Dec. 17th, 2012

Suuup?                                                                                                              December 17th, 2012

So it sounds like it has snowed a lot in Utah?? We haven't got any snow here yet and I don’t think we will be getting any around Christmas. But I think you guys are supposed to have snow Christmas Eve. The weather has been going up and down from the high 30's to low 50's. Thanks for the all the Christmas CD's!!! We've been listening to them everyday!! I’ve got a few Christmas cards from people in the ward. I have the paper tree up that Mom gave me along with the ornaments everyone wrote on. I also have that paper nativity thing up Mom sent me last year, and I’ve been doing that 12 days of Christmas thing. I read the stories/talks every morning during personal study. I’m sending home your guys' gifts today. Hope you like them!! We have our Christmas Zone Conf. tomorrow. I think for the talent show our whole zone is doing the Haka (or how ever you spell that.) It’s the thing that the football players usually chant. So the whole Zone is going to be hanging out at the church today for P Day. So were going to learn it while we’re all there.
Ok here's what we did last week. Monday- we had our special Zone Conference with Elder Pieper from the 70. It was really good, he was a pretty cool normal guy. We learned a lot from him. Ok here is a little stuff from my notes: Ok so he had a bunch of us ask him questions we had. So people asked stuff like how can I get my investigator to come to church, why won’t this investigator follow this commitment etc? So he talked about how pretty much all of these questions have the same answer. He talked about how the person/investigator needs to understand the Doctrine/principal behind commandments that we teach people. They have to understand why we’re asking them to do something, and how by doing that thing, that it will somehow help them to be able to become closer to God. So that's just a little bit from him. Later that day we saw Vernice and then Tony, both newer investigators. Tuesday - Was our P-Day since we had Zone Conf. on our regular P-Day. We went down to Center City and did a little Christmas shopping. That night we were supposed to teach Debbie, but she had to cancel. We had a member with us so we went and taught Vernice and had a good lesson with her. Wednesday - I think I told you about one of our recent converts dads dying. He was killed in a hit and run accident last week. So Bishop requested us to go to the Funeral. It was at a Greek Orthodox Church... and lets just say it was VERY different. The "Priests" sang in Greek the entire time. The entire funeral was them singing prayers and scriptures. There was a bunch of really sad crying people. Its crazy how different our funerals are compared to theirs. Big difference! That night we had FHE with Ruby. We watched Mr. Krugers Christmas. Haven't seen that in a while. Thursday - Had District meeting, all 3 of our appointments for that night fell through. We had an appointment with Cinquetta that I was excited for. We had a really good active couple coming to the lesson with us, and it was going to be awesome. Then the couple and Cinquetta had to both cancel last minute…  Friday - We had an appointment with Debbie. Nick Andro the Recent Convert came teaching with us to that. We had a good lesson. Read the tree of life. We still can't get her to come to church, but she's reading the Book of Mormon and enjoys our lessons. But she’s stuck on continuing on going to her catholic church. She teaches disabled kids there. We also saw Tony that night and had a good lesson with him. Saturday - we had coordination meeting in the morning with Bro. Payne, our awesome ward mission leader. Then we mostly had stop by's all day. Tried to visit all the people that have a baptism date to remind them about church. Sunday - Had PEC in the morning. We ended our meeting kind of early so we walked to nearby people to try to get them to come to church. Cinquetta was there (her 3rd time). As well as Niki who is a new investigator from this past week. Church was really good, and we had some good speakers. After church we taught Ayanna a young recent convert.  Then that night we went with the Dyers to the Messiah, which was good.
So that was our week! I’m excited for Christmas and to call you guys!! Our president gave us permission to Skype, so if we can get over to a members house. We will try to do that. My companion doesn’t really want to deal with all that, so we might not... it depends. But either way we will be talkin!! So be ready with questions! So think of things you want to ask me/talk to me about. I will have about an hour.
:) Have a great week!
-Elder Jeremy Jensen

Philly Subway