August 10th, 2015

I've been trying so hard to remember my week, but nothing is coming!  It's kind of frustrating to be honest.  So this email might be a little lame, sorry!

On p-day last week my district and I headed up to Frankenmuth, which is a small German town about 30 min away.  The town was really cute, everyone was wearing German outfits and the buildings were all German and the food was German and everything was just German.  I tried some chocolate and blueberry cheese and it was the best cheese I have ever tasted!  Made me think of all the yummy cheeses you used to buy Deb, you definitely gotta try the chocolate and blueberry.  Unfortunately I'm terrible at remembering to take pictures so on our way out of the town I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures from inside the car... The pictures are just awful and make me laugh.  I'll post some at the end of the email.  After we left town our district realized that it was our last P-Day all  together before transfer calls so our DL (district leader) paid for all of us to ride this super lame roller coaster made for kids, ages 7-12, called the Serpent.  Ironic right?  Satan's the serpent?  That's not as funny writing it out to all of you as it was to our district. Missionary jokes... you gotta laugh at what you can right?  Anyways, the rollercoaster was so stupid hahaha, and the whole time the elders were shouting out things like "if I do I want all you kids to know that Joseph Smith was a prophet!  The book of Mormon is true!  We are missionaries of Christ!" etc., etc.  The kids were looking at us like we were nuts.  Worth it. Their faces were pricless.

   While door knocking this week twice old people have seen me and invited me right into their homes.  Both times I was like "are you sure?" and they would reply "Yes don't be silly."  When they walked closer they then realized that I am not their granddaughter.  Both times I laughed pretty hard, but felt bad at the same time.  How was I supposed to know they thought I was their granddaughter?  I just thought they were super eager to hear about the gospel!  I felt pretty bad when their super happy faces turned into a look of horror like they just invited a killer into their home.  Guess I just have a common face here among the old people.

   The people we are teaching right now all have pretty rough backgrounds. Yesterday the bishop called us into his office to talk about a family we were bringing to church. He said he looked them up on line (he does this to every investigator we bring to church because Bay City is known to have lots of ex criminals) and both of the older sisters had been imprisoned.  One of them for kidnapping an 18 year old girl and the other for stabbing someone!  To say I was shocked is an understatement. Everyone we teach here has some crazy background story, makes me a little nervous, but the gospel is for everyone.

 On Sunday we had a baptism!  The elders baptized two little girls and it was awesome.  That was the first baptism I have been to in a really long time, I forgot about how awesome they are!  We have two investigators on date to be baptized, but both have really bad addictions they need to get over, so pray for them! Transfer calls came on Friday and Sister B and I are staying together and staying in Bay City!  A couple of the elders in our district are moving out though and we have a new DL named Elder Ingle.  Apparently he is shorter than me.  Pray that  I can take him seriously haha!

I'm sorry this email didn't have much, I'll do better next week!  But thanks again for all the emails, I'm still praying for all of you and love you SO. MUCH!

Love  Sister V

German town Frankmuth

Yes, a purple house

Tired after tracking

August 3rd, 2015

Before I start anything I gotta answer some questions for you dad, sorry I always forget and then as I'm headed out of the library I'm like "SHOOT! I forgot to answer my dads questions AGAIN!" My comp always just rolls her eyes and laughs. So here we go, We have a car, but I like to walk so I make sister B park the car in the middle of town so that we can walk to all our meetings and appointments. I'm liking the sound of a classy coat, but trench coat seems a little extreme. is there any type of coat you can buy that is for warmth and water proof for the fall? I only have a heavy duty snow coat here haha! Not smart on my part. It's a Duracell converter for a 512MB memory card? Does that help? Made in China? :) haha jk

This past week was so weird and all messed up. We usually have P Day Monday but sister B wanted to go to the temple because she hasn't been in a year! (holy cow) so we scheduled to go into Detroit with our bishop and his wife on Friday.  But since we were going for our own personal pleasure we had to make Friday our official p day. So Monday we got to email and do laundry, but then get back to work. Thursday we had a half-mission p day which was So. Much. Fun!!  There was food and water games and basketball, football, slack-line, volleyball, you name it, it was there. I went nuts! The entire day was designated towards the missionaries actually having FUN! I got in trouble with my president though because I was becoming too competitive and beating all the elders.. oops? I still don't think I should have been chastised, but of course I respected his wishes and toned it down a bit. There was a high wooden wall in the park like the army bases have for people to climb over and all the elders were telling me and making bets that I wouldn't be able to climb over it, so of course I had to prove them all wrong. It took me a couple of tries but I eventually hoisted myself up on top of that wall and let me tell you it was soooo painful! My arms were covered in splinters and bruises from rubbing all over the wood! Totally worth it though. Now that im thinking about it, maybe that's why president chastised me? They also split us all up into our districts and had a tug of war. The next day my back and abs were SOOO SORE from the stupid tug of war.. I was so embarrassed haha anyways Thursday was fun!!

    Friday we got up early and drove into the scary city of Detroit. As soon as we got into the city we were surrounded by huge buildings and tons of scary people walking the streets. We got stopped at a stop light and then all of a sudden this huge black guy started banging on our windows asking for us to give him some money, and he had a gun! The next thing we knew our entire car was being ambushed by the homeless people asking for money and trying to open the car doors! Bishop was frantically calling the police and sister B was screaming!  Just kidding, none of that really happened :) Detroit is really pretty. The temple is TINY!  But it was awesome to go through!
 It's been incredibly hot but incredibly stormy.  At the beginning of the week I felt so terrible on the doorstep. People would answer the door and Sister B and I would be standing their melting!  It's like "Hi, we have a message about Jesus Christ. Can we come in and sweat all over your nice couches?" Ha!  Pretty sure we grossed some people out. Towards the end of the week it started to turn from blazing hot to blazing hot and raining. We've had some pretty huge thunderstorms here and last night a tornado hit a town a couple miles away and did some pretty good damage.  When I think of tornados I think of Kansas, NOT MICHIGAN. I didn't sign up for this:) haha

The mission work has been good this week! we picked up 3 new investigators through door knocking this week.  My knuckles are actually bruised today from knocking so many doors yesterday. When I first got here President Jacobsen said this, "Most missions in the US are what people call a baptizing mission, here in Michigan is one of the few finding missions. You will not baptize many, but you will find lots to teach."  I'm finally understanding what he meant. Mormons are so scarce here you really have to set out and find people.  All 8 of our investigators have been found through door knocking. So I'm now realizing the importance of it all. I may not baptize anyone here in Michigan, but I know that by knocking on all these doors I am planting little seeds for the next missionaries to come by and nourish.

ANYWAYS, we have had some pretty awesome experiences with teaching people. Most of our investigators are black right now which I love. They are the most down to earth/ humble people and they all just love Jesus. Most of them don't have teeth which makes me laugh, because they smile all the time and their smile kinda freaks me out! The other day while teaching an investigator named Sherry started laughing so hard her denchers (dentchers? Dencheuers? help me out dad?) ((OK, dentures, d-e-n-t-u-r-e-s--I'm so proud....))  fell on my lap. It was pretty gross, but super funny.

I love you all and love hearing about your lives! Thanks for all the emails and prayers and letters!

Love from Bay City!

Sister Viehweg

Big Church

Detroit Temple

Big Haul

Seguin Beach

Sequin Beach

Studying

July 27th, 2015

Okay Okay so I guess I haven't been the best at giving real missionary experiences? I will try and do better.

This week was really hard.  We had a lot of investigators drop us which is a really depressing thing. You think all is going well and then you get a call from one of them telling you that they no longer want to meet with you. That happened 3 times so that was a big bummer and each phone call my heart dropped lower and lower. We also had an investigator, Bill, call and tell us that he had to go do some work up north for a month. So that was 4 we lost and then yesterday we got a call from one of our investigator's brothers telling us that his brother, Michael, had been put in jail for dealing drugs. So that's a total of 5 investigators lost. Sister Brockbank and I did our best to keep our chins up throughout the week. Speaking of Sister Brockbank I don't think I have told you much about her. She's been out 13 months so she is pretty experienced. However, this is her first time training so that gets tough sometimes because I'll ask her some questions and she won't know how to answer them. She's a lot like my college roommate Shaylie. Doesn't like to workout, not very outdoorsy, and not very social. But she's great haha. My bishop pulled me aside on Sunday and told me that Bay City needed a missionary like me to liven up the place, so that made me feel good.

You know you're truly turning into a missionary when you wake up in the morning singing Sunday songs. I picture it kind of like on the Grinch when he wakes up singing a chirstmas song and freaks out. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME???  Just kidding, its not that bad, but it is a little weird trying to remember other songs from the radio and not being able to. This past week we saw fireflies!  Yes, they are real! For some reason I didn't really think those bugs existed, but they do and they are beautiful! I also was able to see the beautiful Saginaw Bay this week, which honestly isn't very beautiful. Bay City people rave about how amazing it is and when we went to it, it was covered in dead fish!  Hahaha, and the water was disgusting!  I'll send some pictures of it. 

I'm getting more and more acquainted with the ward which makes things fun.  We went over to this member's house and their little 4 year old kept asking me to pick him up (we can't pick up kids) and I looked at him finally and said, "why do you want to be picked up so badly?" and his response was, "because I want to kiss you."  Hahaha I got a kick out of that!  The Mormons really have to stick together around here because every other door hates Jesus Christ, I feel awful saying those 3 words in the same sentence but I have had people say that to me.  Blows my mind, how can anyone feel that way about their Savior?  Catholics overpopulate this city and they all shake their beads at us and don't want to listen.  We had a couple drunk people pull the "nobody's home" card which I'll never understand.

Time is running out, it always goes way too fast. But thank you all for the emails and letters. I logged on to 40 emails today so I was super stressed out trying to read through them all, but don't worry that's a good thing :) Dad I got your package, I thought I mentioned that to you? Im feeling like one of my emails didn't go through a couple of weeks ago?

Deb happy belated birthday! Im sorry I forgot, I forget everything while Im out here. whose birthday is next?  Becca's?  I also forgot Lisa's and I think I wished her a belated birthday too?? Just because I forget doesn't mean I don't care about all of you!

Have a wonderful week and know that I pray for you all!

love

 Sister Viewheg

Shells from Saginaw Bay Beach

Typical Bay City Scene

Pioneer Day- They made her wear that outfit