December 9, 2013

Mom,

Did you ever take any pictures of what Kyle did to my room? I would be interested to see how he liked it.

In exactly one month, I'll be home. WHAT!!

Q of the W:

1.  Is there snow yet?

It snowed a few days ago. It was perfect timing for when we saw the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. Most of it has melted today though.

2.  How bad does the weather have to be for you to have to stay indoors all day?  Too cold?  Too snowy?

If it gets too snowy during a snow storm, President Jeppson will tell everyone that we're not allowed to drive. I'm not driving so that won't really affect me this year, haha. I haven't heard of anything happening to where they told us to just stay home because it was too cold.

3.  Do you still have that Christmas CD that Kelsie made for you last year?

Yes. And I've been enjoying it along with the other two CD's.

So first of all, we had a surprise baptism! Marco got baptized yesterday! This last week, his mom, Jackie, called us. It turns out that her husband isn't going to have another weekend off of work until past Christmas. Jackie didn't want to push off Marco's baptism anymore. Marco was also excited to get baptized sooner. So she called us this last week to see if we could do it that weekend. We said sure! So we had one last lesson with Marco to make sure that he knew everything he needed to know for the baptismal interview. It was a great baptism. Like I've said before, his mom is a returning less-active member. She definitely wants to start coming back to church and Marco's baptism is really helping with that. Also, Marco's dad isn't a member yet. He really wanted to be at his son's baptism because he says that one day he wants to be baptized as well. It's hard to visit him on a regular basis because of his busy work schedule, but hopefully we'll be able to visit him sometime this week.

We had a really cool experience this last week with one of the families in our ward that is balancing between less-active and active. They really love the church and live Gospel principles. They just let work things get in the way of church attendance maybe more than they ought to let it. But they come on their own free will when they can. Early on this week, the mom, sister Pelaez, called us and told us that one of her friends wants to meet with us. She said that her friend is having some struggles in life right now and that she wants some help. Obviously we were pretty excited about it. We set up an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. The day of the appointment, sister Pelaez called us and cancelled. She said that her friend, Maria, wasn't going to be able to meet with us that night. So we set up an appointment for Friday. When we passed by on Friday, we were disappointed to find that her friend wasn't there. Sister Pelaez wanted us to just go knock on her door (which was just a few houses down the street), but we wanted her to invite her over to her house. We tried to convince her that her house would be a better place to meet since the Spirit was already there. So Sister Pelaez called her and invited her over. Then she told us that the other day she found out that Maria and her husband are actually members of the church! They've just been inactive since before they moved to New Brunswick more than 10 years ago. She said that lately Maria was especially missing the church. Maria was about to leave to go somewhere with her husband and kids. So we decided to run out to just meet them right before they left. So we were able to say hi to them and introduce ourselves. We'll be trying to get in contact with the Pelaez family early this week to try to set up an appointment with them this week.

On Saturday morning we had an activity with the Jeppsons at the Mission Home. They call it Jingle with the Jeppsons. It was super fun! It was just our zone, so it was like 20 missionaries. They do it for every zone in the mission, just on other days of the week. We had a great breakfast with them and then we had a bell activity. We were all given a bell, but there were different notes on other bells. President and Sister Jeppson made poster boards with a song written out on each board with each corresponding note and we had to follow along and ring our bell when our note came. It's a pretty clever idea. Then President Jeppson shared the nativity story from Matthew and Luke. He did an amazing job inviting the Spirit. It was great! I love being at the Mission Home.

Also on Sunday night, we were able to go to the church to watch the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. I thought it was amazing! I was a little confused as to why it was called the First Presidency Christmas Devotional since only President Monson talked and he only talked for like five minutes. I still thought it was amazing though. I loved Elder Nelson's part! I hope you got to see it. If you didn't, I would highly recommend it.

Love you! Talk to you soon!

-Justin