December Already

Hola,

Well, another week has come and gone here in Chalco.  I can't believe we're already a week into December.  I just barely got used to November.  I also can't believe that in a couple of weeks it will be Christmas.  Two weeks from tomorrow we will be having our mission Christmas party.  And since we have a white elephant every year we got the usual shmeel today from the zone leaders about the type of gifts we can bring.  Basically, the majority of the gifts are something funny instead of something useful.  Things like Catholic saints and pineapples.  (The last one is a mission joke.  And I might be guilty of giving a pineapple last year.)  So basically they told us that it has to be something useful that costs at least 100 pesos.  I'm sure there will still be a lot of joke gifts.  I'm considering doing a combination.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same around here.  We had a seventy, Elder Toris, come visit the mission.  He talked about the importance of, and the way to work with members, among other things.  President Crickmore also gave us a surprise announcement.  Starting in January, the boundaries of the mission are going to change.  We will be losing two stakes, Meyehualco and Ixtapaluca.  And we will be receiving three new stakes in the city of Cuautla, in the state of Morelos.  He said that the missionaries will not be changing missions, just the boundaries.  It will be kind of sad to see the two stakes go, since I've served in both of them.  But who knows, maybe they send me out to Cuautla to finish my mission.  Other than that, no big news.  We've had some interesting lessons these last couple of weeks.  We have an investigator named Pilar who is a Jehovah's Witness, who is actually progressing pretty well.  But we've had to study up on the bible in order to be able to teach her.  But we've managed to get her to accept a Book of Mormon, and she came to church yesterday, which is a good sign.  Other than her, we found an interesting Investigator this past week name Itzel.  She doesn't profess any religion in particular, but her beliefs are more buddhist than anything else.  Including the fact that she is the second person in my entire mission I've met who believes in reincarnation.  The first lesson was interesting, but we'll see what she says in the next one.

That's about it for news from here. 

I love you, and I'll write you next week.

Love,

Elder Samuel Long