HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!

Well once again it has been an interesting week filled with many great times. This week we put someone else on date to be baptized! :) I'm pretty sure I said something about her in the past letters. She is the old one who is insane and only said a few things to us. She even said she was sweaty. Ya, that lady. The bishop thinks she is sane enough to get baptized though and wants us to work with her so we went this week and ended up asking her if she wanted to be baptized! She said yes so she is on date for the 28th of January. Her daughter was there and so she seems to be a little more sane when she is there. But hopefully that all works out! I thought for sure that woman would just have to have baptisms for the dead done for her because she was literally insane the first time I met her. Hopefully she doesn't drown when they baptize her! It will be interesting to see how things pan out! We are gonna teach her again this week so we will see what she thinks this week!

So my companion is a fabulous singer and she's always singing and making up songs. So one of our zone leaders "died" this week. Don't freak out, that just means that he went home :) So we wrote him a little song about going home and called him and sang it to him. It was pretty funny. It was to a Backstreet Boys song so maybe we will have to sing it for you on our Christmas Skype call :) It's pretty fabulous and I think he enjoyed it ;) 

We visited another crazy lady this week too. She and her husband are former investigators. One of the young women in our wards visits her quite a bit because she has Alzheimers and enjoys visits. So we went with the young women. So first of all the Jerry Springer show was on TV while we were there. It was SOOO UNCOMFORTABLE. We were trying to talk loud and stuff and just talk to our investigator. Well she was talking about how she is a happy woman and stuff and there was a girl dancing on the TV all crazy. So she pointed out the woman dancing and we asked her if that was what she felt like doing since she was SO happy. (Ps, she is a black woman so picture this coming from an old black woman) She said, "OH NOOOOO. I do NOT like that. I would beat her butt, and throw it in the garbage can!" We of course just started laughing. It was quite funny to hear especially the way she said it :) So just a little funny story for ya. 

So there was a HUGE MLC meeting this week that my companion and I were invited to. MLC is mission leadership council. Well people from Salt Lake came down to train us so the mission can be better now that our mission president  is all settled and is starting to get in his groove. Well they invited "younger" missionaries who aren't in the leadership so that we could catch this vision and training too so if we are ever leaders in the future, we can maintain the new standards and such. So we were super lucky to attend. It was an AWESOME meeting and I learned a lot. There are going to be some changes coming into our mission because of the training. Awesome stuff to be a part of though because they only have one of those meetings once in every mission presidents time being there. 

This week we had some really good lessons with some other potentials as well! One guy is supposed to get baptized this Saturday. He has a little bit of a mental condition so he acts younger than he really is but he is so sweet. He can feel the spirit and even though he isn't sure about everything and doesn't quite understand everything we teach him particularly, he really wants to be baptized. So hopefully that all works out! We are teaching him as much as possible this week so he will be prepared! 

We also started to teach another girl. She is dating a member in our ward. So we have had two lessons with her and she has tons of questions and you can see her desire to really find the truth. But she is pretty logical and analytical so it's a bit harder for her to accept the truth and know it is truth. But she has a true desire so I know she will come to know the truth of what we tell her! She told us she really likes us and that we have been able to answer her questions better than past missionaries so the Lord is really blessing us and helping us through those lessons! Lastly, we street contacted a lady a week or two ago. She texts us every once in a while but has never really answered when we ask to meet with her. Well she finally decided she wanted to meet with us! We met her at a Walgreens and taught her. She was crying and she really felt the spirit. It was awesome. She even said she would come to the church the next day.Soooo Sunday came around and we had 5 investigators there! It was fantastic!

So an unfortunate story. We have handed out hundreds of mormon.org cards with our number on it just in the past few weeks. Well our friend got a phone so we gave him our number (standing right next to him) so he could text us and we would have his number too. Well we never got the text so we had him call us. Some guy answered the phone!!! SOOO we have handed out hundreds of cards to people who might be interested and we gave them THE WRONG NUMBER!!! It was not our fault though because my companion's trainer told her/used that number too. So somewhere, someone got the number wrong! What a HUGE bummer. But it's all good! At least we know now. 

The Christmas season is great for investigators. We bought 3 of our investigators church clothes with the help of  a young couple in our ward (They are soooo awesome! They do so much to help us). They went and bought it for us and we paid them. What a huge blessing though, the store was having a blowout sell so we were able to buy three dress outfits for a lot cheaper than normal! We took them their gifts last night and they were super, super grateful. They won't feel so "out of place" now. They love coming to church because of how accepting it is, but now they can feel more involved just by how they are dressed :) It is awesome! 

I love the Christmas season, although it doesn't feel to Christmasy here. But it's a great time to focus on the Savior and all he has done for us. What a blessing we have to have the truth/gospel in our lives. It's hard to see people reject that truth when we present it to them, but everyone has their agency. It's even more amazing to see the change come over people who do accept the gospel and learn of the truth for themselves. How blessed we truly are. Thanks so much for all the support and love. It's much appreciated!