Yay Christmas Parties!!

This week was a great week! It started off kinda slow but got better as it went on.
On Wednesday we had a lesson with our Mandarin speaking investigator. This was the first time that I've been here to teach him since the church tour because we've been on exchanges and such. This lesson we discussed the Plan of Salvation and we gave him a Mandarin Plan of Salvation pamphlet. So that lesson essentially consisted of him reading an entire page of the pamphlet in Mandarin and then Sister Gali and I making comments that Hayley, our amazing return missionary from Taiwan, would translate for him. They would then talk back and forth in Mandarin and she would tell us what all he said. It was definitely the most interesting lesson I've taught! And I'm basically quadrilingual now that I've been to lessons in English, Spanish, Samoan, and Mandarin.

On Thursday we had the mission Christmas party for the west side of the mission. It was so much fun! This is the most missionaries I've seen together since the MTC. For the first hour or so we just all hung out and played games and caught up with all of the missionaries that we haven't seen in a while. I got to see my district leader from my first transfer and Sister Paul and a bunch of other missionaries I served with on the east side. Then we all walked over and went to the institute and had pizza and cake and hung out some more. I also watched Ephraim's Rescue, which I had never seen before. We also got Christmas cards from the First Presidency and a $10 Walmart gift card from the mission for Christmas presents :) I'm attaching a picture of my zone at the party.

That night we met with one of our investigators and he's awesome! He's preparing to be baptized on January 9th so we're super excited for that! His wife is a member so they've been studying the Gospel Principles book and a bunch of other stuff between visits.

The next day we had the ward Christmas party! It was so good! We had 4 investigators that we're teaching that came and a couple of them brought their families. We also had a few other members that we're teaching that we haven't seen at church in a long time that came to the party. It was great to see everyone there and it was amazing to see the ward reach out and fellowship all the new people. We would just walk up to members and point to someone and say they were new and they'd go over and talk to them. I couldn't have asked for a better ward that night!

Yesterday in sacrament meeting we had no speakers and we sang Christmas songs the entire time. Well, I guess Bishop got up at the end and spoke for a minute but other than that no one spoke. Our primary is a little smaller than the one in Plainfield. We had about 15 or so kids that went up. We're trying to find more boys because out of the 15 there were only 4 boys. It was still great to hear the kids sing though!

Talk to a lot of you on Friday! Love you all! Merry Christmas!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

P.S. There's a lot of crazy stuff happening in the world and I guess Plainfield especially. Things are crazy. But Helaman 5:12 resolves essentially resolves every life problem...so Merry Christmas :D