Merry Christmas everyone!! 🎄🎁 I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! Remember that the greatest gift is our Savior Jesus Christ. He knows you, He’s gone before you, He loves you, and He’s there for you. I can testify that Jesus Christ changes our whole life for the better. If you turn to Him, you will be blessed with more than you can ever imagine. Jesus Christ has changed my life and continues to change my life for the better.

Temple & Sleep Over 💤

Today was temple day!! We were a but too late for the endowment session, so we just did initiatories. Which was still really good. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to go to the temple. The Zone Leaders gave us a call in the evening asking if we could have some Elders stay at our place. We ended up driving to Richmond to pick them up and grab some air mattresses. They originally planned on staying the night at the AP’s place cause they were closer. But the AP’s were’nt feeling feeling well so they stayed at our place instead. Elder Russel and Elder Webb crashed at our place. They were pretty cool. It was a bit crammed cause we got the tiniest apartment in the mission haha, but we made it work. They flew out from Vernon to make it to Mission Leadership Council and Zone Conference.

Wacky District Council 🃏

We got up quick and early this morning. We had to be at Richmond at 9am, and with 4 guys and one shower, the clock was ticking. We all got ready and we cooked this big breakfast of eggs, bacon, and pancakes. It was pretty epic. We dropped them off at the mission office and headed back home. After that we had quite the interesting district council. Since the mission leadership conference was happening, all the other missionaries were busy with meetings. So it was just us, the district leader, Elder Bultsma and his companion Elder Maher. We ended up meeting at a library, and then we went right across the street to House of Cards to play Magic the Gathering. With four players, that game takes wayyy too long haha. But it’s all good, we just ended it early.

Leadership Discussion

Well it’s Thursday, you know what that means? Food mesh! Yeah it was pretty good. There’s this one lady that we’ve been delivering food to and she is super sweet. She told us how much she appreciates us coming and the work that we do. She said that last week someone else came, cause we switch routes sometimes, and she was sad that it wasn’t us. We got to briefly talk about what we do as missionaries, and where we are from. She was like, “you guys are always dressed so nicely.” Which is like the perfect segway to talk about what we do as missionaries. Unfortunately, since we are doing service, we aren’t really supposed to teach people. Cause we are not trying to make that the point of our service. But we can always stop by another time if we want to teach her. After that we stopped by the Spanish Elder’s apartment to complete our studies and do some contacts. With the Zone Conference happening tomorrow, we were in charge of picking up the food and delivering it to the church. We found out we are having buttered chicken for Zone Conference, so that’s pretty cool! Lately it’s been so busy, I’m struggling to process all of my thoughts. On our drive to the church my trainer was talking to me about leadership. He wants to give me more opportunities to lead, and for me to gain a deeper understanding of what leading truly is. We listened to two general conference talks about leadership and when we got back to the apartment we read over some verses in D&C 121 and shared our thoughts with each other. Interestingly enough, President Gill shared with me a scripture that was in D&C 121. This is definitely something I need to grow my understanding in more and better apply to everything that I do. I know that this is all inspired and the Lord is trying to help me and prepare me for the rest of my mission and life. I marvel at all these learning opportunities, because I know that they are divinely inspired.

Zone Conference 🎁

Zone Conference was quite awesome! With it almost being Christmas, it was all about remembering the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. There was a buncha music and we watched all of the different depictions of the Savior’s birth. Since I’m the new tech guy I got the opportunity to run around and try to fix all of the last minute technical issues. After looking through the material center, family history center, and the Stake offices we realized that all of the equipment was locked away in the Clerk’s office. Which was quite unfortunate, but we made it all work with what we had. We set up a Zoom for the missionaries that were sick and unable to attend. It was all kind of a mess, but we made it work out in the end. Also we got all of our packages from our families today. I just want to give a heartfelt thank you to my amazing family! Thank you! You’ve given me so much more than I can ever ask for. Not just in my gifts, but for your support and love.

The Buckets 🪣💦 and the White Christmas

Alrighty, let’s start things off with this wasn’t a white Christmas cause we didn’t get any snow. But that’s all good, we had a white Christmas cause of a baptism! Which is even better! So yeah, we had Lakshmi’s baptism today! It was so good, her son came too! Since the baptism was at 9am we got up early and started filling the font as soon as we could. According to the instructions, the font is supposed to fill in about an hour and a half. However, by that time it wasn’t even half way. But it’s okay, we made it work. After filling the rest with buckets of water, we were ready to go. My companion baptized her and I got to witness, which was pretty neat. It’s actually quite interesting, my companion has been to a lot of baptisms but has never been the one baptizing. So it was really great that he finally had the opportunity to do that before he went home. What a great way for Lakshmi to celebrate this Christmas season. The rest of our day was super duper busy. We shared a message with a member, gave a church tour to a family, and finished off the night at the Davis'. Today was one to remember. This was my very first time seeing a baptism of someone I assisted in teaching. I don’t consider any of my teaching efforts to be crucial in helping Lakshmi get baptized. She was prepared by the Lord and through the missionaries that came before. I’m just glad that I was a part of this great work helping her make her first covenant with God.