December 5, 2011

Hello! Glad to hear you all survived the windstorm.

I'm glad you got my photos.

Dad said the Choir was great. I'm glad you both liked it. Have fun participating in the living nativity. Our stake isn't really doing anything....well...they had a community breakfast that we didn't hear about until the night before...(maybe they were doing it for just the immediate community around the stake center...) but I might be transferred somewhere I'll get to participate in something like that. We're having a Christmas devotional for the mission the Wednesday before Christmas. I told Sister Wilson I'd love to play if she can find me a flute. She hasn't said anything yet, but it's two weeks away, so she still might ask me to play something.

Glad to hear Jon did so great last week at bowling! Good job, Jon!

We were allowed to watch the First Presidency Devotional in members' homes if we didn't have investigators to take to the stake center. We watched with two cute old ladies in our ward--our favorite people. It was really good. We had dinner with them before hand and then talked about it afterward. My favorite was probably President Utchdorf's talk, for his Jenga analogy. I learned that I need to be patient with learning line upon line and look for daily blessings, not just for the ones I've been promised in my future.

This past week I really enjoyed reading President Eyring's talk from the Priesthood session. I liked how he emphasized that love is the most important leadership attribute you can develop. During mormon.org time, I also enjoyed watching the El Salvador temple dedication video (https://lds.org/youth/video/temple-blessings-in-el-salvador?lang=eng). It's a good one!

We got the two packages addressed to the three of us. We all love our scarves! Sister Niu has been wanting to buy a black one, and I've been wanting a blue one, and Sister Beckstrand's favorite color is purple (don't know if she's been thinking about buying more scarves though) so they were all perfect! All my companions have really appreciated how much you think of them. We liked your clever notes on the soap and whatnot, too. I haven't gotten the Deseret Book or Kohls packages yet, though. They might be holding them until transfers, since it's only next week. I don't know when they start the mail hold though (they hold our mail a few days before transfers and give it to us at the mission office in case we DO get transferred and the mail doesn't get to us before hand.....it's kind of fun when you get a lot of mail all in one day).

This past week has been pretty great. Chris' knee surgery went great; she's well on the mend, and attributes it ALL to the blessing she received, which is wonderful! We also had five of our focus families/less actives we've been working with regularly at church on Sunday! No investigators (hey, Chris just had her knee replaced!!) but that more than made up for it. Fast and testimony meeting was pretty good. Probably the best one since I've been up here. In a lot of ways I'm going to miss this area, I think.

ALSO recently been allowed to do sisters exchanges again! (they were taken away for a few transfers because President wanted to figure out how we could have 24 hour exchanges instead of just a few hours) and we're exchanging later tonight...and we have dinner with our Bishop in about 15 minutes...and we have a lesson at 7:30......and our WHOLE week is like that. We've been working SO HARD....and we're SO EXCITED to see it paying off this week. It's going to be SO AWESOME...but Sister Beckstrand and I are both just kind of..."AHHH! WE DON'T REMEMBER HOW TO BE THIS BUSY!"

Anyways...we had our first exchange last Friday. Sister Anderson came to Everson from Arlington with Sister Niu and I and Sister Beckstrand went to Arlington to be with Sister Everett. She's been put in charge of the exchanges for our grouping of sisters' areas. Tonight Sister Everett is coming up here to be with me until tomorrow night and then on Friday Sister Niu will be here with her. That means Friday I get to go back down to Arlington.....which.......something ELSE......REALLY EXCITING...................


THE ARMAR BRANCH* IS NOW A SINGLES WARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! woohooo!!!

as of TODAY! It's SUPER exciting. and SUPER cool. Their branch president has been trying so hard to get them to be a ward...and now they are! We suspect he's been called as Bishop, but we don't know for sure until tonight when we see Sister Everett and Sister Anderson. So that'll be fun to hear! =D

Anyways...times' up, as usual.

Love you all!
Sister Heather Holdsworth