Merry Christmas!

Hey y'all,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year this year! I hope it truly is the greatest time of year for all of you.

Things are going pretty well here in the Palm Harbor area! This week has been pretty cool. One of the ideas that Elder Mainor and I had was to write a whole lot of Christmas cards for people that we are teaching or that we have previously taught. One of the coolest miracles that came out of that is we were able to get in contact with a lady that Elder Christensen found and that I had met only twice. Her name is Kelsey and she is pretty sweet. We were able to show her light the world and she invited us back in the next two weeks to share some scriptures with her. I am so excited for that.

We also got to go to the temple this week. It was super nice to go back to the temple and feel the spirit that is there. I know that those buildings are the house of the Lord. I felt so much peace sitting in the celestial room and I was able to have a question answered that I was pondering about for a couple weeks now.

We also had zone conference this week which is always awesome. This time it was on what we could do to jump out of the bottle. (When you put fleas in a bottle and put a lid on top, they will train themselves to jump just high enough so they don't hit the lid even if you take the lid off)

We also have been able to see a lot of miracles by knocking on doors. When I first got to the mission I was told that we do not knock a lot of doors since people are not very receptive anymore when you do that. This week I decided to make an effort to knock on a door  if we haven't talked to anyone for a while. This is one of the takeaways I took from zone conference.

We also had a good church meeting. The chapel filled up to like halfway through the gym. It was pretty cool. We had Patrick's nephew's Cyrus and Daniel come. That was really cool. We also had Neil Demers come again which was really cool. Elder Mainor and I were able to drop off some zucchini bread and have dinner with them this week. It was good, but we pushed baptism really hard which I think scared him a little bit. Hopefully we can continue to work with him and he will have the desire to get baptized in the future.

We were also able to go caroling with Bishop Patera and his family, the Glauss Family, and Emily Garnica. We were able to carol to about 4 families which was really nice. The best part was Brother Glauss insisted we sing Feliz Navidad each time. He got totally into it. That was really cool.

Other than that it was a really good week. I am excited to hear how any of your Christmas's have gone and hope y'all can remember the reason for the season. Have a great week and God Bless!

Elder Beard

2 Nephi 19:6

"6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called, Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace"

Elder Mainor and I went to the sponge docks last week.