Letter #42

Every transfer that goes by, I feel like a much older person.  And I kinda assumed that I would be staying in Gig Harbor through Christmas, but it looks like I'm going to be transferred before then.  I will be going to the Aberdeen ward in the Elma stake, which is way out in the middle of nowhere.  Which is pretty sad, because this last week, we set up 3 more baptisms for this month, so that will be cool for the new guy coming in.  I'm super sad to be leaving Gig Harbor, especially this close to Christmas.

Well, we had a bunch of Christmas-y activities this last week, which was pretty fun.  The first one was the mission Christmas party, which we had on Tuesday.  We all met together as a mission in Tacoma and we got to do a bunch of Christmas activities.  We started out with a white elephant gift exchange, and that was pretty great.  There was a picture of an old pope going around, as well as other silly things.  Most of them are on the blog.  I got some bible card games that I'm not planning on taking with me to my next area.  So that was pretty wild.  After that, we had lunch together in the cultural hall, and that was good.  We had to sit by zone though, which was a little annoying, since it was the only time that we would actually get to see our friends in other parts of the mission, and we weren't even allowed to be by them.  But lunch itself was good.  We had to do a lot of singing though, and then skits.  We had a really good skit planned out, but then when we went to have it approved, it was too long, and so we ended up doing something that wasn't funny... But that's alright.  After that, we went into the chapel and had a more Christ-centered Christmas activity.  And by that, I mostly just mean a testimony meeting.  So that was good too.  After that, we got our packages from home, and headed back to our areas to go tracting for the night.

Also this week was our ward Christmas party, which was pretty great.  We came to the church a couple hours before it started to go to the bathroom, and the people who were supposed to be setting up weren't there, and someone else in the ward noticed that and came over to set the tables, and so we got solicited to help with that, since there was so much work to be done with that.  And it was pretty great overall.  They showed a segment of Joy to the World, which portrays the birth of Christ, and then we had dinner, and then Santa came.  We had a really good turnout, and we went to sit with this part-member family during dinner, who quickly told us that they wanted to have their kids baptized.  So that was pretty cool.  They have been meeting with the missionaries off and on for a long time now, and it sounds like they really want to be more serious about the church now, so that's awesome.

And that's the most interesting things that have happened to us this week.  Transfers are tomorrow, so I'll be in Aberdeen for a little while pretty soon.  So yeah, that's all.