Thanksgiving, mice, and the Christmas Initiative

Diomara and Fam

This has been a good week. This will be mostly pictures because they explain better than words. Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I had a great thanksgiving. We ate with our investigator Diomara and her family, and then ate with Crissie (from Ecuador), her daughter and her fiancé's nephew. We ate way too much, and it was great. 

Crissie and fam on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Morning Selfie!

 We had a solid book of mormon lesson with Ción and the girls Monday night. They are doing well, but went to Chicago for the weekend so we couldn't get them to church. But Gabriela, our english student, and her husband Miguel came to church! Sunday was just a miracle- all the missionaries had investigators and/ or inactive members at church! It was because of the primary program. Children have secret powers or something, because they get people to church better than we do. :)

Our stake of missionaries at the service activity last week

 We got the Christmas initiative, which means we have the purpose and focus of the church for the month of December. The hashtag is #LIGHTtheWORLD and we will be doing service worldwide! It's going to be awesome, the members here love it already and we don't even start til December. :) Which is this week. But yeah.

Me with some trees.

All of us with some trees.

So we got a phone call from a lady named Nuri that was in our phone but not in any of our records. So we talked to an hermana that served here before and she said she was sweet, but kind of weird and to be
careful. We decided to visit her, and it was actually a pretty good experience! For the first half our. But it got weird. She is an older lady from Cuba, super nice and sweet, and also super sick. So we helped her out a bit in her house. She got home 3 days ago from being in the hospital for 3 months. She can barely stand up, so we helped her vacuum. As we were cleaning up the closet a mouse ran across the room! We all screamed. It was kind of a weird bonding moment. But so scary! So, she has mice. We helped her clean up a bit more, shared a message, and tried to leave. But she wanted to tell us about all her conspiracy theories. That's ok though, I'm not sure if we'll be going back. She got a good impression of us though!

 I was reading a talk by Robert D. Hales where he said: "Dark moments of depression were quickly dispelled by the light of the gospel as the Spirit brought peace and comfort with assurances that all would be well." That really hit me- what power the gospel of Jesus Christ really has! I have felt the spirit do this very thing for me many times on my mission. Jesus Christ is real and He is so powerful. I love being a missionary and I love sharing this joyful message with the people of West Chicago.

Til next week! Love you!
Hermana Hokanson

The new b2 crew (The missionaries in Bloomingdale 2 branch)