Hey Guys

Hey guys!

Honestly, I don't even know what happened this week. I've found that mission life does that. ; ) What the heck? ; )

Favorite Spiritual Quote/Thing/Yeah, we'll label this as that:

So, this is actually from a picture from an Ensign magazine a couple of months ago, and it was just part of the picture that was in the magazine, so I don't know what the whole thing looks like. But there's a picture entitled The Savior Walked on Water, by Walter Rane, that I thought was super cool this week. It's depicting when the Savior is reaching out to save Peter. Super cool. I really liked it.

Favorite Funny Moment:

You know you're in California when... everyone is so good at movie stuff. ; ) A member family that fed us this week showed us a video the scout group put together about a chapter in Alma, just before the war chapters officially start. It's the chapter where the one guy gets scalped. Anyway, I was expecting it to be some production shot with a cell-phone, you know, something that looked like it had been done by a group of kids, but heck no. They had special effects that made it look like they were shooting machine guns at each other! (They modernized the chapter a little bit. ; ) So yeah. That was impressive.

We went to teach Carlisle this week and he told us he'd just had a couple of beers before we came by. (Obviously we haven't gotten to the Word of Wisdom yet. ; ) Sister Reynolds thought it was hilarious. Afterwards, she was just like "Oh, the Mormon Missionaries are coming over. Better have a couple of beers." ... Sorry, rough week for funny things. ; )

Favorite Spiritual Moment:

Our mission got to go to the temple this week for Christmas! It was so awesome! Being there is such a blessing. It made me think about how we truly are so blessed to get to have so many temples all around us in Utah. Sometimes I think we take that for granted. It's cool to see how so many people in the ward here make the temple such a priority in their life. There was a member family that fed us this week that hasn't been able to be sealed to their oldest son because his mom (his parents are divorced and remarried) won't allow it. They have to wait until he's 18. But it's so cool, because they all are so completely dedicated to being able to go the very day he can. He says it's his 18th birthday present. He's still only 14 or so, so it's amazing to see how important it is to him. I hope that the temple can always be that important to us as well.

Other stuff:

Sister Reynolds and I went to the family history center at our stake center with Stephen and Naomi this week, to show Stephen how to look for names. One of his lines seemed very done for someone who is the only member in his family that he knows about. But now we know why: we kept looking down that line, and suddenly something looked very familiar... Stephen is my cousin! He is descended from Asael Smith, Joseph Smith's grandfather. It was through a different one of his sons than our family, but yeah, how weird is that? We counted it out, and we are 7th cousins. I told Stephen the relationship to Joseph Smith, and I think it went a little bit to his head (not really, but yeah, it was funny). But cool! I love family history.

Love you all!

Love,

Sister Garfield

Christmas temple trip! Yay!

Our weird but awesome STLs

Us at lunch last p-day

Elder Clarke's funeral. ; )

And Elder Smith's. ; )

(When people are going home, we say they're dying. So our last district meeting of the transfer is funeral week. ; )

Random zone members in our parking lot picture

Thank you for the package! We are enjoying the fudge and the spanish book. Sister Reynolds is even more curious than I am about what's in the bottom layer. ; )

Our STLs gave us a Christmas tree! I don't think we realized how much we missed it until then. But we feel a lot more in the Christmas spirit now. And we had an awesome member family that gave us stockings. This ward is great.

Sister Reynolds looking through her stocking

Sister Reynolds looking through her stocking

me, doing the same.

me, doing the same.

Christmas temple trip! Yay!

Leo, the ferocious yorkie or something like that who thinks he's super terrifying. He likes to charge the fence and bark at us, defending his kingdom like a knight in mangy armor, every time we walk by. But apparently he's camera shy. ; )