Mele Kalikimaka!

What up fam?

So here's how it's all been. This week in the mission field was pretty mediocre. Lots of cancellations and not enough lessons. We had a sit down with mission president (who just showed up at our pad, I thought that only happened in The Best Two Years movie) and he advised us on some ways that we could work more with the ward council so we will be trying to work with them and hopefully we will see some improvement. Prayers are always nice though :)

So is Moana taking over the mainland like it is here in Hawaii? I've heard a bit of the music just from members listening to it and whatnot and it sounds pretty solid. I would expect nothing less from Hamilton himself.

I definitely do not and will not pick up all of Hawaii Pidgin, you basically have to be born and raised here in order to speak it (and sometimes even understand it) but there are some really common terms that I have picked up. For example Pau means finished or done, Kapuno means senior citizen, and Pordague means someone that really likes to talk (we use that last one a lot with some of the Kapunos around here). But yeah I'd say more than anything my pronunciation some words has changed a bit. Hearing the way people on the mainland say Ukulele just sounds weird to me now. I will always be a haole but I at least don't want to sound like a tourist.

Elder Boyd is pretty cool. He's from some small town outside of Mesa, Arizona and is the third of six boys. He's a good missionary and we get along great but he sure as heck is different than Zollinger. We still don't quite have teaching together down to a science but we are getting better at it. We'll get there once we have had more practice.

So yeah some good stuff did happen this week, the best of which being that we got another commitment to baptism! We started teaching Sadie (the non member daughter of the Sunday school president) and she agreed to be baptized on Christmas eve so heck yes. That's probably the best way to spend the holidays that I can think of. I'm so excited!

Speaking of Christmas if anyone hasn't looked at the Light the World initiative yet you need to do that now. It is such a great idea and will bring a lot of souls to Christ. I can feel it. Christmas is just such a great time of year, especially being a missionary is awesome cause now I can focus just on Christ without all the presents and Christmas sales getting in the way. I hope everyone can remember why this is such an amazing time of year. I love it so much. I love my life and my family and this great gospel. It's all just so great.

So there's this Christmas thing that I'm making a commitment to do for the rest of my life. Every December I'm going to read a chapter of Luke every day because there are 24 chapters in Luke and it gives a really good beginning to end of Jesus's life and it will end up at the end of his ministry on Christmas eve. I'm going to do it out here and probably make it a tradition for every December.

Mele Kalikimaka!
Elder Smith