The Week Before Christmas...

December 15, 2014

Hi Everyone,

I can't believe that it's already so close to Christmas! It's coming up so quickly and I didn't even realize it, haha. I guess it's because we're so busy we don't even think about it. We'd better start thinking though, because we have a big Christmas party for the English class we teach and Elder Smith and I are in charge of making hot cocoa and organizing a snowball fight. No, there isn't any snow here, but we're getting a bunch of balls and folding up some of our socks to use. We're trying to stay pretty cheap lol. That's coming up this Wednesday and should be really fun. I love having the English class because we get so many people to teach from it. Last week I was talking with a guy named D... and he said that he wanted to meet with us this Thursday so I'm excited for that.

We had an amazing miracle yesterday. The trio of Elders in our district (Elders Brady, Galura, and Page) had met this cool member family the R... who had said they had some friends, a young couple from the Philippines named B... and D... living with them who where interested and were asking lots of questions about what happened after we die. D... father had recently died, and B... brother had too. They were afraid that their family was going to Hell because they had made some mistakes. We got to talk with them about what happens when we die, and the opportunity we still have to change if we had never heard of the gospel of Jesus Christ while on earth. We shared about baptisms for the dead. We told them that their loved ones would have the chance to accept the gospel in the afterlife and be baptized. D... just started to cry for joy right then, and they agreed to be baptized! The Spirit was so strong in the lesson, and with 5 missionaries teaching, we were all in sync and taught the best lesson I'd ever been in. Actually it was all because we were following the promptings of the Spirit. I'm really excited for them! Oh, and as a plus, they all speak English, so I was actually able to share in the majority of the lesson for once haha. It's such a relief.

Before we taught them, they made us a huge dinner! It was a ton of really good Filipino food. Their rule was that we weren't allowed to leave until all the food was gone...turned out to be pretty hard. We struggled for the next 2 hours to finish it all. The problem was that the lady would steal my plate and instantly add another mountain of rice on it! And they had this thing called bitter melon that is really...bitter. It was the main dish. It seemed that Elder Page and I were the only ones who could eat very much, so we did most of the heavy lifting during that meal.

On the way from the R... house, Elder Page's bike pedal randomly fell off and we still had about 20 minutes left to bike to our next appointment. So we all helped push and pull him the rest of the way there, which was not fun because there were a lot of hills, mostly going up. It was a rather inspirational story because we fought against the odds, and helped out our fellow comrade and still made it to our appointment on time!

Well, we got locked out of the apartment again, but this time I made Elder Smith go up through the window because I was tired of doing it. He was lucky though, because there was a ladder sitting right next to us this time, so he just climbed up that. Hopefully that'll be the last time.

Things are looking very promising for us. We also had another investigator named L... who agreed to be baptized this March! She was originally planning on waiting for two years before she would make that step, but she decided to move it up. She's golden. The trio of Elders were originally teaching her, but since they are moving, we will be teaching her now, or actually have her teach us. She has read and knows all the lessons. She reads the scriptures at least 30 minutes before she studies for school, and has a solid testimony already. She's only officially been taught twice though!

Well that's about it for this week. The singing sounded really good Alexa! I enjoyed listening to it. Keep up the good work. And Ian I'm glad that you guys won your last soccer game of the season. That's always good to end on a high note. I think that calling you at 10 your time would be good. I'll try to get in touch with Eric and plan a time to call him. I'm really excited! Well, I just had another interesting thing to add. Every morning I actually shower in the kitchen because they randomly have a shower sitting there, so sometimes I'll heat up my food while I'm taking a shower haha. It's rather convenient. Well I love you all! Have a great week!!

Love

Andrew