Christmas Zone Conference

How did the Christmas party go and did you play the guitar and sing? 

 

• Well, it turned out that the person that was going to bring a guitar forgot to bring the guitar.  So I didn't get to play.  However, it was kind of a good thing because I never actually would have had a chance to practice witha guitar untill about a half an hour before.  Not to mention the fact that I've only touched a guitar probably 5 times so far on my mission, so it's been a while since I've actually had some practice.

 

Have you been through an ice storm?

 

• so far no, our mission president left a message with us saying that there might be one coming, but it never came.

 

Did you get your packages yet?  I sent your Birthday presents on Friday so you should get it in a week or two.

 

• Yep, We've got the tree set up and the presents under the tree ready to be opened.

 

hmmmm...what happened this week...I feel like I just wrote home yesterday.

 

This last saturday we had the ward party for christmas, we had some really good food there.  We ate ham, turkey, rice, tomales, and this sort of pasta (it had macaroni noodles with ham and some sort of sauce, I think it was mayonaise).  And unfortunantly they forgot to put the tortillas out untill the end, so I didn't get to eat turkey with tortillas again.   There were a few people that played some musical numbers and then santa clause came (I got a pix with santa clause also).

 

Oh, yea, we also had our Chrismas Zone conference (There should be a few videos on U-tube)  That was a pretty long, however exciting day.  We had to wake up at 4 am so that we could get there in time because it was a three hour drive out there. For the first half of the conference we talked about the ward mission process as well as our investigators church attendance.  I learned a lot from that which will be usefull and that I'm hoping that we will be able to apply.  We just got a new ward mission leader, so learning about the ward mission process should be able to help us/him as we get missionary work going in the branch.   Actually, kind of a cool story witht that.  After Zone conference I was thinking about how I could talk to the president of the branch to get the ward mission process going in the branch, without impeding on his authority.  We didn't have a copy of it in Spanish so I translated it all into spanish onto a different piece of paper and then on sunday I made copies of it and gave it to him.  Aparently he had talked to one of the missionaries in the past about the ward missionary plan and they were thinking about geting things going with that, but they needed it in spanish, and the missionary had plans to translate it, but he must have been transferred or something when that happened.  So when I brought the ward mission plan translated into Spanish, our Branch president willingly accepted it, and it looks like we should be putting it in place pretty soon.

 

I think I have told you about the less active/part member family that we found a while back.  They seem to be doing awesome right now, it's been kind of hard to get up with them very often, but we did get to teach them this week, and they have been coming to church for the last three weeks and they came to the ward activity on saturday.  The last lesson we had with them, we taught them about the book of mormon and the importance of it.  However we did find out some frustrating news at the end of the lesson, they arent married.  Aghhh...!  This seems to be the unending problem, I sometimes feel like a marrage counselor rather than a missionary.  But anyway, they talked with pres. martinez and it sounds like they're fine with getting married, they just need to find paperwork.

 

We also Taught [investigator] this last week, and the lesson went really well.  We taught him about keeping the sabbath day holy, and the word of wisdom.  We just flew through those two commandmants, because he already knew what they were and he was already living them both.  By the time we had finished teaching all of that we realized that only 20-30 min. had passed, so we decided we might as well go on to something else, so we taught him about the baptismal covenant, which didn't know what that was at first, but he learned quickly.   So from the looks of things he should be ontrack still to be baptized on the 8th of January!