Week 43: The Reason for the Season

Hey everyone,

Hope you're all happy and healthy and drinking plenty of hot chocolate!

First things first, a favor to ask:

So many people that we teach here have a hard time with keeping the Sabbath Day holy. (For those of you who've never heard of the 10 commandments, or, better said, for those who conveniently choose to ignore them, that means not working on Sunday. Or requiring anyone else to work.) It's a pretty awesome commandment, with some pretty amazing blessings. But, understandably, it's difficult. And out of my 20 years of life experience, I can only come up with so many inspiring stories. But I know there are some people reading this who're amazing Christians, who've had practice standing up for God's truth, in this area especially. Would you mind writing me with your experiences about the Sabbath Day? How have you had to defend it? What blessings have you seen from living it? And when you've ignored it, how did you learn your lesson and start keeping Sunday sacred? I'd like to share your experiences with investigators, because I know they'll help inspire them, help them have the faith to make this major change in their lifestyle. You can respond to this email and my mom will forward them to me (Thanks, Mom!) or send them through dearelder.com, or contract a carrier pigeon... as long as they get here! :) Thanks! I'll really appreciate it, and so will the people we teach.

This week was a bit of a transition as we helped our recently baptized amazing investigators get used to being amazing new members of the church and learn how to keep progressing spiritually. We started looking for new people and have had some really, really spiritual experiences, including a divinely inspired lesson with a 23 year old kid named Joel, who in last year alone lost both his parents and his grandma. We haven't been able to meet up with him again, and nobody came to church on Sunday (except an adorable old guy with his little daughter, who always showed up on his own but can't get baptized because he's not married with his current wife because he's not divorced with the first one and can't afford a divorce and can't read. But he's full of smiles. We're looking for a solution for him.) Anyway, we're constantly building and working through our investigator pool and fighting Satan. Thanks for your continued prayers for the work and missionaries. :)

Something interesting that we've done this week is participate in the ward Christmas choir! It's been a little bit highly unorganized at times, but incredibly fun, made better by four preteen boys who sing better than Justin Beiber. We aren't singing hymns so much as normal Christmasy songs that you would hear on the radio, but in Spanish, and they all mention Jesus... way fun. My favorite is a version of the Little Drummer Boy. We perform on Friday, and Sunday, and I will tell you how it goes!

Life is good, the work is better, the Lord is great.

Love you all,

Hermana Ison

P.S. Interesting spiritual insight: I was reading Luke 2 this week and it occured to me that Mary and Joseph were really obedient.