Dear Family and Friends,
Well Christmas is here. it is interesting all the kids here are out of school so Christmas and they all so caroling every night. Turns out caroling is a little different here. If someone goes caroling to your house you have to pay them. They have so many christmas lights and lots of nativities set up. The best is all the Christmas trees, and it is just so great also the people are not super busy here rushing and rushing, it is just really peaceful and enjoyable for everyone. And we set up appointments on Chirstmas because that is when everyone is home.
Well this has been an exciting week. We started off with our trainers/new missionary training, and then we had a great Christmas Zone Conference. Our Christmas Zone conference was with all the missionaries in the entire mission. It was a lot of fun. I didn't realize how many missionaries are in the Legazbi Mission. Anyway though we had a great conference, and of course Pres. Guanzon gave us all some great counsel. It was a little depressing because they showed us the charts of where we are at as a whole as a mission and where the standard of Excellence was and we all realized that there is work to do. But that is okay we just need to stretch and reach higher.
We all made it back to Bulan late Wednesday night, and then on Thursday morning was the wedding of Oliver and Jeann. Oliver was an investigator in my area before. His wife is a member, but they were not married before. So it was exciting to see them get married. It is really exciting. It was a really simple wedding, and the person that was suppose to sing so they assigned sister Flake to sing, then before you knew it we were both singing. There is a phlippino tradition that after the wedding the bride and groom dance and then people go and pin money on their clothes. So that was interesting. Once again though the music player didn't work so Sister Flake sang for the dance. It was really short and sweet ceromony, of course though, only for time only. I hope that soon it will be for time and all eternity.
On Friday we had exchanges with Sister Fonua and Sister Papica. Sister Papica is the Sister Training leader and she is Training Sister Fonua from California. It was a lot of fun. I was with Sister Fonua and we worked in her area. We taught one of their Recent converts, who was absolutely amazing. His name is Seven, and he is 13 years old. He knows the scriptures so well. He wakes up at 5 in the morning to study his scriptures and then he conducts a scripture study for all friends. He was baptized a few weeks ago, but he already has all the scripture mastery memorized and lots of other scriptures memorized too. He lives in a farily far area too. He teaches all his friends and we taught one of his friends Nicole about the plan of salvation and we started and she taught us the plan of salvation with scriptures and everything. I didn't even know what to say because she said everything. It was so crazy. Brother Seven is so great. He want to serve a mission so bad, I think he is an example to us all of member missionary work. Wow.
We also taught brother Jose. He is the sister of Sister Jonalyn who is preparing to go on a mission. Brother Jose is interesting. He is sometimes really hard to read. He is a joker and loves to joke about everything. Sometimes I don't know if he is serious or not, but he did come to church. I think that sometimes he doesn't want us to think he actually cares when we teach him, but I think deep inside he does. Even his sister said he always takes time for God. So that was exciting. It is funny because Sister Flake and I go jogging every morning. It is part of being exactly obedient and exercising everyday, there is a track close to our house that we walk to every morning and then jog. Of course Brother Jose also goes running every morning too. It was really funny when we saw him on Saturday. It was actually really funny because we were talking to him as we were running and giving commitments to come to church on sunday. I told my companion and that is why we run, so that we can contact all our investigators every day. Actually though it has been a really good tool. Everyone sees us jogging and they all think we are crazy because we go everyday. And everyone knows about it. We talk to people and they say ya you guys run everyday, don't you ever get tired? I don't know I just feel like it builds the trust of members and non members in our area.
Anyway so we had a good week. Slowly, but surely you can see the miracles that are happening in our area. I was noticed, wow we are starting to fill up our area book. I remember back at the first week of this transfer saying to my new companion, well we don't have any appointments so we need to so tracting and now our planners are becoming filled with appointments and things to do.
So I am excited to talk to you guys on Wednesday. I hope that we will be able to use skype or google chat, mostly I hope that the internet connection will be fast enough because it is pretty slow here. But hopefully.
Well have a great Christmas Everyone!
-Sister Richins
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