Preparing for Christmas

Hello everybody!

      Transfers were this week.  (They are every 6 weeks.)  My new companion is Elder Mahoney and he's really great.  He's a lot like Elder Day - basketball and football player in high school and will be doing sports in college.

Here's all of the Elders in the YSA now! Elder Mahoney is in the back left, next to me. Elder Aiken (driving) has a new companion, Elder Kautai (front right) who was in our district before and I've been on a few trade offs with him.

  
      We teach a really nice girl, a freshman in college, who we've been trying to get to come to church, but she can't bring herself to come. Anyway, we invited her to an activity in Ocala last night - a bunch of nativity sets were all arranged in pretty lighting with beautiful Christmas music playing, as well as a church Christmas devotional.

 They had an area set up for kids and families to act out the nativity. Here a a bunch of  other missionaries filling in the parts of the Christmas story.

      We felt prompted to call her and ask if she wanted to go (we weren't going to go unless we had somebody coming with us) and she said that she would love to! She really enjoyed it and loved all of it. That segways into what I wanted to talk about a little bit.

      Jesus describes himself as the light of the world - a "light that shineth in darkness." Every time I think about special spiritual experiences, the main thing that stands out is how beautiful and light everything is. I think of the temple - a special building where we learn about Heavenly Father and Christ and make promises with them. I haven't been to the temple in about 5 months now, but when I think back on it, I just remember how pretty and bright it was!

The Chicago LDS Temple

The Orlando LDS Temple

     On Friday night, John Bytheway, a big motivational speaker for the church, spoke in Jacksonville and we went to sing in a big missionary choir (I played viola in a small orchestra.) It was great - he spoke on how we can press forward in hard times. He spoke really well and everybody who went really enjoyed it!

Elder Mahoney, John Bytheway, and I. Sorry for the blurry picture...

       I hope that everybody is having a good time coming up to Christmas!      Keep looking for chances to help people. :)   Wait! One last picture....

Um, no explanation, but just a really cinematic picture of after I woke up from a 5 minute nap in our church building. I was able to sleep on couches in the music building at Lawrence, on the floor in practice rooms, and thankfully that talent has carried on here in Florida, where I can fall asleep within 2 minutes basically anywhere... Random facts about Elder McMullin that nobody wanted to know.

Ok bye! Love you all!