Out Of The Office!

Hey!!!

Merry Christmas!!! Haha sounds like everyone is definitely busy with the christmas activities! It'll be fun getting to skype home soon!

This week was awesome. OUT OF THE OFFICE! Haha its true that being in the office was a huge blessing and I learned a ton. I'll miss it in someways...but I don't miss it enough to go back. My new companion, Elder Olsen, is pretty fun. Haha I called him 3 times before we actually had transfers just to tell him how excited I was to be there with him and to work hard (and to arrange how we'd meet, since I had to help with the new missionaries on transfer day). Haha luckily he's way excited also (or else those calls would have been kind of awkward...). We've got a ton of work to do in this area though, it kind of looks like we're starting from almost nothing.  And really our whole district is way fun and excited. I get the feeling that last transfer was kind of hard for the district because it seems like everyone's areas are a little bit...dead, and because everyone is way excited about the changes that happened and are way ready to work hard. Our ward seems cool and quite a few people came to church yesterday (about 100).

Saturday we had a district activity that the zone leaders had assigned us. It was an "open chapel" activity where the district got together to invite everyone near the church to come and learn more. Well, as a district we probably knocked on around 200-250 doors during the activity, and talked to quite a few people...and not a single one came. (wow that story would be way lame if it ended right there...luckily it doesn't). We were all in front of the chapel as we finished up, when a woman walked up to us and told us that she was looking for a church-that she was new to the neighborhood and that she had distanced herself from God, but that she thought she needed to come back to Him-and wanted to know if she could see our church sometime. Well, it was already set up for a tour, so the sister missionaries went inside with her and had an amazing discussion with her! Totally made the activity worth all the effort. And it showed us how even though Heavenly Father expects us to do all we can, when it comes down to it, this is His work and He knows what He's doing. We're just helping it along.

Scripture of the week would have to be...1 Nephi 11:8-23. Nephi's father had seen a vision, part of which included a tree whose fruit would make people happy. Nephi wanted to see the vision and learn more about what it meant. In the first few verses here, Nephi has the blessing of seeing the tree, and then asks what it means. Instead of being told what the tree meant, he was shown a vision of Mary and of the baby Jesus, and then an angel asked Nephi what he thought the tree meant. After seeing Mary and Jesus, Nephi knew that the tree represented the love of God, the most desireable thing for the soul, and which could make man happy. It caught my attention that Nephi wasn't simply told that the tree represented love. Instead, it appears that as he learned about Jesus, he learned about the love of God for mankind. Jesus Christ and His sacrifice is the perfect example of the perfect love that our Heavenly Father has for us. Hopefully as we think about Christ and His birth this Christmas we, like Nephi, can learn more about the love that Christ and Heavenly Father have for each one of us, and that we can begin to love others in that same way.

Merry Christmas everyone!! And Happy New Year (next week)! Love you all, and can't wait to talk to the family later this week. Keep being awesome.

Elder Webster