The Week with a New Home

This week on Sister Cale in Columbus-Sister Cale left her first Ohio
home (it was pretty sad, borderline emotionally traumatizing, and
overall hard, but good), got assigned to her new area (Moundbuilders
3), was once again taught that Heavenly Father knows exactly what he's
doing when he puts you somewhere, had Starbucks for the first time in
six months (Courtesy of Skyler B (review of the s'mores frappe-meh)),
experienced quite the thunder storm with sketchy tornado skies, and it
rained...a lot...again.

Hello Dear Ones,

Greetings from Pataskala, Ohio. Everyone here says that this is God's
Country, or Zion, so I'm pretty excited to get to work and make that
the case. There's a lot of work to be done in our area and it's
equally exciting and scary to know that we have to do a lot of things
from the ground up. We've just got a lot of reestablishing of purpose
to do and a lot of people to find, which is totally workable.

My new companion is the darling Sister Bassett. Guys, you would love
her. She's a Disney and Doctor Who Nerd. The Elders in our district
called us twins the first night because we react similarly and our
laughs sound almost the same a lot of the time. We've had a lot of fun
getting to know each other and the area in the last few days. Sister
Bassett has only been in Pataskala for the last six weeks, and when
you're not the driver, it's pretty easy to still feel lost in an area.
We're going to figure it out though. I'm super grateful to have my
semi-trusty GPS Elder Garmon (Thanks Aubrey!). Our area covers all of
Pataskala, Graville, and Etna. It's kind of huge. But it's going to be
awesome to get to work and find people to teach and serve.

So, last week before I left Delaware we got to go to Ollie's one last
time with the Turner's. I love them so much. Sister Turner is
basically who I want to be when I grow up. She has an amazing
testimony and truly searches out understanding for herself on things
that are hard for her to understand. I want to have that pattern in my
own life. She's also awesome because she belongs to the school of
thought where you don't say "goodbye", you just say "see you later"
(sound familiar Mel?). We also went to say goodbye to our heathen
family. That was rough. I did okay until I got out to the car, which I
was pretty proud of. In a lot of ways I felt like I was leaving home
all over again. Seriously so weird.

Getting to Pataskala has been awesome though. I love the people here
already and our apartment is pretty great. I got my pictures hung up
and my desk is decorated, so I'm sufficiently nested so as to be
happy. I am so glad that I saw that Sister Missionary blog where she
had pictures hanging up over her desk. It has been one of the more
inspired things that I did in preparation for my mission. There's
something brilliant about having your space decorated that makes all
of this seem less transient than it actually is (which I think is
dangerous in some ways, because I could hypothetically have to pack my
whole life up in six weeks, but that doesn't seem entirely likely.

Well lovelies, I hope to have a lot more to report in this next week
as we go out in search of people to teach and serve. There's a lot of
good things just around the corner, I can feel it.

The church is true, life is good, God's in charge, and Satan hates you.

Love you,

Jessica