Happy New Year!

 Sorry it's been a bit! I think my last email was before Christmas, so I'll start there. Christmas eve we had a surprisingly successful time street contacting, everyone was so kind and surprisingly outside. We had a huge heat front, and so it was 80°. It was so nice walking around Christmas eve/ Christmas with short sleeves haha. we had dinner with the Kuroiwas, this super cool family that made some awesome shrimp scampi🦐

After that we went to the apartment and cold called, which also surprisingly went well considering it was Christmas Eve, the Lord was definitely answering prayers on that one. 

Christmas day was our Pday, and me and Elder Godfrey decided to treat ourselves to some McGriddles but alas McDonald's was not open. So we went home and had some granola bars and I was able to open a package my mom sent me over video call with the fam. I got a tie with dinosaurs on it! #swag 

We then went to the church and played some games, pretty much a normal p day actually. It was kind of wierd, Christmas this year felt like a normal day, guess that's kind of a part of serving a mission! It was super cool focusing more on Christ and what he's done for us, and seeing how just everyone was kinder and had their arrows facing outwards. 

Another week came and went, not much out of the ordinary happened except for an exchange with Elder Thomason, he's a goober it was pretty fun. New years eve we had a super hype lesson with this Catholic lady named Sharon, and then a meal with the Adams family. We had a curfew of 6 pm, so we just did more cold calling after dinner. I think I have cold called every holiday of the mission so far, surprisingly it has been pretty fun on those days because people are generally happier and thus more open to at least conversation. Anyways New years day came, and with it more tornados! This time they mainly hit this stretch of land like 10 miles north of us, we just got some warm wind lol. This lady that we are teaching had her roof blown off, it's still so weird to me that tornados not only exist, but are just a part of life here. And we aren't even in tornado Valley! anyways, we had to hunker down for New years day and we played board games and you called it Cold calling. 

That brings us to this week! Thankfully we should be back on normal p day schedule. Elder Godfrey has been so fun to work with,this transfer has been a blast I'm sad that it's only gonna last one more week. 

This last week I was getting a little frustrated with myself for not being able to do more to help my area. It hasn't been so much being frustrated with outward results, more so just hoping my imperfections were not costing the people in the area, hoping that I'm not doing something to prevent more success. Then, I read Alma 29, but focused on the first four verses. I won't tell you the details of the study u had, as that would probably be useless to all reading this, but I'd encourage yall to go back over that chapter, it's powerful. I know that the Lord knows how to work around imperfect instruments, and as long as we are striving with with we have to do our role and improve, he will fill in the gaps.

Love yall!

- Elder Thomason before and after shots of drinking maté

- funny text, pretty much the south in a nutshell

-Elder Godfrey straight mobbin 

- Tennessee in a picture 

- the district

- cool sunset, pics don't do justice but they're crazy down here

Brother and Sister Adams (went to law school with Eric and Kristin Jeppson)