Man I love mission holidays!

Dear Family,

Agreed, Skype is the best. Also agreed about my comp- Sister Wester's pretty fantastic, I'm really really grateful I'm yet to have a crazy or awful companion.

So Sunday ROBIN GOT BAPTIZED! It was such a sweet baptism too, the Spirit was so so strong. It was so reassuring to know that even though teaching him didn't at all go along the "normal" way missionaries plan their investigators to progress, the Lord took care of him and it was definitely the right time for him. His wife was so cute too, she had a bag packed with everything he needed like a week early and every time his baptism was mentioned she'd reach over and grab his hand. Ahhh I love families! I can't wait for them to get sealed in the temple, I really think they'll do it in pretty much exactly a year since that's been their goal for about 9 months now lol.

Things were hectic getting ready for it though, especially since we lost our phone over the weekend..... So we couldn't make the last minute calls we needed to. When I got my stitches out we used the phone in the doctors office, then that night we got home and realized it was missing. So the next day we went by the office to look for it...And they were closed until January 7th. Awful. Thankfully our amazing branch president loaned us one of their phones that they don't use much so we survived, but we didn't have about 90% of the phone numbers we needed. We got a new phone on Monday, and then Tuesday a less active/investigator family we're teaching called us and said they found it in their drive way. So we're going to try to dry it out and then see if it works. It would be nice to get all our investigators' numbers again.

Kelsey unfortunately missed church on Sunday, so her baptism is going to be pushed back a bit. We haven't talked to her in a while, due to the afore mentioned phone fiasco, but we're hoping to see her this weekend and reset a date.

So like I told you, we had a Book of Mormon Read-A-Thon for Christmas! So Christmas Eve from 1-9 and Christmas Day from 8-2 we read it as a zone and got just a little over half way through it. So we'll do the rest New Years Eve and New Years Day. It's SO much fun! District meeting yesterday we just shared insights and talked about how much we loved it. Perfect combination of much needed socialization with other missionaries and getting pumped full of Spirit. I love getting the big picture too, we talked about how complex the time lines and stories are, and what a miracle that book is. The patterns and words and themes that are repeated are incredible, and getting to just rip through the book just shows how impossible it is for a man to make that up. It's also added a whole new level to the study of the New Testament I'm doing right now, ever since then I have all these new connections being made as I read the Bible. Sister Wester talked about how the Book of Mormon is promised to bring us closer to God than any other book and so when we're reading it we're able to grow closer to him more easily in everything else we do. I LOVE IT!

The rest of Christmas was really sweet. We went and visited 2 older woman. One is a woman we tracted into, Barb. She's a staunch Roman Catholic who lives alone and is super lonely, so we just went by and sang some Christmas songs and read some scriptures with her. She said we can come teach her, so we're praying she's open to our message and not just company- but either way, we feel really lucky to have met her. She told us after we sang with her that earlier in the day that we first knocked on her door she had prayed that God would send her someone to talk to since she has pretty much zero human interaction, so she knew we were an answer to her prayers. We also went to the hospital and sang for an older member of the ward who's there sick, who's family was also sick so unable to visit her. It was a really special experience to spend the evening with 2 people who had no one else to spend Christmas with.  Man I love mission holidays!

I think that's pretty much it....Love you all. It was awesome to see you :) Hope the rest of everyone's holidays are awesome, and going back to school isn't too terrible. Bye!