becoming new

caroling and contacting in Centro with otra misioneras

¡Happy (almost) Christmas! This week we celebrated the Christmas season with Hna. Grecias' baptism. She's an investigator that we have been working with from the beginning — a long process that required a lot of patience. But once she finally (FINALLY) prayed and received her answer that this Church is true, she was baptized the very next week and it was beautiful. Her husband baptized her, and seeing them both dressed in white was like a vision of what their eternity will look like now that they can be sealed in the temple this coming year. 

Along with this quiet and wonderful celebration, yesterday all the missionaries in the entire mission gathered for a whole day together — a day that included a catered lunch and talent show with various missionaries and their varying talents (i.e. a sketch that was made up of all the scriptures we have to memorize, featuring a blown up polar bear and missionaries dressed as elves. This really happened). After meeting together in the Stake building, we all went to a park in Centro to sing Christmas carols and contact people with The Dadiva initiative. It was a quiet and powerful experience, singing about Christ and inviting people to come unto Him. Due to this season, Ive been thinking a lot more about Christ — His birth, His life, His purpose in coming here to save us and heal us and love us. It is becoming more clear to me that Christ came into this world because of His love for us. Because of this, it is then becoming more clear to me that love is the greatest, most grand, and most powerful thing in the world — the good type of love that can change a person, that can make one better. It seems like such a simple thing, the act of loving. And yet it is so much easier to think about how you are feeling, how others are making you feel, what you are not feeling, what others are not giving you. Real love is not worrying about how you are receiving love, but rather how you are giving, because isnt that what Christ did every single day of His thirty-three years? I'm trying to be better at giving and showing love so that I can be a little more like Christ — and oh, what a seemingly hard and unreachable goal, trying to become a person of perfect love and perfect goodness! At times it feels like I do not possess any of those qualities of Christ: faith and hope and love and diligence. Yet there is a sense of beauty in all of those things that I am lacking, because I know that I can gain them and learn them during my time here. It is both a humbling and horrible experience feeling new, but I think with every new beginning comes the test of what one does and how one feels during a re-birth of sorts. During times of humility in this Christmas season, I take courage in the fact that Christ came into the world as a child — as a new being that had to grow and learn and progress, and that its thanks to the birth and life of our glorious Savior that every single person can be born again a new creature. How glorious is the Gospel and how merciful is God for always giving us the hope of new beginnings and second chances through His Son.

Wishing you all a Christmas of joy in remembering the birth of our Lord and Savior, the Prince of Peace!

all my love and joy,

Naomi

eating a snickers bar for you all (and no, I wasn't really hangry)

Hna. Grecia on her baptism day, with husband (who's a member), and her newborn child