Birth-Day!

Wow!

I think I start every email that way. But wow. What a week. 

Oh Baby Vera!! Ahhh!!!!! So cute!!!!

This day has been a pretty emotional day. Your gifts were brilliant. By 10 am it was already the best birthday I´ve ever had. Being able to reflect on the impact that all these people have had on me, I look forward to running through these scriptures and relating them to these people. Seriously. It was brilliant. Harmonica? Hahahaha. So down to learn it. But I won´t send any videos home or anything, you´´ll just have to wait 2 years to find out whether or not I learned! Went bowling with Elder Fowles today! 

He. Is. So. Skinny. He´s lost 47 pounds! He runs and works out every morning, eats healthy, and is just having a blast. I´ll see them both next week at the Christmas Devotional, so it´ll be good! It was way fun. At the devotional I´m performing twice! A zone leader in another area asked me to help their zone with a musical number at the devotional, so I thought of songs we could do anddddd we made an arrangement of Joseph Smith´s First Prayer and Silent Night, the morning and the night of the greatest comings of the Savior. It´s way cool. I´ll get it recorded and send it to you! So my saturday´s I´ve been traveling to that zone in the morning and practicing with them the song. It´s cool. I also made an arrangement of I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day by request of Hermana Cook, it´s only piano. But I get to use music a lot down here, it´s pretty fun.

There are 2 experiences this week that come to mind that I feel like helped me better understand Christ and His Love for us, and since that is the message of this blessed season, I feel inclined to share them. 

1) This week my comp and I had tried to plan a Night of Talents for the ward, in which we could have a bunch of Christmas Festivities and bring everyone in the ward closer. We prepared a Spanglish version of White Christmas, which was pretty fun, and we invited everyone to come to the activity. We planned it to be from 6-8/9 on Saturday. We were all pretty excited about it. Saturday morning, as part of my training, we had to watch a few videos from The District(missionary training videos) and in this "episode" the missionaries had also planned a ward activity. Sometimes it´s kind of disanimating to watch The District because their wards are so big, their leaders are all so supportive, and the miracles the experience are pretty dang incredible. In this episode, they were expecting 150 people to come to the ward activity, and 300 people came. Haha. 

While I knew (yes, my faith is poor) that we weren´t gonna have 300 people show up to our activity, it did kind of make me hope to get more people than we were expecting to come to our activity. We worked just as hard as these missionaries did, and I felt like we could have a miracle too. We went to the church at about 5:45 to set up a little bit, and quickly I became discouraged with the results. At 6:10ish, 2 people showed up, and then left after they realized that nobody else was coming. By 6:30 we had the first counselor of the bishopric and the ward mission leader there. We were kind of ready to call it quits, but one of the other missionaries in the ward starting making phone calls to all his members and his investigators to try and get them to come. Having nothing else better to do, I followed suit and starting making phone calls.

A little miracle, but indeed a miracle, we got about 20 people to come down to the church. We ditched the idea of the night of talents, and instead watched a Christmas video and opened up a testimony meeting. The Spirit was very strong in the room as I listened to these Chileans bear testimony of our Savior. I grew to appreciate a little bit more the miracle that Christ performed with the Loaves of Bread and The Fishes, as He multiplied the little bit of food they had to feed all who had come to partake. In this night, and in my heart, Christ multiplied the presence of these 20, humble members of the church to more than I had room to receive. It was a perfect night with a perfect Spirit. It may not have looked the same as the "Miracle of the 300" that I saw in The District earlier that morning, but it was just the same to me. El Milagro del Veinte. 

I don´t know you may feel you lack in this time of gifts, presents, and festivities, but I have a testimony that none of us lack a Savior, who loves and knows us personally, who came to this earth to glorify the will of His Father and atone for all of our sins and sadness, for all of our everything. And He can multiply whatever little bread or fish you have, so that there is not room enough to receive it. He did it for me, He can do it for you.

That took longer than I thought, so maybe the other experience will be shared via Skype next week! 

Woo!

Love, 

The 19 Year old Uncle,

Elder Hixon