Exit Christmas, Enter New Year

Aloha!

So its been an interesting bit of time here in Hawai'i. Last week we had Christmas which was amazing. We got together with the zone and had a secret santa gift exchange. Some elder got me a Chewbacca hot wheels card and I got Elder Iverson (our ZL) a " Men of the Islands" 2018 calendar. So all in all everyone had a merry Christmas. Also the big treat was that we all got to watch the movie Moana which was amazing. Most of us in the zone are older in the mission so we have been waiting over a year to see this. We all thought it was great and was a cool combination of all the Polynesian cultures (there is actually very little Hawaiian there, it's mostly Samoan, Tongan, and Maori). Beat part was when Mau'i yelled "Cheehoo!" the first time and all the elders did it too. I flippin' love this mission.

Buuut on the work side of things we had to focus on finding some new investigators and we found a really solid one named Brittany through a member named Sister Frost. It resulted in probably the funniest lesson i have ever taught because sister frost is... interesting. She would take the lesson in the wrong direction constantly and her son Thunder (yes. His name is Thunder Frost. Dopest name ever) who just got home from his mission last week had to keep directing the lesson where it needs to go. Brittany was super receptive and in the end Elder Lee and I extended the baptismal commitment and she said yes... only for sister Frost to say its too soon for us to extend that and Thunder had to tell his mom to be quiet because this is how we are suppose to do things. Despite the craziness we set her with a date for mid February and we will hopefully see that through. The spirit was super strong and I gained a testimony that you can feel the spirit even in the craziest of circumstances.

Aside from that we had New Years last night and stayed up til midnight to see all the neighbors launch their illegals. Our apartment has a view of all of south Kona so we could see a lot of crazy stuff happening. Its been a very memorable week. Anyway I love you all and hope that you are all finding ways to keep the Christmas spirit into the new year.

Ofa atu

Elder Smith
Hawai'i Honolulu Mission