Email December 29, 2014

Hey y'all! Merry-after Christmas and happy New years! So Christmas was great! We had a Christmas Eve Celebration with all the missionaries in the mission, there were so many missionaries there! We built little toy cars to give to kids on Christmas and then had dinner with President Gerber and then had the talent show and we sang 'Praise to the Man' it was awesome! We then got all the packages that were sent and put them under our little Christmas tree haha it was great. We then had Christmas and in the morning we opened all our packages...let's just say we are set for life! We have so much candy it's insane! I have no idea how in the world we're going to eat it all but it's crazy. Thank you for all of you guys that sent Christmas cards and packages, it really meant a lot to me. it's an incredible thing being a missionary and a representative of Jesus Christ and celebrating His birth and sharing the most precious gift Heavenly Father has given us with others. It was so awesome to see you guys on Christmas and guess what y'all? I'M AN AUNT!! Ahh Lydia is the cutest thing ever and such an awesome present haha. We then went around to all the gas stations in the area and gave candy bars to the people working there, it was awesome to see their faces light up when we showed up and we had some awesome conversations with some of them. We have some pretty awesome potential investigators from that. We also met this one guy Jaliel before we went to Skype with our families. He was just randomly sitting on the swing in a park as we were driving past, Heavenly Father definitely put him in our path, so we stopped and talked to him and he had some really awesome questions. He's from Iraq, in his 20's and his dad is a pastor, that kind of turned him off religion because he feels like he's getting forced into it. We explained what we do as missionaries and he seemed pretty open about it and we made him think a bit haha. He's really cool though and definitely prepared, so fingers crossed that he'll call us! We also saw Alliy that night because he was also working on Christmas and so we brought him a candy bar too. He was so happy to see us and he was like "I'm surrounded by candy all day long but I'll eat this one because it's from you." haha he's so cute! he's still reading the Book of Mormon and loving it, he has a lot of questions and we're doing our best to answer as many as we can. He's doing so good though I love him! Also Ryan Petty is back! He came up for Christmas and said he was sticking around for a while, I think he's living with his grandparents now so I'll get to see him! I got to see him the day before Christmas Eve and guess what? he still glows! haha his testimony is still solid but he just doesn't have any friends really who are good influences on him but he's doing really good. He was so excited to see me and he said he wants to move to Utah when I get home in August haha we already planned this out so it's totally going to happen! We also had exchanges on Saturday and got 3 new investigators! We met with Bro. Choi again and taught him about the Word of Wisdom, he liked it a lot. He apparently quit smoking 3 years ago and is still going strong! The only thing that's holding him back is coffee, but we told him to pray about it and he said he would and wanted to find substitutes for it like hot chocolate or something haha. Sis. Choi comes back in about 2 weeks so we're excited about that, they're totally getting baptized! they're so cute. We also taught Chloe, she's a less active who we've really struggled with, she's got 4 kids some are adopted and some aren't but we cannot figure out how to get her back to church. so we taught her Saturday and made a temple chart with her where she can make her own goals to bring her closer to the temple. She loved it! She really wants to go to the temple and we found out that she has some fears so that's why she isn't coming to church. She's afraid of Satan basically but we told her to pray about it and focus on these goals she made and it will help her become stronger and she's slowly gain a testimony about coming to church again. She's awesome and is definitely on the right track, please pray for her! Well that was pretty much it, such a good week! I hope you guys had a wonderful Christmas and I hope you have a wonderful New Years! My resolution- Baptize the entire town of Northville! You never know, it could happen haha. Anyway I love you all and the gospel's true! Sister Gordon