The mission Christmas conference was awesome! We started out with a talent show, and I had no idea we had that many instruments in the mission. We had an elder play "Go tell it on the Mountain" in a country style, Elder Vandenburg played the bagpipes and he wore a kilt (the poor guy was called Sister Vandenburg, but he corrected them and said, "It's Hermana Vandenburg-I'm in the Spanish program." :)) We had five sisters do a mix of Christmas melodies, there was a rap about our purpose as a missionary, there was a little play about the actions of a straight-A missionary in the morning (get up at 6:30 or earlier, exercise so you work up a sweat, eat healthy, brush your teeth, shave for the elders and put on makeup for the sisters, be ready and excited to get out and work!), but my personal favorite was "Poncho Claus" by President Burton, one of the counselors to President Riggs. President Burton can speak Spanish and he has the look of a mad scientist when we he gets excited. Anyway, so he starts off(In a Spanish accent) "Twas dee night before Chrristmas and all trrough dee casa not a criature was stirring to ask "Que pasa?!" It was so great. He changed up some things so that the poem reflected true Hispanic culture and he nailed it. The whole Spanish program was dying of laughter by the end of the poem, and all of the English program was wondering what was going on. I really wish I had recorded the performance, but I totally forgot and I think I would have been laughing too hard to get a good video of it, anyway! After the talent show, we had a Christmas devotional and then took a Christmas photo of the whole mission. All 250 of us. We were packed on the stand like sardines in a can. It was good, though. We then had lunch, where I ate chicken pot pie on a buttermilk biscuit, two cupcakes, and some sort of vanilla cone with white chocolate and peppermint pieces on it....I had a very fun night that night, trying to balance allergic reactions with working..I made it, though!
It was a good thing I got a lot of laughs in at the Christmas conference, though, because I could never imagine that getting someone baptized would be stressful. We had a miscommunication with the mom of our investigator on Thursday, two days before the girl's baptism, and the mom thought her daughter wasn't going to be baptized. We hadn't had contact with our investigator all week (really bad thing to do), so that was why we had called her mom. Friday, after the conference, actually, we searched hard for our investigator, found her, and asked if she was getting baptized. She said that the night before, Thursday night, her mom got mad at her because she thought she wasn't getting baptized and asked if she really was. Our investigator told us that in a moment of anger, she told her mom she wasn't. We told her what had happened, that it was our miscommunication and we'd talk to her mom again and that she was going to get baptized. We couldn't get ahold of the mom, but the elders talked to her and texted us that she was going to bring our investigator to the church on Saturday for her baptism. The day of the baptism, Saturday, one of the missionaries our investigators wanted to be there calls us up and says, "I can't get a ride from the members here and the assistants to the president won't let me drive there, so I won't be coming, but tell her how proud I am of her!" And I said to myself, "Self, my companions and I have fought too hard for this day to let ANYTHING fall through now." A name came to mind and I called them up and they said yes, they would pick up this missionary, even though it was a 45 minute drive one-way and there was an hour and a half before the baptism..they made it in time...God is so great. I am very certain He put that name in my mind and helped us to find our investigator to remind her how much she wanted to get baptized. And I gotta say, man, I have never felt so relieved to see anyone go into the waters of baptism before. I've seen a lot of baptisms here, but it's different when it's a person you, yourself, have helped come to those waters.
Then, Sunday, there was a gas leak in the church, so we only had an hour of meetings, but it was taken care of by the evening, so the Christmas concert went really well.
But, the ups and downs of missionary life continue. :)
