I had a boy in my bed...

His name is Clovis, he is a slightly overweight cat who loves to be around us. On our first night, I got in bed and he hopped right up and just decided to cuddle up under the covers. Now, he is my boyfriend. He likes to sit on our scriptures when we are studying and knock pens off the table.

 We are in the New Bern area - which is basically on the coast, but not quite, though the Neuse river runs right through our area. We are opening this area for sisters and wow do they love us. Apparently President just emailed two areas and said whoever can find housing first gets the sisters. New Bern acted fastest. We are staying with a member and she is so amazing. Her husband died like 8 years ago and she lives alone and loves the missionaries. She works all day long, so we don't see her much, but she knows everything about all the ward members, so she is a great resource. She takes great care of us :) We have a bedroom and bathroom (basically the whole second floor) to ourselves and then we share the rest of the house. Our room is really cute and we live on a golf course.

 The sister missionaries are celebrities out here. I keep thinking about Sister Waldman and hoping that she is getting the same treatment. They fight over us for meals and the young women have been wanting to talk to us. The ward is amazing. The leaders are really ramping up the Missionary effort and have been really helpful - especially since this is a new area for Sisters so we have to start from scratch. The Elders gave us a few referrals, but other than that, it's just us. We spend a lot of our time marking up maps and contacting, though we have already had quite a few lessons. When we called in our numbers last night, the District Leader was a little impressed (cuz we are amazing).

 My companion is Sister G. from Delano, CA and I LOVE HER!!! She is the perfect trainer for me and we have been getting along really well. This is her last 12 weeks though, so I will have to kill her off :(

 The weather has been lovely, which is great for contacting. The people here are really polite to us - even if they don't want to hear from us, they just say so and it's no big deal. We have some return appointments for people whose doors we knocked on.

 On Saturday night we taught this woman and we brought Sister C. with us (the woman we live with). This woman's daughter is convert of almost a year and she just wanted to hear about the church. I loved to teach her. Sister G. asked "if there were prophets before, did you ever wonder if there were today?" and this woman was like "hmm...I guess I never thought of that," and she loved talking with us. Then Sister C. took us to visit someone in an assisted living home. Unfortunately it was a scene that was very familiar to me and fresh in my mind from Grandma's passing away. I could tell that our visit was very welcome. Then Sister C. took us out for dinner. When I say she takes care of us, I mean she takes care of us. We got home last night and there was a giant jar of PB on the counter for me that she had taken out of her stock-pile (no she is not an extreme couponer, but she likes a deal. "I'm wealthy, but frugal" that's what she told us).

One last thing. I have been so impressed by this one family in the ward. They are converts on their way to the temple and the mother just has the best kind of Faith. She truly knows that God loves her and answers her prayers. She has seen true miracles. And they are also great because they are new converts and want to share the Gospel with everyone, so they set up a lot of appointments for us.

 Oh, wait, one last funny thought. At our district meeting last week, our leader said something about "time to hold the counting," talking about everyone sharing their numbers for the week and I started laughing thinking about Cold Comfort Farm.

I love NC, it's not LA, but it's amazing. I love this work and while I can't wait to get back to my family, I couldn't think of anyting else I want to be doing with my time. Love my family!

Love the letters! :)
Sister Benning

PS-I can't remember my exact address right now for mother's Google Maps purposes, but I can say that the church building is on Forest Drive in New Burn and we live like a minute away on West  Fairway drive by the golf course. You should be able to get the church address on lds.org and go from there.