12/30/13: Christmas and 2014 :)

Hola mi familia!! And everyone else :)

Our week started with a blessing of comfort [for my companion], which is always a nice addition to any week because of the awesome spirit it brings :)

For district meeting on Christmas eve this week we did a white elephant gift exchange. The gifts were hilarious, including a date night set (completely with fine china and candles), a pineapple and fuzzy socks (I got that one!), a strange woodcarving of an animal of some sort, and a large Walmart print of Sister Newton's face with accompanying 'Pagan' t-shirt (long story, hilarious and stupid all at the same time) and a Justin Bieber poster. It was fantastic. We've been blackmailing and generally making the elders lives miserable to find out who has Sister Newton's face up on their wall now. They totally stole the picture when she won it!

Wilmotts: one of my favorite families ever. We spent Christmas eve at their house, and it was just awesome. I LOVE them!!

Christmas we spent with the Vanderheyden's between skyping home, preparing dinner, eating dinner, and sharing a message. It took like our whole day. It was a pretty good Christmas :)

Then on the 26th it was back to work! We did service at Habitat, and visited some potentials (our teaching pool is struggling). I love Sister Dresang dearly. She has really got to get baptized. And we are looking at some more hopefuls!

We went on our first exchange of the transfer on Friday--it felt like it had been FOREVER--and that was a lot of fun. Angie is still on fire--she's never going inactive again--we got to see Jill for a moment, talk to Tina, see the Ehnerds, and eat with the Vance's. Then we poured over the BoM study-help book Angie let us borrow, it's totally awesome!!!

We went to a baptism on Saturday and received the confirmation text a few hours later--WE GOT EXACTLY OUR MISSION GOAL FOR BAPTISMS IN 2013!!!!!! Exactly. I'm sure I'll find out soon who the miracle one was because it was looking like we were gonna be one short of our goal. I can't wait to see what we do for the new year :) *love going to MLC*

We also walked like 4 miles to our dinner appointment because it was 40 degrees outside so we may well have been in summer. It was really nice to go walking :)

Today it's been in the way-negatives. SUPER cold. I'll never complain about 40 degrees again--cause that was really nice!! You know you shouldn't be outside when you're coughing like crazy just because the air is too cold for your lungs. Geez.

Yesterday we met a semi-new family in the ward for realz--the Johnsons, and we super-love them! Plus we finally planned for a training coming up that was really stressing us out, plus Bro Wilmott and us taught Quentin all about the priesthood and callings and stuff and hopefully he gets it soon!!! I'm so excited for him--I just love these moments!!!

So yeah. Life is grand :) Just loving serving the Lord! It never stops being worth it <3

 Sister Neal