I love it here so much!

Family,

Do you think that the Lord has a sense of humor? I seem to think He does. I'm not sure why this makes me laugh, maybe it's just because of how it's spot-on of how He runs things in missionary work. On Friday, we were looking for people to teach and nothing special was happening, but we made our way over to see a potential investigator at 8:45 but he wasn't home. We had 15 minutes left and I thought to myself that it's okay if we went in a tiny bit early, but as we were passing the only lively house in the neighborhood, I put my pride aside and suggested we knock on it. It was a peculiar thing to do because it just sounded like a bunch of teenagers upstairs, but a very nice woman named Marie answered the door and we talked for about 15 minutes and we left her with a Book of Mormon and she initiated our return appointment. New Investigator!!! haha, so cool. It's always the last door that you don't want to do where something goes great. The Lord certainly answered our prayers with that one. It's a rare occasion we find an investigator by tracting, but it doesn't mean it doesn't work!

It was actually a pretty good week for us here. We taught 4 people this week, which is the best weekly report we've had so far. The weather is very warm here, it's been in the 80's all week (: I'm not really all that sad about there not being any snow here, to be honest. Often people ask if we'd ever move to California and it's too bad it's so expensive here, because the winters really are great here.

On Tuesday, the Hobbs and the assistants visited our zone and presented a new video the church is putting out for Christmas. It's exciting for us as missionaries because it gives us a way to connect to people easier since everyone's starting to feel the Christmas Spirit. The cashier today at Winco even told me to have a Merry Christmas, it was weird. And Pepboys was playing Christmas music. Either way, the church is so great with the audiovisual stuff. I'm never embarrassed to view or suggest a video for someone to watch.
Recently I watched a great bible video of when Christ healed a blind man, and He instructed the man to wash in a certain pool of water. What I noticed was that Christ wasn't even there to see the man regain his sight. Doesn't that just sound like Christ's character? He never acted compassionately for a reward or praise. I'm so grateful that we get to celebrate along with many others of different faiths the birth of the Savior and how He humbly entered our world. He truly has been refined through the Atonement, it goes to show that our trials results make us stronger and better than before. It's unreal what he experienced while He was on the earth. It'll be a special time of year. I started the Book of Mormon again and this time, I'm highlighting any reference I see to the Savior and from my reading, I picked out 58 times He was mentioned in the first 3 chapters. How could a wicked person write a book so inspiring? I know Joseph Smith is a true prophet of God and that he helped millions find renewed faith in our Savior. Myself included.

Our English class went well this week. We had 10 people attend! It's such a fun class. It's a different form of service, but I really like it. We taught our class what kind of things to say when they go shopping. They were so relieved we taught it, they said it was very helpful to them. There's a guy that leaves our class each time in his struggling English saying: "I feel good!" haha, he's awesome. On Friday, we knocked on a guy's door and he was pretty drunk and gave us a hug, but he said if we knocked on his door any other time he wouldn't have answered, so that's kinda cool. And because Elder Hsu speaks Chinese, we got 100+ referrals for Chinese speakers in the Chino stake from missionaries in Arcadia, so we should be pretty busy till Christmas it seems like ha!

Well that's our week in a nutshell. We've got 2 Thanksgiving meal plans on Thursday, so that's good! I really hope we can find a new person to teach that day. Just because it's a holiday, doesn't mean the Lord's work ceases! Thank you all so for being wonderful people, I am truly thankful for the Lord in sending me to California. I love it here so much! I love you guys as well. Have a great Thanksgiving, talk to you next week!

- Elder Bennion