Christmas and New Years

Before I forget:

Dear Everyone.  I love you all.  Please, I don´t really need much.  I would love to hear from you and get letters, and maybe envelopes and stuff with maybe a tie (actually, I do need ties to give to people that don´t have one and need one to get the priesthood) or other small stuff, but I don´t need food or worldly things.  Pictures are fantastic if you want to send something.  A CD of church music of any kind is also good.  These are just ideas if you really really really want to send something.  Yeah.  So, that.  Maybe a story or experience that you had or that we had together. Thanks!

So this last week was good.

This week we got a lot of new investigators and got our dates marked for baptism back up to 10.  Now we just need to get rid of the people in our inventory through baptism, and helping people to stay strong.  That is the struggle is keeping people strong in the gospel.  We are working hard to ensure that things go well in that aspect.  Yesterday church only had 29 people though, so we have a lot to do.

Christmas we did a lot of good missionary work, and then skyped home for a nice talk with family!  Yay family!  Yay technology.  It´s funny when skype from africa to america works way better than it ever did from Brad´s mission home.  Irony.

So the rest of the week, we had district meeting and made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and pizza which was incredible.  Thank you Aunt Diane!  That was pretty much it.  It has been a pretty unnormal eventing week.

Oh Congrats to Mike on the whole marriage thing.

So some investigator updates.

Joakina and her 4 kids:  So they didn´t show up at church because the other people that Joakina works with got fired so now she has to work twice a day every day, including sundays.  We are praying with their family to find a way to get sundays off, or at least to start with sunday mornings off.  Who in the world eats at a resturant sunday morning?  They have a date marked for the 18th.  Lets Go!!!

Joakin is different that Joakina.  He is the guy who owns our new church building we are moving into (right now our church is a 20 min drive from us, and more than an hour for some people.  It is being moved to a bigger building right next to our house).  He is sweet.  Turns out he talked to missionaries like 6 months ago and already knows the church is true.  He is also marked for baptism on the 18th.  We taught last night, him and his sister who is here visiting for the holidays becasue normally she lives in other places, because she works for the UN doing peace keeping.  She just pretty much walks into countries and yells at everyone that isn´t doing what they are supposed to be doing and aren´t being peaceful.  She also speaks fluent english (joakin speaks too but not as well) and is the first Catholic I have met here that actually has any idea whatsoever what she believes.

Hodielson (h is silent) is Kéven´s brother (he was baptized a few weeks ago and is a super studd) and he is being baptized this week.  Yeah.  Sweet.  I love baptisms.

That will be all for now. Next week I will talk about some more people.

So thought for the week.

Faith=Desire to do the will of the Lord in the Face of Opposition.  When temptations come, if we have enough faith, we win, if not, we lose.Yay Faith.  So, develop more faith, by using the faith you already have.  When your body says, time to sleep, not read scriptures, give your self a battle cry and win!  Then the next time it will be a bit easier.  When the spirit says, help your neighbor, Follow, AND YOUR FAITH WILL GROW!!!!!!  Wahoooooo!!!

So, in the end, it is all about winning.  The world says, it´s not whether you win or lose, it´s how you play the game.  But actually, the truth is, IT IS ALL ABOUT WINNING.  When you lose, fix whatever happened to lose, and win the next time.  That is repentance.We can´t have eternal salvation without winning more times the next day than we did the day before, every day of our lives.

GO

FIGHT

WIN

Anyways,

Love you all,
Love,
Elder Sampson