Spencer - Called to Serve: Week 77 - Lots of Great Blessings! Playing Piano in Church and Skyping with the Family!

Lots of great blessings this past week that really made one of my favorite weeks of the year a great one! Last P-day was my birthday so we went out and got ice cream at one of the biggest malls ever, that is all we bought because sometimes we are miskinaries.....if you speak Indonesian, you'll get that joke! Overall, it was a great day filled with lots of happiness.

On Tuesday, we made transfer calls with President as this week there will be moves in accordance with the wave of new missionaries that will be arriving on the 30th! Every time there is a transfer, it is a season of its own. We are a lot more busy in the office and have less time out in the streets yet I still feel we are incredibly blessed with great investigators. This past week at church there was very few people because everyone in the ward went back to their homes to be with their families, there was like a total of 4 families with a couple extra people. That being said, I was asked to play the piano in church. It was not too bad at all, could have gone way worse. After all these years, I never knew I would be called on to play the piano in church. For now, I am okay with that one time experience until I can practice more.

I'm 99.9% sure my companion thinks I'm crazy out of my mind. On Christmas Eve I just could not hold in my excitement for skyping the family and for Christmas day. I was yelling and dancing and singing. He may think I have a problem or something but I was just so excited. The Skype call with the family was just awesome! It was such a great time!

As for investigators and other people we are working with, we were able to spend the 24th out and we visited some less-actives and sang Christmas songs with them and shared a Christmas message that lifted their spirits! We have a few new faces in our pool that are really excited to learn. Our goal for the new year is that every companionship get 5 baptisms in 12 months. I pray that I will be able to achieve that goal with the time that I have!

On Christmas we still held our English class. Afterwards, we always share a spiritual message. There was only one student and then the other missionaries. I am the only missionary that is serving in our ward that is a native English speaker so I taught and then gave a spiritual thought that really hit me. We listened to Christmas music for our class and also for the spiritual thought, I picked a song by Josh Groban some of the lyrics go like this

" Somedays we forget to look around us. Somedays we can't see the joy that surrounds us. So caught up inside ourselves, we take when we should give....It's up to us to be the change....There's so much to be thankful for....Even with our differences, there is a place we're all connected, each of us can find each other's light"

These lyrics really hit me, especially that last part. Living in a different culture, with different people that are way different than I am, we are still connected. I hope Christmas was a good one and that the New Year will bring great blessings!

Elder Hayes