Happy New Year!

December 31, 2012

Hello!

It was quite a treat to get to talk to you all the other day! Nice to hear your voices... and just have that back-and-forth interaction that email doesn´t provide. I love you! And I was very impressed with Jacob´s harmonica playing.

We passed a very nice Christmas here... we woke up, opened presents and letters, ate lunch with a member family, played a few games of ´eat flour´ with them, went to the church and called our families, and visited a few people before retiring to bed. It was great!

But I think Christmas Eve was even better! We went to the temple - it´s incredibly beautiful! I didn´t get to go during the open house, so this was the first time I saw it. Interesting to do a session on Spanish, too. After the temple, we went back to the offices and had a nice lunch, then went to a Christmas devotional set up by Hermana Carter. She read us a children´s Christmas book (ha!) and we heard some really excellent music sung and played by missionaries serving here. It was HOT, though! The temperature that day + the humidity that there was made it feel like (we calculated) 124 degrees. Ack! And all 180-something of us missionaries in one room, without windows or fans? Oof. Pretty hot. But still really nice.

Well, let´s see... what´s been happening here recently?

One of our investigators has stopping having lessons ... that has been really sad.  Very suddenly, she was gone and out of our reach to help. Our spirits took a serious hit when she left, but since then God has blessed us with other great investigators. We met a man who has a strong desire to leave behind drugs and alcohol and change his life. Another woman, who was the sister of one of our other investigators, met us and the next day came to church. She loved it - she felt the peace and the Spirit that she was looking for.

And, we still have our other investigators, some of whom are progressing. José told us the other day that when he reads the Book of Mormon, it makes him want to hug someone. So, things are not so bad here.

On Friday we taught a sample Beginning English / Piano class, and it was a big hit, so we decided to continue doing it and announced it in Sacrament meeting. Lots of members told us that they´re excited to come to the class, and we invited them all to bring friends. This should be a good way to find new investigators as well as help people learn new skills! I´m no expert piano teacher, but was able to do a pretty good class on identifying the names of notes last time. The problem is, everything has a different name in Spanish! Even the notes - they´re called Do, Re, Mi, Fa, etc. instead of C, D, E, F... we´ll see how the class goes this week.

Well, today ends my ´white year´: the one year (January to December) of my life that is spent completely in the service of the Lord. It´s been a good one. I´ve progressed a lot, and I´ve been very blessed. The mission is good.

And an embarrassing thing: We taught a lesson to a nice young man last week and made an appointment to come back. After the lesson, Elder Wing told me that she was, in fact, a nice young lady. Whoops. Curse these gender-disguising shaved-head/mohawk haircuts.

That´s all I´ve got today, I think... time to read the letters from my dear family. :-)
I hope you all have a wonderful week! And, Happy New Year! May it be the best yet.

Love,
Elder Stockton