This week has been great. Things are still tough, but I'm still happy. It's my Saviour's birthday! And we all know how much I like birthdays :) I've had a good amount of time to think about why Christmas brings us so much joy, and I think a lot of it has to do with promises. God has promised his children so much, and Christmas is when we celebrate the time when our Saviour was born and those promises started being fulfilled. We can see that God's word is good. We can put complete and total trust in those promises. He has promised us eternal life, and we may not have obtained it yet, but the promised way there was born in the city of David. He has promised us that He'll never leave us alone; He'll come to us and comfort us if we'll just call for Him. And we can have His peace, which is not of this world. He promised that all things would be gathered in one in the Latter-days, and that promise began to be fulfilled when a young boy named Joseph Smith knelt in a grove of trees and the Father and the Son came to him to answer his prayer. And we're promised that our Messiah will come again. What else could we ask for? I love the Lord and I love this season when we get to focus on things that are not of this world. I hope that all of us can have a light heart this year as you think about the love that your Heavenly Father has for you in order for Him to promise you so much.
J&S have been reading the Book of Mormon and we talked about baptism this last week. If you haven't seen the new video on lds.org, watch it! We're going to watch it with them next week :) http://lds.org/pages/mormon-messages?lang=eng#a-book-of-mormon-storyD,D, & A. D is the 16 year old girl we've been teaching, and D&A are her parents. Before we thought we were just teaching the dad, but then her mom came to the Christmas party at the church, and to sacrament meeting on Sunday morning! We'll be going to visit them tonight.
We visited with G&M on Sunday night also. M is not Christian but shared such an awesome yet simple testimony of prayer. We invited her to pray to our Heavenly Father every day and she tried it for a week. At first she said it was like she didn't have problems anymore, then corrected herself saying, "Or I guess I still do have problems, but it's like I know how to get through them better." She said, "It feels wonderful, like nothing I've ever felt before." Luckily we got through that part of the lesson before a bee came into the flat and made the rest of the lesson a little harder to focus on.
Did I tell you about DA? He's a man that the elders used to be teaching, but stopped answering their calls. About a month ago, we were on a bus and he came up to us asking if we were the Mormons. The elders had given us his number to try meeting with him but we couldn't get a hold of him either, and we didn't know he was the man we were talking to on the bus, if that makes sense. He told us his name as he hopped off the bus and we were in shock wondering if it was the same guy we'd been trying to call. Then about two weeks ago, we were biking to an appointment and he biked by going the other direction (see! someone else bikes too!), so we stopped and talked and invited him to come to the Christmas party, and he came to that. Then on Monday, we stopped for dinner and as we were eating we watched a man at another table who was reading a newspaper but had his back to us, thinking that it might be him. When we left, we walked past the table, and it was him! So we sat down and talked for a while just about his life and different things, then got down to God. He is big on science and doesn't believe there is a God or any creator. All we could do was teach and bear simply testimony that there is a God, He is our Father, and we can know Him. We invited him to try praying and he said he would. We're meeting again tomorrow.
Now to R. She's an 18-year-old girl we found in a kampung last week. We asked some people if there were any Christians in the kampung and they pointed us to her house but no one was home so we just left a pamphlet in the window. We went back later to find it was a Jehovah's Witness home, but they let us in and were so nice. We went back to see R last night and had a really great lesson about the Restoration of the gospel. She's still very unsure of the idea of a prophet after Christ, but the amazing part is that she wants to learn and she wants to listen. We were so scared going into the lesson that we would just be confronted with so many verses in the bible and the Spirit would be driven away through contention, but the Spirit was there the whole time. She's sincerely looking for truth. So I'm counting that one as a miracle. I'm excited to see where it goes with her.
Two of the younger girls in the branch have started calling me "Shakira Jie Mei" (Sister Shakira). Don't know where the confusion is coming from, I think it's just the hair.
Sister Norton
HFI
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