First week in Canada.

HELLO from Canada!

Wow! So much has happened since I last e-mailed. I am now in my first area in the great land of Ontario. I will write about it in a minute. I ended my MTC stay on Wednesday and it was great. It was sad to leave, but I was happy to go on another journey. I auditioned to sing and was able to sing "O My Soul Hungered" at the departure devotional on Sunday night. It was a really special experience and I will never forget it. The last week and a half at the MTC, I had many wonderful experiences with music. My companions and I practiced a few songs and would walk all over the MTC singing to missionaries. Our golden song was "Amazing Grace." It was amazing how well we blended. We made many friends as we sang for them and felt the spirit very strongly. I love good, wholesome music!

Tuesday night, my companions and I were called to the travel office. We were told the news that apparently we were supposed to fly to Canada on Monday!!! The travel plans got mixed up and instead, our flights were for Wednesday. My mission president waited at the airport for about three hours and then called to find out that we weren't coming until Wednesday! All of our trainers were waiting for us at the mission home and everything! It was crazy. They tried to re-arrange the flights, but it would have cost far too much money. Because the President was sending 27 missionaries home Wednesday night, he could not pick us up. We got to have a very unique experience and stay in a hotel! There were 14 of us (3 Sisters and 11 Elders). We stayed the night in a hotel and then my mission president picked us up in the morning.

We traveled to the mission president's house from the hotel around 9:00 am. The home is absolutely BEAUTIFUL! It is so nice and it was so great to be there. I get a new mission president next week, so it was nice to meet the current one and learn a little bit about him. After each new missionary was interviewed with the mission president, he assigned us companions. My companion is Sister Lavatai. She is from Edmonton, Canada. She has been so incredible so far. We are serving in an area called North Bay right now. It spans about an hour and a half across. It is four hours north of Brampton, so we had a long drive ahead of us. It was so incredibly gorgeous on the drive! It is so green here. It was so nice to have a long conversation with Sis. Lavatai. We learned a lot about each other. She is a singer and writes her own music. She is very talented. I know that my mission president was inspired to put us together. I feel that we have a great work to do and hopefully we can do much of it with music. I am so excited to learn from Sister Lavatai. I am her first trainee, so this is new for both of us.

We are treating part of today like a preparation day because we won't get one until Monday. P-days are changed to Mondays now, so that's when I will be e-mailing. We knocked some doors today and have talked to people on the street a little bit. Knocking doors is hard. Nobody listened. We told them we are missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and once we said we have a message about Jesus Christ, they held their hands out and closed the door. I don't want to be discouraged, but I can see how doing this everyday could be hard. Those are just the people that aren't ready. The Lord has promised us that "the field is white already to harvest!" We are NOT here to plant seeds for future missionaries. We are here to baptize and bring the people who are ready to Christ. That is who we search out. No wonder we say so many prayers in a day haha. We have a dinner appointment tonight with a member family and then we have a less-active member lesson. I'm excited to get to work since we have spent today as a mini-preparation day.

Keep smiling, praying, reading, serving, and loving! That is my advice for now :) I will write again on Monday and hopefully have some fun stories! Have a wonderful weekend :)

Love,

Sister Barton