Sister Alley Shaner

I'm Alive!!

Hello everyone! I’m so sorry it took me so long to send out another email. Turns out adjusting to being home is a lot harder than I expected it to be! My experiences as a Service Missionary have been great though and I promise to send consistent emails once again!

First, I want to share with everyone where I’ve been serving! Getting a schedule organized for me was really iffy at first and I was driving up to St. George almost every day because there are no other service missionaries in Mesquite and so nothing was really set up down here. The time difference also sucked because if I had an assignment at 8 Utah Time then that’s actually 7 my time, which means I need to leave at 6. I’m not a morning person lol. But, we’ve slowly been figuring things out and now most of my assignments are down in Mesquite!

We’re still figuring out the kinks but let me just go over my schedule quickly! Monday I have a morning devotional in St. George with my district and then afterwards I stay at the institute to work on a really neat service project. We’re basically making homemade beds out of grocery bags and then we ship them off to refugees and countries who need it, like Ukraine! Then I come home and I help at the food bank we have here in Mesquite. Tuesday we’re still kind of figuring out, but I think I’ll be helping with the FamilySearch Center or the animal shelter which I am really excited about. Wednesdays are my temple days! I’m so excited to work in the St. George temple, it is absolutely gorgeous! I’ve missed it a lot!

Thursdays are really exciting because I’m helping my old 4th grade teacher with her class! I’ve only done it once so far, but I loved it and the kids are amazing! Almost has me really considering becoming a teacher! Finally, Fridays I’m helping at the Salvation Army in Mesquite! Saturdays I don’t really have anything scheduled and Sundays are really a family day, which is nice!

It’s been over a month now but I’m just barely starting to adjust. It’s been a little difficult keeping the habits I formed on my mission, which has been really frustrating for me but it’s to be expected. I’ll start shaping back up soon enough lol! 

I want to share with everyone a thought I’ve been having the past week. Last Saturday I had the privilege to hear from Bradley Wilcox who is in the Young Men General presidency! It was an amazing conversation and he said something that really made me think, that I’d like to share. Being on the covenant path can be really difficult, I think the most difficult part for me is feeling like I’m not making any progress because I keep messing up. I think it can sometimes take really long to take a step forward and we all focus on how fast we mess up. 

Think of it this way, each of us is walking our own path. It takes everyone a week to take one step forward, it’s a hard long journey but after 7 weeks we’re 7 steps ahead of where we were. Then all of a sudden something disrupts our journey, whether it be ourselves or an outside force and we end up falling back 6 steps in one day. How frustrating is that! We made so much progress and it took so long only for it to be ruined in a matter of seconds. I think we all can sometimes get caught up in the fact how much we backtracked and end up not realizing that we’re still one step ahead from where we started. That’s how our paths work. It sucks, it’s frustrating, and it’s not fair but it is worth it because eventually if we keep going we will all make it to where we need to be. President Wilcox said this in different terms, but his message was clear and that was that the only way we could possibly fail this journey is if we stopped trying. We let the mistakes get to us and we stopped trying to move forward. I hope everyone can think about that for a moment. 

Mistakes and bad circumstances suck but that’s no reason for anyone to get off the path that we’re able to be on through Christ. If we did stop trying we would just be playing right into the hands of the person who caused our misery! 

Anyway, I hope everyone has a fantastic Thanksgiving and recognizes the things in our lives to be grateful for! Adios!