WEEK 56: Oh The Weather Outside is Frightful 💨

It has been a week full of thanksgiving, miracles, and Christmas!!! So excited for this Christmas season to start. Especially with the Christmas campaign that the church has come out with this year, "Light the World" in 25 ways over 25 days! If you haven't sent he video yet you can go to Mormon.org and also that is where you can find the daily service calendar starting December 1! I am literally soooooo excited for this to start and I really think it will help the world be brighter and we will be more peaceful. If everyone did it, think of how happy everyone would be! I do love the holiday season because, for the most part, it brings out the happier side of people. I challenge all of you to do the 25 day service thing.

But let's not get too carried away with Christmas, because we had a lovely thanksgiving in Arizona! We spent the morning studying and then we had dinner with the Freestones! They're members in our ward, and the wife is from Guatemala! Maybe she'll make paches for us on Christmas. But they're really nice and super willing to have us at their house. We talked to the English missionaries that morning and they had like 4 or 5 dinner appointments that day! So I'm SUPER grateful that we got one nice thanksgiving dinner and could eat the amount of food we wanted. After the dinner we went home and since we couldn't really visit with people that night, we decided to make chocolate chip cookies for our investigators! It took a while, but it was soooo worth it. The next day we got a lot of texts from the people we sent them to saying they were the best chocolate cookies they've ever had. If you want the recipe, they really are the most amazing chocolate chip cookies!

The day after thanksgiving we got to go Black Friday Shopping!!! Hahahaha, just kidding, we did something even better. We worked at the Christmas lights for the first night! It was so beautiful and I'm so happy they do it in my mission. And this is my second time doing it so they called us as shift leaders, nothing super special, but still cool. They invited the sisters from the Gilbert, Scottsdale, and Tempe missions to help us this year so we get to spend more time in our areas during the week and get to know even more people. I think I am officially accustomed to the Arizona weather because it is like 60 degrees out side at night and I am literally freezing! Despite the cold, Christmas lights is one of my favorite things because 1) You get to feel the spirit of temple grounds for about 3 hours 2) you get to meet and talk with so many people and help them feel the spirit of Christmas 3) It reminds me of salt lake temple square lights. I just love it so much!

Yesterday at church was also soooo great. We had 5 investigators at church, and the other sisters in our branch had about 5 as well, possibly more. So we had around 10 non members at church and it was really great! Last night was also really awesome. It started raining and it was about 8:00 at night and we didn't have any set lesson plans, so we were going to go visit people, but since it was cold and raining we needed to go somewhere where we knew someone would let us in, like a members house. So we pulled over for a second and looked at our list of members and a specific family kept coming to mind, but we were a little hesitant about visiting them because they talk A LOT. So we kept looking but that family was the only that felt right, so we went. We ran to the door to get out of the rain and knocked and a girl probably in her early 20's opened the door and let us in. We had never met her before but she is the daughter of hermana Sanchez and just moved in about a week ago. We started talking and getting to know her and everything and then she asked us to share the new Christmas video with her (it was part of the conversation). So we did and at the end she really opened up to us and said that ever since she came to live with her mom she's felt like she needs to come back to church and so many signs had been pointing to that, and then we knocked on the door and she saw who it was and she said that it really helped her to know. So it was really cool and I'm sooooo glad we followed that prompting to go to that house!

Well, I love you all so much and I hope you had a lovely thanksgiving and you enjoy this upcoming Christmas season! Have a wonderful week!

Hermana Brown

We went to downtown Mesa last pday and it was really fun!

Our little Christmas corner in our apartment 🎄 

We did a thankful Spanish board!

 Luces de Navidad Fotos!

This picture was sent to me by my cousin Yvonne that lives in Gilbert, AZ! She ran into Hermana Brown while visiting the lights!

This picture was also sent to me by someone that was there. I am so happy when I receive these pictures!!!