopped in a flood drain gutter and talked about any frustrations we had been dealing with. We decided we were co-senior companions and needed to do some better counseling before we made decisions...problem solved, or so we thought. Saturday we had 'interviews' with the district leader and he told us that Sis. Barton was senior companion and I was suppose to be junior this whole time. News to us. Well, its clear that Heavenly Father wants me to learn more about humility and love. Challenge accepted, I love being the happy support system, the hard part is staying involved and invested in the decisions that are made, but its a good lesson to learn. The fact of the matter is, Heavenly Father knows who each one of us are and where we are going to shine. The correction may come in different ways but it always still comes. We can chose to learn and grow or be stuck in a rut and silently miserable - not fun. On the teaching front, we found an awesome new family, the Ortiz, in our apartment complex last night. As well, yesterday we had a lesson with one of our less actives, the McHugh family. For the first time yesterday, Bro. McHugh sat in for the closing prayer of our visit. There were key blessings that I wanted to have said for Bro. McHugh but Sis. Barton was asked to say the prayer. I panicked and began frantically praying for her to think of those specific things in her prayer - well those key phrases I was thinking of, she quoted word for word. This was a miracle afterwards when she said those phrases came to her mind in the middle of her prayer. I learned that telepathy is possible via Heavenly Father.

In closing, I hope all my math friends (and everyone else as well) had a wonderful 'pie' day (3.1415...) and if anyone is ever in Laredo we recently found a great place to get raspas. A raspa is a mexican version of shaved ice with ice cream, pure happiness.If you can't make it all the way to Laredo, I still recommend everyone find their own happiness treat and spoil themselves this week.

Laredo Love xoxox H. mckenna Crawford