Sister Hayley Meise: I really love this area, these people, and Oregon

Hi everyone!

It was another great week! It's getting SO HOT here in Oregon. It really finally feels like summer which is great. And all the fruit is growing! We went to pick cherries a couple weeks ago. I don't think I ever had fresh cherries until I moved to Oregon and I LOVE them. Literally, we can just walk down the street and pick cherries as we walk. I will never get over how amazing that is.

I don't think I've told you before about our investigator, Poncho. There's this recent convert named Gustavo, he's 25 and he's leaving for a mission in September for Tijuana. He's AWESOME! We've been teaching his childhood best friend, Poncho, for a little while now; in fact, the whole time I've been here. He's absolutely amazing to teach because everything we teach is like the most amazing thing he has ever heard. He told us last week when we were teaching him that his goal is to be baptized because he really wants to have that fresh start that baptism offers us. It's so awesome. We're shooting for the end of July but we'll see how it goes! He takes a little while to process things so we're going to have to go super slow with him. BUT he has the desire which is most important.

We had this awesome ward activity this week. It was a Father's Day BBQ sponsored by the Primary. We played games, ate, and it was super fun. The best part was that we had a lot of our investigators that we invited, come! I think five or six of them were there? It was awesome! I swear sometimes having investigators come to activities is like being a parent chaperoning a school activity for your kids and trying to watch them make friends. It's this weird in between thing where we want them to make their own friends and we want to help them but we don't want to hover. So we introduce them to someone and then step out and creepily (haha) watch from a distance to see how it goes. It's great. McMinnville is really good in that the branch is big enough but the branch is not too big so almost every person we meet already knows someone in the branch which makes things sooooo much easier. It's awesome! I really love this area, these people, and Oregon. Here are some pictures from the week:

Father's Day BBQ

We went over to a member's house for dinner. We were super full and could NOT finish all the food they gave us so we took it home. They were teasing us hard core about not finishing and playing like they were so offended so we took a picture to prove to them we did eat it for lunch the next day.