Christmas!

Well we had a wonderful talk with Elder Gale over Christmas! It was so good to see him! I just cried when I closed the laptop for about 10 minutes. LOL Mitchell got to spend Christmas with a very nice family. They had two sets of Elders there and the whole time we were on the phone with him the other Elders kept peeking over his shoulder and trying out their English on us. It was so cute! They sang "Do you want to build a snowman" from Frozen in Spanish to us and we just loved it. Mitchell asked if it had snowed here and so we walked the laptop out the front door to show him the snow. The other Elders (who are all native) all say "ooohhh!" at the same time when they saw the 5 inches of snow we had. They asked Mitchell in Spanish to ask us to make a snowball. LOL We made a snowball and threw it for them so they could see what snow was like. We had such a good time with them.

We were disappointed to find out that Mitchell didn't get his Christmas package from us by the time Christmas arrived. I was so disappointed. As a Mom I felt like my poor little boy was in a strange country all alone and didn't even have one piece of candy from home. I emailed the mission president's wife and asked her to keep an eye out for it. She assured me that most packages there are just delayed and not lost. That gave us a little hope. Then we got Mitchell's letter last week that said: "So, as Christmas came and left, I was left without the package that my Mother sent me. Santa really let me down. Just as I had completely given up hope and resigned myself to the fact that Santa was never going to come, something miraculous happened. On the morn of El Dia de los Reyes Magos (3 wiseman day) I received my package. I now have a firm belief that the 3 wisemen are really where it's at." Mitchell goes on in the letter to tell us how frustrating it is to talk about the Bible with people who claim to know what they Bible says but clearly haven't read it. He said that people will say "The Bible doesn't say that" and then he'll have to show them where it does indeed say what he's talking about. Another fun story from Mitchell "One night, it was kind of dark and we went into an alley to try to find the place where we had an appointment with someone. All of the sudden, this big dog came out of nowhere and started growling. It's hair was standing on end, and it was coming toward us. You know my history with dogs here, so I was a little bit nervioso, but my companion was stiff as a board. He was paralyzed with fear. Out of the blue, I thought "you know, I'm a servant of God , and a representative of Jesus Christ on HIS errand. I'm gonna chill this dog out" I kinda walked up to it, put my hand out and calmly shushed it. It calmed down and I even pet it for a bit. My companion at this point still couldn't move and kept saying "Elder, talk to it. Fix it!" After the dog was no longer a problem, we knocked on a door to look for our investigator. The owner of the building came out and told us he was extremely surprised that we made it to his door, because his dog really does, and has in the past, attacked people who go into that alley at night. I just told him we had protection, and I pointed up (pretty cheesy, I know) and he let us in. It was pretty cool. The guy must have believed that we were sent by God because now we have an appointment to teach him as well as the other investigator we were looking for that night."