Week 14, 12/29/15

Wow just like that Christmas has come and gone!! I hope all you cuties had the best Christmas ever.  Mine was definitely great for the most part!  I'll get to that in a bit. 

 

On Wednesday we drove a couple hours to Barrhead to have a district meeting, and they told us to wear ugly Christmas sweaters so we could have a contest and bring a gift for a white elephant gift exchange.  We got there and E. Payne and I were the only ones wearing ugly sweaters, so we definitely won. You can be the judge of who won the contest between Elder Payne and I.  The gift exchange was fun and the rest of the meeting was great as well!

Christmas Eve was a bit of a slow day, we weren't really able to do much actual missionary work.  One great thing we were able to do was we wrapped up 25 Books of Mormon with "A Savior is Born" cards inside with a little explanation/testimony we typed up, and gave them as gifts to all our apartment complex neighbors.  Hopefully some good will come from that!  That night we had supper with a fun family and we played Phase 10 with them for a bit.... I beat everyone but the nine year old kid.  I just didn't have the heart to crush his spirits on Christmas Eve alright? ;) 

Christmas morning just felt like a pretty average morning aside from opening the rest of our gifts.  It didn't really feel like a special day until we got to Skype home, which was such a great time!!  I loved every second and that's probably why it went by way too fast.  After that I'll admit, I was pretty homesick and down for a while.  We had plans to go over to some really nice, fun investigators' home and they cancelled, and our backup plans fell through too! After looking for something to do for a bit we decided to just do weekly planning haha.  Weekly planning is basically the pits for us most of the time, so we were pretty depressed at this point.  It's amazing though, by the end of weekly planning we were both back to our normal, goofy, quacked up selves!  That was definitely an eye opener to me how simply forgetting yourself and going to work can bring happiness and help us forget our problems! 

After that we went to the long term care facility in the hospital and helped the nurses feed the residents there.  Like we literally took the spoons in our hands and put the food in their mouths haha... It was actually a lot of fun!  Making sure all the food actually got in their mouths and not all over their face was more challenging than it might seem, but we did our best.  It was so awesome to see how our service there affected the people.  They couldn't even really understand us when we would talk to them, but somehow our visiting them seemed to make them happy.  We were there for about an hour, and then wished everyone a Merry Christmas and left to go eat supper at a member's home, which basically turned into a branch party. Overall Christmas turned out to be a great day!  It didn't really feel like Christmas, but it was definitely a memorable day.

Other than that, the only other piece of big news from this week is that Elder Payne is getting transferred     We both knew it was kind of inevitable, but we have grown to be super close friends in our time serving together and hearing the news this morning was pretty saddening.  I know whatever challenge lies ahead will ultimately be for my benefit though, and I look forward to it! I love you all, and I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year as well:)

 Everybody meet Elder Francis Payne, the Christmas elf Ugly sweaters feat president park aka president swag  What we did on Christmas Eve