December 4, 2023 - 15th Email - The-cember

 Hey all you people

So this week was pretty awesome

But first I wanted to start with a goofy story from last Monday

So basically Tuesday was one of the Hermana's (sisters in the Spanish ward) birthdays and so they wanted to drive our truck for a day. Apparently they think our truck is the coolest thing ever lol, so we got their van. And for the record, I think their van is way cooler than our truck, it drove insanely smooth and it was a hybrid vehicle which was sick

But anyway

We get home and we were calling people from inside the van to set up lessons when my phone died. And my phone has the sim card. So we couldn't call people anymore and we didn't have a thumbtack to switch the sims. Elder Gonzalez left his charger at home so we had to go inside. But we found out we left the keys to the house on the keys to the truck. So we had no way of getting inside and no way of contacting people. We were using my hotspot on my phone when it died so Elder Gonzalez couldn't even call people on Messenger. We spent like a half hour trying to break into our own house lol and it was really cold, in hindsight we should've just waited in the van

Eventually the other companionship in the house got home and let us in so we chillin

Also on Monday one of the bike elders sprained his ankle, so he couldn't ride a bike anymore. On Tuesday we drove them to some parking lot to pick up a car from Elder Peterson (the car guy) so they have a car now, and we got the official okay in person from Elder Peterson to leave our tiwi (the car speed regulator thingy) unplugged because it drains our battery.

I want to reiterate how nice the van was it was so cool

Also because it was one of the Hermana's birthday and we had our ward huddle (we meet with leaders on Tuesday to go over the people we're teaching) she brought a ton of candy and honey barbecue fritos to the meeting and it was so fun lol

Literally nothing happened Wednesday and Thursday out of the ordinary, except now we're calling December The-cember because this isn't just any December it's The-cember to end all cembers

Friday was cool though, we went tracting and ran into this guy who was cursing out Jesus for a second which was a little uhhhh but we still just shared a story from the Bible and then gave him a Book of Mormon and his whole personality just changed and he was like "yeah I'll read it why not" it was absolutely insane I've never seen that before

Also we had a volleyball activity where we invited a bunch of people, but apparently there was a relief society activity in the gym at our building at that time and everyone (the other missionaries) was just like "just cancel the activity" and we were like "no" and we did it anyway at a different building. We still had to go to our building though because we needed a volleyball and our volleyball was stuck, I don't even know how to explain it, there's this overhanging thing in the gym where we hit the volleyball up there like two weeks ago on accident. I'll save you guys the less important details but we accidentally knocked over a table that had been set up for the relief society activity with a pile of chairs that fell over and we had to fix it. But we got the volleyball.

The activity was really good though, we bought Little Caesar's pizza and had a lot of friends come.

Saturday was just lesson after lesson after lesson, it was honestly pretty exhausting, we gave 7 blessings that day too. Then at the end of the day we set up Christmas decorations at home.

Yesterday was also a good day, we had a baptism! Angel's sister Caroline got baptized, and Angel had just gotten the priesthood so he was able to baptize her. We did the baptism at the building that Elder Gonzalez's first ward met at, and I was able to meet a bunch of people he knew because they were just finishing up church.

The baptism was so good that then their other older sister Kimberly (after like an hour long conversation, and calling the mission president for help) accepted an invitation to get baptized too! Her baptism is this Saturday. Then we went to a member's house, and they have a daughter who is her age who told us that Kimberly had called her and she told her she was going to get baptized too. It was so hype

And President said he wanted to be at the baptism.

Also I benched 135 this morning which is a new max

Spiritual Thought:

I was thinking about a story in the Old Testament about when Elijah visited a widow in 1 Kings 17. She was almost out of food and just wanted to make one last meal for her and her son before they died, but Elijah told her to feed him first. She made him food with the last little bit she had and she found that her food never ran out again and they didn't starve.

I love this story because it shows that if we have faith and do what we are asked to do (especially as missionaries) then the Lord will always provide and we will never starve spiritually. Even when it seems like we're giving everything we have, like the widow was, it will be given back to us and then some.

Ok love you guys bye

Elder Hanson

Pictures!

-Christmas decorations

-okay this picture might look just like a black image but if you look closely on the middle left part and I'm sorry for the poor quality but we were driving home and there was just a toilet sitting on the side of the road

-picture of me and Elder Gonzalez