Week 8 - Feliz Navidad!

Family!

So good to see you on Christmas! I have to admit I felt my first twinge of homesickness after I ended the call. Then I walked into the bright sunny day, and somehow I felt better, not sure why.... And it might have just been a leftover stomach ache from all the food we ate. I honestly have never eaten so much.

Other than Christmas, this week was pretty normal. Everyone was super excited about Christmas and was cooking tamales and lighting off fireworks so teaching was a little harder than usual, but it was hard not to just be happy walking around seeing so many people so excited about the same thing.

Saturday was easily the most interesting day of the week. We'd set some really high goals for this week and we felt super confident about them and we'd had some success with our investigators earlier in the week so we thought we could just build off that. We had our whole day filled up and I left the house with so much energy. But by 2:00, every single one of our appointments had fallen through. So we decided to call the rest of our investigators and see if we could meet with them, or invite them to church. By 2:30, we had called all of them and either they didn't answer, couldn't meet with us, or couldn't come to church. At that point, I was ready to go home and just crash. I was feeling so deflated and discouraged. Since there was nothing else to do, we went contacting. We didn't find anyone so we decided to say a prayer. After that, we walked around a little more and then Elder Duran had the idea to go to a new area we hadn't been to before. It was farther away than I felt like walking, but we just started walking anyway. When we got to the area, there were a lot more houses than I was expecting, and at the second house we found a family of four who were incredibly nice and welcoming and we taught them part of the plan of salvation and they were really excited about it and told us that they'd love to have us back again. Feeling a little bit better, we went to the next few houses and had a similar experience. By the time we left that area, we had 15 new investigators. We went back to Siquirres and had some time before our we were going to meet with "H", who had called us back thankfully, so we went to this park and contacted more. We found 4 more investigators there and 2 of them told us they would come to church that Sunday. 

When I was thinking more about it that night, if our appointments hadn't fallen through, we never would have found these amazing people and they might not have ever heard our message. It's amazing because the Lord really does always have a plan for us. I just didn't have the faith to see it. But I know He was just preparing us to carry out His plan.

I love you all. I hope your Christmas was fantastic! And I hope you all have a happy new year's! Not to rub it in, but I get to spend the entire year of 2015 as a missionary. But anyway, love you all, I'll talk to you soon!

Elder Hansen

"A typical meal"

"Our house"

"Our adorable Christmas tree"