The End of 2021

 Hello y'all!


I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas and is getting ready for a very happy new year! Especially all of you with snow... please be extra grateful for that this year cuz I'm really missing snow with my 90-degree weather with 90 percent humidity haha. 

But this last week was good. It was a little slow in terms of missionary work. A lot of our lessons fell through just because so many people had plans change for the Christmas season, and we're expecting a little bit of the same thing this week with New Years, but the work goes on! We're hoping to be able to find a lot more people this week in our efforts to help people come to understand the joy of the gospel. 

About Christmas... Christmas eve, we worked like normal. We ended up going through our long list of people who might be interested and trying to call them and share a message and set up a lesson. I will admit, quite a few people hung up as soon as they heard the word missionaries, but we were able to have a little bit of success. Then on Christmas, we started off the day with opening some presents, studies like normal, and a delicious Christmas lunch with the Stake patriarch and his family. We got to spend a little bit of time with them, and then we were able to call home and talk to our families. The rest of the day, we wanted to try to visit some families and stay with them but with the craziness of Christmas decided it better to just hang out at home and play some games together. That was really fun, but I will admit that we ate way too much junk food. I'm definitely still feeling the effects lol. 

Yesterday was a pretty normal Sunday other than just one hour of church. I found out 5 minutes before it started that I would be giving a talk, but my Portuguese has gotten good enough that I wasn't too worried about it. I shared Heleman 5:12 and talked about how we can show our gratitude for the gift of Christ that we celebrate on Christmas by showing that we really will build our foundation on him. I think it went alright and I hope people were able to understand me. And after church, we were able to have lunch with the Bishop and his family. It was great to talk to him and work with him on some of our plans for the coming weeks. 

The fact that Christmas was so different this year (hot weather, few decorations, not much Christmas music) made me completely forget that this week marks the end of another year. It's absolutely crazy for me to think that we're just about ready to start 2022, but it's a great opportunity to think about the ways that we want to improve this year. One of the talks in church on Sunday was about One More Day (a talk in general conference or something I think. I didn't catch that part in Portuguese) and the opportunity to reflect on what we would do if we just had one more day to live. In thinking about how I want to improve this year I have tried to think about what I would do if I just had one more day. Would I waste time laying in bed in the morning, would I let my limited Portuguese stop me from trying to bring one more person to the wonderful knowledge of the truth. Certainly not. So how can I make sure I live every day as if it was my last. This is a question that all of you can think about too. If today was your last day, what would you do? And how can you try to live every day that way? What things are really important?

That's about all I got for you folks today. I hope everyone has an amazing week and a happy new year!

Love,
Elder Hill


Our Christmas "cake" that a member gave us 


Christmas with Elder Miner

All the Elders from my MTC district together at the Christmas mission conference

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Transfers!

  Hey all!!! It's been a super long time since I've written an email, so I've got a lot to talk about! First things first, last transfer was my last transfer in the office, so I was training a new financial secretary! His name is Elder Hilton and it was super fun to work with him and train him! After I had started training him (and had a little more "free" time in the office) I started taking care of housing as well because our mission doesn't have a housing secretary. So that kept me super busy, but wasn't too bad. Like always we stayed super busy!  We also had the amazing opportunity to have Neil L Anderson visit our mission and give a devotional! He talked a lot about preparing ourselves for life and becoming truly converted to the Lord. He talked about how the scriptures can make that conversion possible. He asked people what their favorite scriptures were and then asked them if they really truly believed in what the scripture taught. He said that when...
Read more

Feliz Natal!

 Hey all! It's been a while since I've sent an email so I must apologize. Things (like always) have been super busy here in the office. Especially with Christmas and getting everything ready for the Christmas zone conferences, end of the year budgeting and just all of the other craziness of the end of the year. But things are going great! This year our Zone Christmas Conference was pretty short, but a lot of fun. A lot of it was musical performances by the missionaries, and I was able to play Hark Ye Herald Angels Sing which was super fun! Our district also sang a hymn so in preparation we all bought matching ties. And not to brag but our district was definitely the best prepared group. Our Christmas lunch was super amazing! It was literally a feast and there were so many wonderful options that I didn't even know where to start. We also took a mission picture... except that the whole mission wasn't there... so we took a bunch of pictures with our ...
Read more

Christmas is coming!

  Hey all!! Sorry that it's been a few weeks since I've written! Things are still going really great here. We had transfers here this week, and surprise surprise, I am going to be staying here in the office for at least another few transfers lol. But transfers meant that we have spent the last few weeks getting everything ready for 6 missionaries to head home and then 13 new missionaries to get here! It's always super exciting to be with the new missionaries who are so excited to participate in this wonderful work.  Oh, and today we put up the Christmas tree here in the office, so it's starting to feel like Christmas time! We have been working with a few new families recently, and like always, even though sometimes the progress is slow, it is so incredible to be able to be a tiny part of the change that the gospel of Jesus Christ brings into the lives of these people, and each and every one of us.  And I just wanted to share how impressed I've been in my studies of ...
Read more