Dear Family,
Well, another week has come and gone away here in the mission field, and we had some good things happen, as well as some surprises. Elder Sanchez is no long with us. He was midtransferred this morning to McAllen and is now safely over there with his new companion. He was only here for three short weeks. I did learn a lot from him and he helped me to progress and become a better missionary. Elder Marble and I are back to a companionship of just two again. I'm not gonna lie, I loved being in a trio. Four missionaries in an apartment sometimes leads to too much goofing around, and two is sometimes pretty quiet. Three seemed about just perfect. Like I said, he was only here for three weeks, but it seemed like longer. I'm thinking it may have been because we got along so well that we got to know each other like we were together for a long time. Bah, I don't know how to explain it, but hopefully you all can understand.
Oh wow, New Years was this week and I completely forgot! We went to bed like normal at 10:30, but got awakened at midnight by our neighbor's fireworks. Something interesting to know is that Cameron Park is sectioned off from the city of Brownsville. All the areas around it are city of Brownsville, but they cut out Cameron Park. It's interesting because that means that none of the city laws apply to Cameron Park. For example, in the city of Brownsville you can't buy/sell fireworks, but Cameron Park isn't the city of Brownsville. So basically the whole place is filled with firework stands because everyone from the city goes there to buy their stuff. We've heard that Cameron Park also gets pretty crazy on New Years from people shooting off guns to celebrate. W didn't hear any since we were in our house and Cameron Park is a couple miles away from where we live. Before the missionaries did live in Cameron Park though, I imagine that New Year's eve must have been a pretty intense experience back then.
I had some meetings at the church with the ZLs earlier on in the day and then we had a party for the missionaries from the afternoon until the night. So basically I spent the whole day in the church, but it was pretty fun. We had a pinata of the Book of Mormon that a recent convert gave to the missionary that I replaced. We filled it up with candy and smashed it at the party. I got some pretty good pictures of it and a video of my (former) companion Elder Sanchez smashing it open. We were running low on time so we put him in and took off the blindfold. He's a pretty big guy and without the blindfold he got some pretty good hits on it. Afterwards we played a scripture chase game and then we watched the movie 17 Miracles. I don't know if you've seen the movie. It's about the pioneers, specifically about the Martin Willie handcart company if I remember correctly. It's a really sad film, since you see some of the extremely hard things they had to go through. It also gives you an appreciation for their dedication and shows some of the tender mercies of the Lord to them during their trek. I don't think I have nearly the commitment to the gospel that the pioneers had. Don't get me wrong, I'm very committed, but what they did was just amazing. I hope if I ever had a chance to make a decision like that and test my faith that I would follow through with it.
Anyways, thank you to everyone who sent me card and letters for Christmas. I especially enjoyed the drawings from Nathan's family and Christian. I hope we can all commit ourselves to doing better in this new year and I know that it is going to be filled with some great things for all of us. I pray I can grow as much in this year that comes as I have in this year past. It really is amazing to me when I think about it. Happy new year everyone! Talk to you next week!
Love,
Elder Wood
