Week 12 - Thanksgiving and finally teaching more regularly!

So for my first month here we pretty much just tracted around all the time, but now since we've actually found some people, it's so nice to actually have appointments every once and a while!

I know what you mean about the "eternal perspective" idea. I've definitely caught a glimpse of that on my mission as I've thought about the sacrifice that this is. In an eternal perspective, these 2 years are well worth the blessing it is to share the restored gospel. But it is often hard to keep that eternal perspective.

Glad to hear Thanksgiving at the Thayne home was a success! I'm also glad to hear that you're getting "swoll" ;) I miss those days when I could go to the gym everyday and work on my own "swoll".

 We did get another lesson with Hna Lyon's friend. We actually gave her a church tour on Thursday which turned out way better than I expected. Usually we are supposed to have a member there to give the tour with them, but we couldn't find anyone to do it so I was kinda stressed about that. Not to mention I hadn't practiced my church tour very much so I was worried about remembering how to say all the things I needed to say. But everything went well, and then afterwards we taught her a quick Plan of Salvation lesson. She doesn't seem to understand very well. She said she'll start coming to church but we still haven't seen them there. J. and C. are still showing a lot of interest. It's just a hard situation because J. works every day from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. and C. works every day from 3 p.m to 1 a.m, so it is going to be hard to teach them together. We might have to end up just going twice a day and teaching them individually. It is also hard because they have a strong desire to come to church and see what it's like, but they can't because of their work schedule. We invited them to pray that the Lord would give them a way to attend church and they told us they would. 

The highlight of the week for me was thanksgiving. We had the whole day off and it was nice to get a break.  Yeah it was definitely weird to have a thanksgiving away from family.  We started out with a nice breakfast at Denny's with everyone in our zone and then we went and played a turkey bowl :) it was really cold, but after running around for a while, I warmed up enough. Then we ate at our branch president's house and it was way good! He's such a fun guy and he loves the missionaries. He's actually from AF but he hasn't lived there for many years now. Then we had a dinner appointment at a members house. We eat at Cristina's house every Friday, but this week she had us over for thanksgiving instead. It was a lot of fun to have Thanksgiving here, but I definitely miss Thanksgiving at home! I got your thanksgiving box and I LOVED it! There was some sticky syrup that got on a few things but it wasn't too bad ;) All those leaves that you guys wrote notes on made me tear up. Thank you so much.

Thanksgiving Dinner at Cristina's House

Something I learned this week is how important it is to have patience as a missionary. Patience with your investigators, your companion, the weather, and much much more. It's definitely hard to be patient and it's something I have always struggled with, but I can see that I am learning to be more and more patient each day. 

On p-days we usually just go to the church and play basketball or volleyball with all the other missionaries in our zone so that's what I have planned.  It has actually warmed up a bit in the past couple of days, but it's still pretty dang cold. The thermals help a ton! Thank you! 

So I don't know if you have seen the church's new Christmas video "He is the Gift", but if not you should all go see it! It's only about 2 minutes long and it is quite powerful. We have started using this video as a way to talk to people about Christ in order to find more people to teach. Since so many people have smart phones now days, we even just ask people if we can watch the video right there at the door. We have already seen some success with this as the first person we showed it too invited us back to talk some more next week! I'm hoping this will help bring people closer to Christ through the winter season. I hear it is the hardest time for missionary work. 

Thank you so much for your prayers and your support! You're in my prayers every day and I love you so much! Happy Holidays!

Love,

Elder Thayne

We're spot on with our Christmas spirit :)  We found this tree in a closet. It was probably left here by some previous missionaries.

Sporting a tie mom bought for me for Halloween...a little too short, but looks great under sweaters!