Merry Christmas

Aloha everyone!!! :) Merry Christmas to one and all!!

May the thoughts of our Savior Jesus Christ be fruitful the Christmas. It's such a beautiful time of year! Well here it is! At least you're all truly having a white Christmas! It doesn't even feel like Christmas! It's so weird! But it's finally kicking in because we've had some Christmas events.  Hopefully my "white Christmas" is with baptisms!! Haha Now that's the white Christmas I want! :) We have planned a baptism for Ollie and her children James and Lora.  That's on Christmas Eve so that will be wonderful! :) So ya I'll email about the last two weeks since no one knows what happened last week.  Neither do I! Haha But ya basically as I said I got a random call and I've been in Mangere in Papatoetoe for the last two weeks with Elder Smith the Zone leader up there.  It was an awesome experience! Being able to see all the different missionaries and be with them all and learn from them all and their individual teaching styles.  I grew so much in that little time.  So I loved it all very much.  But I missed my area here in Manurewa, I missed the wonderful people here. Being with Elder Smith was awesome though.  Elder Falepapalangi is in that zone so it was great to see him again.  Everyone thought I was already going Zone Leader it was pretty funny! Not even close! But it was fun doing all the Zone Leader tasks and just being with all the different missionaries.  It just was rough being pulled out of my area with so much big stuff going on.  And I thought I was gone for good.  I felt so strongly that there was so much more stuff that I needed to see through.  So much left undone here.  I know I still have a lot more I need to do in Manurewa. 

But that's part of the good news! I'm still here! I went back at transfers! And I'm still with my little islander Elder Baraniko! We were so excited! :) Elder Jibas is being trained elsewhere so he won't be with us anymore.  So now things are back to normal and we can just continue in thrusting in our sickle with all our might! It was fun because we got to pick up the elders coming in from Niue at the airport and they stayed with us for a week until transfers.  They were a lot of fun.  We also got to go pick up a missionary that was getting sent from the mission in the West Indies in the Caribbean to our mission.  He's been serving for about a year.  He's an awesome missionary to.  We got to also go to the mission office and mission home a lot which I haven't seen since I came out here.  So that was a lot of fun, I was able to talk to President Porter more.  So there were a lot of fun things about this whole crazy transfer thing they did.  They did it because Elder Smith's comp is going AP so I came to fill in for him for a couple of weeks until our transfers which was also our Christmas conference.  At mission conference it was fun to talk and hang out with all the missionaries.  I love the men that are serving here.  There are some awesome guys.  I talked to Elder Atkin a lot.  And he was just completely shocked that Paora had been baptized.  Because when he left Pa hadn't even gone to church and was still addicted to a lot of things.  What a huge change he made!

 But speaking of Pa… I've never seen a bigger miracle in my life! If you all knew him when we first met him. He was about as far away as you can get!!! Now he's got the priesthood and he's coming out with us all the time and he says that he's having thoughts of serving a mission.  So we've shared our thoughts with him a lot about that as well.  How cool is that?! Man!! This truly is the mission of miracles!!! :) For the year so far to this point the mission has about 1,550ish baptisms.  It just truly is the Promised Land out here in the pacific.  Such humble believing blood here in the islands.  The prophecies are coming true of the Lamanite descendants flocking to the gospel! I'm so lucky to be a part of the glorious work especially in this part of the Lord's vineyard!!! :) It's amazing I'm telling ya!! This year the goal for the mission was baptizing multiple souls monthly, doubling the mission’s baptisms.  And the mission only needs 20 more this week and then they would literally double their baptisms from last year.  (i only know that number because I heard it in the office.) But that's what big miracles are going one! That's amazing for a mission to double the numbers in a year! So this next week is huge!!! This next year, with raising the mission's faith, our goal is to baptize WEEKLY!!! So you can see how much faith that's going to require!! So we'll see what I got! haha I'm excited!!! :)

But Mission conference was just wonderful!! Elder McAllister came again, whose over all the missions in the Pacific.  It was so uplifting and inspiring, especially uniting as a mission together.. Spirit was so strong and powerful.. It was a great Christmas celebration.  And we had a talent show with the mission and all the different nationalities performed.  It was so cool; the Samoans did some amazing songs and dances.  And then the Tongans did their thing to and of course did the Haka.  Than the Samoans answered back with theirs and they just fed off of each other and went nuts.  It was so cool to see!! Such strong cultures and people out here it's so beautiful.. There truly is no better mission than this!! Haha But now I'm back in South Auckland in the rough parts! But I love it!! My 3rd transfer here, but I wanted to come back so I don't mind!! Just excited to get back to work!! Sorry about last week just was so busy had no time for anything!! But I'm glad I have an opportunity now to have more time!! I love you all very much and I'm so grateful for your support and prayers in my behalf. I hope you all truly have a 'Mauri" Christmas!! haha :) I wish you all a MERRY CHRISTMAS and send my love to you all!!!!!!!! :)