December 29, 2014

Dear family,

It has been an amazing week!  It was great to talk to you on Christmas.  I'm glad that everyone was able to be there.  It has been a great Christmas season and it's going to be a great start to a new year!  It seems like a lot has happened this week so hopefully I remember everything. 

We had a couple lessons with one of our investigators.  We are finishing teaching her lesson five, so we taught about the temple and family history and also about service.  We hope to get her to the temple really soon after her baptism.  She had her baptismal interview and she is already to be baptized this Saturday.  Her family is not too supportive so we are hoping they will come to the baptism.  We had a lesson with another investigator this week and she accepted the invitation to be baptized!  We tried to set an earlier date, but she wanted to do it in February.  She is on date for February 7th!  I'm really excited to continue to teach her.  We also had a lesson with a kid that has been coming to church with his friend.  We taught him the restoration lesson and he had a lot of questions.  He didn't accept the invitation to be baptized, but we have another lesson with him today. 

On Friday we found out that we were getting a couple mini missionaries on Saturday.  So what happens is several youth from a stake in our mission come with the missionaries for a couple of days.  They stay with us at our apartment, they follow all of the mission rules, and do everything that we do for a couple days.  So we have a couple youth from the Highland West stake staying with us until Tuesday evening.  We have two of them so we can split up.  It is almost like we are on splits most of the day.  The mini missionaries are seniors in high school and are planning on serving missions.  It is a great experience for them to see what it is like to be a missionary and it will hopefully get them excited to do missionary work before their missions.  They are some awesome youth and are doing great.  We try to involve them as much as we can.  So one of them actually extended the invitation to be baptized to the investigator who is planning to be baptised in February.  That would have been cool to do that before my mission.

Christmas eve and Christmas day went really well.  We went caroling on Christmas eve with our district.  It was a lot of fun!  We stopped by a recent convert in our area and she was having a hard day.  She was really grateful that we came.  It makes just one visit like that to make it all worth it.  We had a different kind of white Christmas.  We had a couple of baptisms in the zone on Christmas day.  Everyone was a little worried that no one would come because it was on Christmas, but we had to move into the chapel because there wasn't enough room in the relief society room.  The whole stake presidency was also there.  It was a really great baptism and the spirit was really strong there.  What a perfect way to celebrate Christmas by being baptized.

It is amazing to be a missionary!  It's not always easy, but it is most definitely worth it!  I'm so grateful for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I know it brings so much joy, peace, and hope into our lives.  I know that Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer.  Thank you for all your prayers and all that you do for me.  I love you all so much!  Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Joshua Gandy

P.S.  I met someone the other day that knew dad in high school.  It's a small world.

P.P.S.  Steve Young's brother lives in one of our wards and he was visiting this week, so I shook Steve Young's hand at church on Sunday.