Week 7: First missionary exchange

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Happy Christmas everyone!

This past week was such a great experience!!

I just spent more than half my time emailing mom and dad about christmas stuff, so I've gotta hop to my main email! Here it goes!

Last P-day we played our turkey bowl in the snow! It was cold! But it was sooo fun! We played with a few other teams in our ditrict, and it was great! (see pictured above)

I had my first and second missionary exchange! The first one was for two days with Elder Peery, my district leader. Within those two days every single one of our appointments with investigators flogged (dropped) So we spent our time knocking doors and street contacting. Tuesday we spent literally 8 hours finding. It was fun! And I really enjoyed learning new things from a different cmopanion :) We celebrated our day of finding with dominoes pizza that night! And it tasted pretty authentic!!! Good stuff! (See second picture)

I also went on exchange with my grandad (my trainers trainer, who is not a zone leader) and we went to his area and met with some less actives and some investigators. He's from Munich, Germany, and speaks great english! I was quite impressed. :)

At the end of the week, we were looking pretty low with our new investigators, and it didnt look like we were going to achieve standards of excellence again because of all the flogged appointments. Which kinda sucked, because our mission president has a 'president's fireside' every fast sunday

at his home, where all of the missionaries who acheived standards for that week could come and bring their investigators. Disappointed, Elder Pass and I prayed, asking heavenly father for his guidence. We recieved an answer Saturday morning that we were to achieve standards and take our investigators to the fireside... And guess what? Between Saturday and Sunday, our key indicators tripled, and we made standards!!! Not only that, but on Saturday, the Lord scheduled two new investigators for baptism on the 25th of December!

Merry Christmas! And God bless us, every one! (In tiny tim's voice) We scheduled Peit (pronounced like pete, as in peter) and Francis (who we later found lives in another team's area), from Ghana! We were so excited, we had to celebrate! So I finally get Kebaptised! Thats right, I had my first acutal Kebab! (kinda like a dry gyro, see third picture)

It was also fantastic because we found a family of 5, the winkinson family, and taught them on sunday! (We would have on saturday, but they were having their own weekly Family Home Evening! How perfect is that??)

We were able to take Sabeena and Antonio to the president's fireside afer all :)

Great story? I think so :)

Merry Christmas!

Elder Gabriel Spencer

PS You can consider my fourth picture my Christmas card to you all (hint hint, mom please print out and give away when you get it. I really like it!)

PPS. Doctrine and Covenants 130: 20-21 (c) ;P