Merry Merry Christmas!

Merry Merry Christmas! It's the most wonderful time of the year or something like that.

It sounds like everyone in Oregon's had a great pre-Christmas week. That's a whole heck of a lot of concerts to go to, though. I'm jealous of course. Not many concert opportunities on the mission.

I'm happy it never gets down to -20 here in Colorado.

I think I can probably best tell you how the week went by telling you that I learned this week that Ibuprofen and Tylenol are wonderful, and that Robitussin tastes really nasty. Kinda got sick this week for a while, it kinda really sucked. Had to stay in on Thursday and Friday with what we're pretty sure is the flu. But we're getting better, so we're really hoping to be better by Christmas. But even though there were some not super happy things like being sick, the week was still good. 

We were able to find a new family of investigators, just by tracting (People are just letting us in left and right nowadays, I think it's the Christmas spirit or something like that.), and we were able to visit a couple of less-actives who really needed it.

We also had a pretty fun little event on Thursday that we were well enough to go to--we did a Christmas devotional, which was basically a mini zone conference. Plus all of the zones put on Christmas skits (ours was a like mission 12 days of Christmas) and we got free food. What could be better? 

PLUS they had a missionary choir that I sang in and that was really fun. Spanish wards honestly don't sing too well, so it was really cool to sing with a lot of people who can actually sing pretty well. So that was pretty fun I'd say.

I'm really looking forward to Christmas, let me tell you. We've got some pretty cool plans--we're going to have dinner and lunch with all of the missionaries in the ward, and visit a couple of members, and of course... SKYPE HOME YAY. 

Christmas is just really great, everyone. It's a really awesome time to just remember all the things Christ did for us. I hope you all know that I know he really is our Savior. That's why I'm here in Denver, and not at home for Christmas.

I love you all a ton.

 

Peter

"I'm happier"

Dear everyone,

First of all, pretty funny that you got to help out with the zone conference lunch. It's weird how things are so similar everywhere in the church. I kind of thought that was just a Colorado thing to have zone conference lunch provided by the stake, but yeah that's totally a thing we do here too. We also always sing to the sisters that made and served the lunch. Our song is just straight up the "Army of Helaman" without any changed lyrics except that at the end after the "to bring the world his truth" we say "and thank you for the food." So anyway we're basically pretty cool I think is how that works.

This week was pretty great for us. The biggest, most awesome thing, was that our investigator was baptized and confirmed! It was really, really awesome. There was kind of a little bit of stress leading up to it, not being able to find the baptismal clothing, and some other craziness, but as soon as the baptismal service started, it was just great. The first counselor in the bishopric did the actual baptism, and our bishop confirmed her yesterday, so that was pretty cool. I got to give a talk about the gift of the Holy Ghost at the actual baptism--I think that was the first time I've actually given a written talk in Spanish here. I mean, I've borne my testimony plenty of times, and done some other like impromptu stuff, but in terms of a talk talk, that was the first time. The whole time the Spirit was just super strong. It was really just amazing to see how much she's changed, how much she wants to do the right thing. As we've been teaching her, she's been talking about how much different she feels than before. And then after she was baptized, we were just telling her how happy we were for her, and she just told us "I'm happier." And you know that just felt so awesome. It really is an amazing experience to see someone change so much. We talked to her yesterday after she received the Holy Ghost, and she just told us that she felt so good. Leading up to her baptism she was feeling kind of nervous, but she said that she just felt completely calm and great. So basically I just can't come up with enough ways of saying that it is just completely great to be a missionary.

Another pretty cool experience came from a girl we've been helping to reactivate. Basically she's gone from completely not active when we got here to completely active now. I've mentioned her before, because she's really cool basically. Something really awesome is that most of her family is either less-active or nonmembers, it's just her and her mom that are going to church right now. Her Mom told us that her Dad is like really not friendly towards the church, and actually tried to get her to stop going to church. But apparently her reaction to that was a "He[ck] no!" So basically when I heard that I laughed a lot and fist-bumped her :).

 

And then after the baptismal service we had the ward Christmas party which was pretty good too. Had some weird dessert thing where you basically just make a really crispy (not burnt, not sure exactly how that works) tortilla, and then completely cover it in cinnamon sugar. That was really good. And of course, lately we've been singing a lot of Christmas carols at basically any meeting we go to ever. So that's a lot of fun.

Things are going great. We're finally being able to get into the Christmas spirit now that it's finally started to snow and it's gotten below 40 degrees outside. I hope everything's going well with you all. I don't have details about Christmas calls/skyping yet, but I'll obviously make sure to make that happen next Monday.

 

Love you all!

Peter

 

P.s. I don't have the classic "in baptismal clothing" picture because things were a little crazy, but here's a picture we took during the ward Christmas party.

Everything is awesome!

Dear Mom! And everyone else!

It's Christmas time, and it's awesome! Although the thing is basically we haven't been having any Christmassy weather for a while now, and we won't be having any this week apparently, so that's kind of weird. It's supposed to be in the 60s this week. But it's okay, we've been getting into the Christmas spirit anyways, listening to Christmas music, and putting up Christmas decorations (Thanks so much for contributing to that! The "I don't even know what it is sticky nativity thing" was really cool, and we were both duly impressed with the sabuda pop-up.)

It sounds like you've been having a pretty dang busy week. I will always be jealous of people who get to go to the symphony while I can't. Sounds like a pretty neat week. I was surprised that you still don't have a tree, but then I thought about it and it makes sense, it's just that like every single house I've gone to lately has their tree all set up and decorated and everything. I think Hispanics are way more into Christmas than Thanksgiving.

This week was a little bit slower for us--we were doing a lot of tracting, but that's okay. You probably remember that closer to the beginning of my mission we weren't doing too much of that, but lately we have definitely been doing more. But there were some great things about the week too! Some highlights:

This Sunday I got to give a baby blessing! That was suuuuuper weird. There's a family who's been returning to activity for the last few months, and the dad has the Aaronic priesthood, but not the Melchizidek, but they wanted their baby blessed, so they asked me to do it. It was really weird, but really great.

Our investigator is still doing really awesome. She's so cool. We had her baptismal interview on Tuesday, and she passed, and it's just been really great. She is doing awesome, and she is so ready. The experience of teaching her has just been awesome. Her baptism is going to be the same night as our ward Christmas party, like immediately before it, so we're hoping a lot of people come for the baptism and stay for the party. The bishop's announced it the last two Sundays, so that's been really cool. 

I'm sorry, that doesn't seem like a lot, but that's basically the cool things that happened this week. We also were able to get in contact with some cool less-actives that I'd never been able to talk to, so that was pretty neat.

There are definitely some people who I hope to be able to keep in touch with as the years go by. I think one of the best parts of serving a mission is the huge variety of people you get to meet, and I definitely want to be able to keep up those relationships. There's definitely a lot of people I've gotten to know and love here that I probably would never even have talked to in "normal life".

Basically things are going well, my companion's awesome, being a missionary is awesome, and yeah basically that's it!

Again, thanks so much for the package, that was fun. I love you all a lot!

 

Love,

Peter

He is the Gift

Hi!

First of all, thanks so much for all the pictures! That was pretty great and awesome and made me a little bit jealous, but that's okay. And then I'm super jealous of the new game store thing. Last P-day we stopped by this game store in our area that was about like a quarter the size of Rainy Day Games, so anyways I'm jealous I think that's clear.

I'm gonna go ahead and answer your questions first!

1. I don't really have any requests for Christmas... maybe just that it not be something bulky. I'm kind of running very thin on luggage space, so that's fun. Probably the most like practical thing would be maybe like a new pair of pants?

2. I don't really know (how our ward with celebrate Christmas). I do know that members of our ward like Christmas a lot, e.g. one of our investigators has had a Christmas tree up for like the past 3 weeks, so that should be fun! We'll be having a Christmas activity a couple weeks from now, and that'll be fun.

3. Yes I have seen the new video about Christmas He is the Gift. In fact, the church has made these special pass-along cards for us all about the video, so we've basically been giving those out at every door we knock, so yeah, we've seen it. It's pretty cool, huh? I especially like how it invites us at the end to like do something about it. Not just be like "yeah Christmas!" but actually to act. And the music's pretty cool too.

4. What do district leaders do? Not a ton. (That's a palindrome). So far, we set up district meetings, answer a ton of questions from the missionaries in the district, and try to help encourage the missionaries to do good work! So pretty fun!

So this week was pretty great. Had a good Thanksgiving--there's this Anglo family in the ward, and they had us over for dinner along with a lot of their family, so we had a pretty standard Thanksgiving dinner. We even had Funeral Potatoes! So that was fun. The rest of Thanksgiving, when we weren't eating, we went and visited a lot of members and less-active members, so that was pretty cool. It still felt like Thanksgiving, but we were still working hard. So the best of both worlds, I guess!

Our investigator is getting closer and closer to being baptized! We had to push it back one week, so now it's gonna be the 13th, but it's gonna be awesome. Bishop announced it in church on Sunday, and we've been teaching her a ton this week, and it's been great. We taught her the law of tithing, and fasting, and she has no problems with any of it; she's just really prepared. It's really cool to just see how much she's changing and how much she wants to take those important steps in her life.

Things are going pretty good here. The transfer made things a little crazy, but things are getting moving - there were some transfers and some new missionaries so just kind of weird.

I hope you have a great week! I love you all!

Love,

Peter