Meeting Many Mice in New York

Editor’s note: Many are familiar with my daughter, Sara Arkell, also known as The Piano Gal. Sara has been called to serve in the New York Syracuse Mission. This is a series on her weekly letters that we will be posting on the site for those who wish to follow along with her mission. You can read her previous emails here.

Thursday was probably the craziest day of my mission so far. Beware, this is a long story… Wow I can’t believe everything that happened, haha. Okay, so we woke up bright and early to drive to Zone Conference in Albany which is 2 hours away from Rome.

I wore my brand new dress I got that I absolutely love!!  Sister Aston and I did a musical number that sounded so beautiful. She has never done anything like that before so she was terrified but she nailed it. Her voice is like an angel!! During the musical number, my right leg was shaking uncontrollably. Like I couldn’t stop it. Super embarrassing.  Zone Conference was great and I learned a lot! Especially about having faith in our friends and being really encouraging. We have a few friends that aren’t really progressing but we still need to show them Christlike love and see their potential. The trainings really hit home for me.

Then we stuck around after while the ASL missionaries filmed something for the ASL mission Facebook page. I will be editing the video so I was there so I could see their vision for it. But the entire time, I had the worst headache ever. For some reason, anytime there’s a big missionary occasion, I always get a headache and feel super sick. So the 2 hour drive home was gonna be kind of rough.

Well, it ended up being 3 HOURS because when we were about 30 minutes from home, the thruway came to a complete stop. For 45 minutes… a truck was on fire a little bit up on the road so we all had to wait for that to get cleared up. There were probably some people that passed away in that accident, it was pretty bad. Praying for their families  anyways, my headache was starting to turn into a migraine by the time we got home so I laid down for 15 minutes so the pain would subside. 

When I came out after my quick power nap, Sister Aston said “Umm, there is mouse poop everywhere…” we proceeded to look around and it was indeed everywhere, in the drawers, under the sink, on the table. It was pretty gross.. We had to head out to some of our lessons so we left the house and before we came home, we grabbed some mouse traps at Walmart. Well, when we came home, I had the thought to look behind the microwave. And sure enough, there was a MOUSE back there. Oh my goodness I was absolutely terrified. I started screaming and Sister Aston came into the kitchen and started freaking out with me of course.

Then came a course of many events, walking around with snow boots, climbing on top of the fridge, tears being shed, sleeping with the lights on, and more. Over the course of 3 days, we caught 7 MICE. We think we’ve gotten them all. Please pray that that is true… quite the adventure.

Missions really teach you how to be an adult because back home, I would’ve made my parents deal with that. I guess you really do learn things as a missionary  On the bright side, one of our friends is wanting to get baptized on the 16th of this month now!!! Yay! It’s going to be a stretch to teach her everything again but we have faith that we’ll be able to do it. Please pray with us for a miracle! She got a priesthood blessing on Friday and the Spirit was so strong in her home. I love her so much!! 

Another one of our friends came to church on Sunday! We had been out of contact with him for a while (found out it is because his phone broke) and we get a message from him 30 minutes before church asking if he can come. God came through for us there because if he didn’t come, we would have had no friends at church. God is GOOD!!!  I hope you all have a great week!! Love you all! Please write me!