12/19/11

Hey Mom!

So the Christmas conference is tomorrow up in Kirtland, I should get
your letters then.  I'm excited, it'll be fun to be back.  I got a
package from Grandma and Grandpa Newey this week full of all sorts of
great stuff, and all the letters from Thanksgiving.  It was nice to
see all the pictures of everyone. sounds like you are all having fun.
Enjoy Arizona, you will be a little warmer than me.  Although I did
rake the leaves and mow the lawn today.  There was snow yesterday.
For a bit.  Our truck looks good too, we finally washed all the dirt
off.  Oh, I got all the Christmas cards from the ward too.  Kinda
weird, I don't recognize many names from before, although it's not too
hard to tell who Jacob's friends are.

The Relief Society here gave us stockings full of all sorts of good
stuff.  We have a lot of junk food in our apartment.  It feels a lot
more like Christmas with all the candy everywhere, Elder H even got
a Charlie Brown tree, complete with ornament.  We found some
Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas CD's in the branch library, and have
just about burned them out.

Other than that the work has been kind of slow.  H  and T
decided that the Church is not for them, and so won't be preparing for
baptism anymore.  All the other investigators we invited to church
were sick yesterday.  So the gospel principles class we taught
consisted of one less active, everyone else had bolted.  This week
will be full of Christmas preparation and tracting, will be fun.  I've
got to start warming up my caroling voice, it hasn't been used before,
hate to scare people away. 

The branch presidents daughter was baptized yesterday, that was cool
to see.  Now I just have to figure out how to get someone older than
eight into the water.  Oh, we attended a Messianic Jewish synagogue
Friday night, very interesting.  The first half hour was full of
songs, a little different than our hymns.  It almost felt like a
concert.  There was a lot of standing.  They had a Torah though, and
said the lambskin was from the 1300's or somewhere around there.  It
was cool because the scroll was all in Hebrew, and they even let us
come and look at it.  They had New Testament Bibles with English on
one side and Hebrew on the other.  Sadly Andrew was not very interested in
what we had to say, so we probably won't be meeting with them much
anymore.  Learned a lot of cool stuff from them though.

That is about exciting as its been.  We ate a place called Hugger
Mugger, they had really good subs. 
Have a great week, merry Christmas, and I will see you soon!

Love, Elder Tanner Newey