Dearest Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! This is going to be the BEST Christmas EVER!!! I am sooo excited to be able to just serve people, and not just sit around and get lost in wrapping paper and sugary treats! 🙂  My companion and I are planning on caroloing at the hospitals and Rest homes here for a long time and then we are spending Christmas Eve with my long lost 3rd cousins!  We’re sure getting well-fed. 🙂

This week was kind of dramatic…but I won’t go into too much details because it’s not fun to listen to, huh? 🙂  Basically…we found out that one of our investigators has been lying to us and was in jail last week.  He was supposed to get baptised on Saturday. 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁  Then Ken TRIED to tell us he can’T BE A Mormon because it’s too hard to give up coffee.  🙁 🙁 🙁 Then one family we are teaching has been in the hospital for 4 days.  Okay, now that the yucky part’s over with, I’ll tell you all of the Miracles that happened! 🙂

Several Months ago I prayed to know where we needed to find a new investigator.  The Lord sent me a dream that I needed to go down “Parkview!”  I was sooo happy that I got a response to my prayer, because I looked at a map and there were TWO Parkviews there!  yay!  So we went to one when it was raining and knocked for an hour without any potentials.  I didn’t go to the other Parkview because it was in a super rich part of town, and it’s hard to get sucess in rich areas…BUT!  The spirit told me to go to the other Parkview this week…so we did!  We drove to the other part of town (in our NEW CHEVY CRUZE!!!!) and started knocking out this little teeny cul-de-sac.  SUCCESS!!! Every door was so nice!  There was a family from Mexico who was super receptive and let us give them TWO copies of the Book of Mormon and leave a blessing on their home.  Then the Mom gave us a hug and said, “God sent you to me!” Awww!  Okay,awesome right? 🙂  Heavenly Father was nice and reminded me that Delayed Disobedience is Disobedience….but he still helped me find a family and about 3 other potentials just within the first 6 houses!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

LOIS HAS THE COOLEST TESTIMONY!!!! she’s really changing her life around and even looks happier than when we first met her!  She keeps telling us these amazing experiences she has when she prays.  Listen to this!!!!! After our lesson about Prophets, we gave her a conference ensign. We told her to pray about it to know whether or not these words came from God and if Thomas S. Monson is a true prophet.  The next day, She had to go to Traffic School for a ticket.  So she’s sitting in Court, reading her Ensign and a guy sits down next to her that she doesn’t know, but he says, “Hey, Are you a Mormon too?!”  Turns out, he’s a guy in our ward!!  She was so excited! She took that as a sign from heaven that the Ensign was a good magazine.  Then she read sooo many talks in it, she just can’t stop reading them!! 🙂  THEN!!!!! She lost her Book of Mormon.  We came over and looked for it and couldn’t find it.  The search went on for days!  So after one particular lesson, we kneeled down and asked for help to find it.  She said once she got in her car, it was sitting right there, in her passenger seat!!! WE LOOKED IN HER CAR for like FIVE minutes and it wasn’t there.  She said, “Now that’s freaky.  That’s a miracle though!!” 🙂 🙂 🙂

We didn’t give up on Ken though. :0) We still contact him about everyday because he told us, “Don’t take away the Book of Mormon from me if I don’t get baptised though, okay?”  We gave him a video for Christmas called, “Finding Faith In Christ” and told him he can’t give up on us yet.  He’s come so far!!! He told us he loved us and asked us if giving us a hug “was against the Law [of Chastity].” haha if you want to know kinda what he looks like, here’s a picture of him! 🙂 And a tree that I triiiied to decorate, but it’s really slanted.  I can’t decorate trees… and everyone knows it! ha! 🙂

Anyways… Thanks for letting me share all of these precious experiences with you. 🙂  You’re all so amazing! Please enjoy your Christmas with your family!  And read Helaman 14-16 with your family this week for a Christmas story from a different perspective! 😉

LOVE YOU,

SISTER STEPHIE TOBIAS 🙂