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In The Heights

May 17, 2021

Week 1 of the transfer was intense! As per usual, we were super busy this week with getting brand new missionaries to their trainers, departing missionaries to the airport, planning zone conferences, President's interview schedule, accountability calls, planning 11 exchanges, rosters, transfers, moving to Manhattan, searching for/buying a new apartment for ourselves, giving not 1, but 2 trainings in a mission leadership meeting, planning our zone conference training for this upcoming week, and trying our best to do at least a little proselyting in our area. We pretty much didn't sleep this week. We ended up doing a companionship study at 12:30 AM because that was when we finally had time for it. We are working on getting to bed earlier... it's not good... But it was a blast! We are productive literally every minute of the day, which feels great.


We were homeless for about 2 days. We moved out of our apartment in New Rochelle, but literally didn't have time to move into our temporary apartment in Inwood because we had to be close to the airport for arriving/departing missionaries. We ended up staying at a SUPER fancy hotel with the departing missionaries for a few days in Queens. Holy cow. I'll attach pictures into the email. It was... luxurious. There was a rooftop pool, ice cream bars, chandeliers, everything. We had SO much fun!

The Inwood 1st ward is seriously incredible. It's an English ward in Manhattan, so ALL the members are either on Broadway or studying at Juilliard or something. They are all so charismatic, energetic, talented, attractive, and happy! The opening/closing hymns in sacrament meeting felt more like PERFORMANCES. They all sing their hearts out together and it really does feel like a broadway play at church with the hymns and special musical numbers every week. We are currently teaching one of the main actors from a movie/play called In The Heights. His name is Anthony Ramos, and we talk to him and his dad pretty regularly, and they are good friends with Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton and some other famous broadway stuff. How cool is that??? I'm living in a dream. Life is so surreal right now.

We are teaching an awesome lady named Raquel who is getting baptized on May 27th! She is AWESOME! She's a professional cat-sitter and owns 6 cats herself. She is the sweetest lady ever and is so ready for baptism. She was standing at the front door at church, individually inviting everyone to her baptism because she is so excited. An opera singer from the ward volunteered to do a musical number at the service, it's going to be awesome! We had some amazing spiritual experiences with Raquel this week.

Quick miracle! We were asked to give 2 trainings at MLM on Friday, and we didn't have much time to practice our presentations. 5 minutes before the meeting started, we did a brief run through to practice what we would say. It was awful. Neither of us had the words we needed to say, and it was just bad. We didn't have time to talk about it or make adjustments, so we said a prayer, begun the meeting, and gave our trainings to about 150 missionaries. Guys. This was a SPIRITUAL experience! Even though our practice was horrible, our mouths were FILLED. We both said exactly what we needed to say and the spirit was so present. It was a huge answer to our prayers because we were very nervous about it, but God totally just took care of it all for us and told us what to say. We've been giving 100% into the work and we still fall short sometimes, but Christ makes the difference. THATS LITERALLY WHAT GRACE IS. We felt it. 

In other news, back at home, I have some friends, Jeri and Alex, that I met while working at Wendy's! They came into Wendy's every week to talk to me and our families quickly became friends. Long story short, Alex now has a baptismal date set for June 12th! Everyone please pray for them, they are so amazing!

Love you all!!!!!

- Elder Webster

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