Great news everybody! Our Savior was born in Bethlehem a couple thousand years ago, and I'm going to celebrate by drinking some candycane-flavored hot chocolate.
The parking lot couple got baptized yesterday! I gave a talk that I didn't think about until about 3 minutes beforehand, but it was pretty great. And there was a lot of support from their families. And a bunch of missionaries showed up with their investigators. These people are just so great, and it's been such a blessing working with them. Now I've just got to keep them active until they get married and moved back in.
The 9-year-old and 16-year-old daughters came to church again, and it was a great sacrament meeting with all the Christmas stuff going on. I think we'll be baptizing the 16-year-old in January, because she's moving out of her grandma's house in Colton and living here starting this week. She doesn't seem super thrilled about baptism right now, but she loves us missionaries and she likes coming to church, so I think once we start actually teaching her and leaving commitments, she'll be easy. The 9-year-old can only come over on weekends, so that would be a lot harder to make happen. But if there's one thing I've picked up on this week, it's that nothing is too hard for God.
Last week at church, we noticed somebody we didn't recognize, and my super-observant companion introduced himself. She's not a member. We call her the "brown-eyed girl". But she showed up to church, went to the Christmas devotional fireside, and went caroling with the youth. So we called her up, taught her a couple lessons, and figured out that she's learned a lot about the church already from her friends, and that she's really prepared to commit. So we put her on date to be baptized at the end of the month. I was thinking we wouldn't have any baptisms this month, and now it looks like we'll have three. That's a miracle.
Also in the miracles column: "K" and "A", the Undercover Mormons."K" is a self-described jack-mormon, and his wife is a truth seeker who hasn't had her questions answered by any religion so far. But she has LDS family, and she loved us enough to invite us over for dinner and have a very involved Lesson 1 afterwards. She asked so many good questions, and she still has more. Unfortunately "K" works at a car dealership all the time, so it's hard to get an appointment to teach them, but the one lesson we had went really well, and I'm looking forward to the next one.
Oh yeah, this all happened on the same day as our multi-zone conference, wherein I felt really inspired and uplifted. And if you remember The Straggler, his mother-in-law was one of the ladies that fed us lunch at our multi-zone, and it was fun talking to her about how much her family has progressed. She bore testimony to everybody in that room about how us baptizing her son-in-law and getting that family active in church was a miracle for her and all she ever could have asked for. That felt good. That, and any time I get to spend with President Smart is a good time.
The bad news is that a lot of the people in my zone that said they were going to baptize, now think that they won't, for one reason or another. I've got lots of opportunities to fix problems and inspire some missionaries today, to see if we can still salvage their baptisms for this weekend and make it possible for the mission to hit the yearly goal. There are enough baptisms up in the air in our zone alone to probably make it or break it, so... NO PRESSURE.
But I'm trying not to worry about it. I've got my Brown-Eyed Girl to prepare for baptism, some Christmas gifts to wrap for my fellow missionaries, and lots of goofing off with members and missionaries tomorrow and Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone! And don't forget to be thankful to God for the gift of his son.
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