Feliz Natal!!

Hey there everyone!  Luckily this week I have enough time to write out a letter to everyone!  This week was good.  Challenges always come up around Christmas no one really wants to talk to us in the street but we keep going on!:)  I can't believe Christmas has already rolled around again!  Exciting and scary at the same time! So also something happened this week, on Wednesday I got my "trunky call".  Trunky is a word missionaries use to mean "can't wait to go home".  In this call the office asks you a bunch of questions so they can buy your ticket for the airlplane and set everything up to send you home.  So yeah that is why in the pciture that I will send I am crying haha.  All of the other missionaries were laughing at my sorrow as well but it is ok!  In reality I didn't get very trunky I feel like I still have a ton of time left and I need to finish strong!  They always tell you in a race you have to run through the finish line not TO the finish line so that is what I will do.  But it is crazy being here and looking back, thinking about everything that has happened and everything that I have learned.  What a journey it has been and still will continue to be!

This week we also had a funny run in with some seventh day adventists ( a religion I was not very familiar with before my mission) Anywho they (like the jehovas witnesses) really like to have bible bashes with us.  I have learned that the spirit doesn not usually testify during such arguments so before we went to the teaching appointment (our investigator had already called her pastor to be there to help her in the lesson) me and Elder João talked and we established how we were going to approach the situation so that the spirit could be there.  We were very careful in the way we taught and it was a really great experience!  It worked well for our first lesson and we combined to have another lesson.  On the second lesson we went with the same attitude but then in the end they kind of told us that they weren't meeting with us for real intent.  But anywho long story short we won the bible bash that they insisted on having and then we made a trade we went to their christmas presentation if they came to our christmas sacrament meeting.  The pastor came and said that he liked it!

Anywho I tell you all of this for a reason.  During our lessons they were fixed on knowing if these things were true by logical facts and reasoning.  i told them that if they really want to know if our message is true they have to remember that this is a spiritual question, and so if they want to know they need to have a spriritual search in order to get a spirtual asnwer.  The gosple is a feeling, a transformation, spiritual and powerful but is not something that you can measure with numbers or calculate with equations and reason it is much more than that.  So that will be my thought for you all I I will have be off for now!  I love you all!!!

Elder Elderdge