Green Christmas

Hey everybody!

This week has been sort of a long week. So I'm going to try to remember it, and try to make this a half decent email.

I got a new companion named Elder Denison this week. He's from Mapleton Utah. He's a really sporty guy. Hes only been out 6 weeks longer than I have, so neither of us have yet been out 6 months. But that's okay, we have survived a week so far. I think we will be fine.

We put one of our investigators (Victoria) on date this week. Its a pretty flexible date, but we just set it as a goal for her to work towards. Our other investigators are doing fine. We got a referral from the YSA missionaries in another stake a while ago, her name is Paige. She is pretty solid but we have to teach very simply or else she gets super confused about everything. Megan and Michael have been praying more and reading scriptures together almost every night, which is great. I think that if we can get both of them to realize how much they want to be baptized, and how necessary it is for salvation, we will be able to get them to start living the law of Chastity so that they can be baptized. February or March I'm guessing. We've been doing a ton of tracting lately, but I really don't mind. A lot of missionaries really don't like tracting, Elder Denison doesn't either. I don't think it's that bad. Plus, we ran into this really cool guy named Elijah and talked with him for a while about the Restoration. He seemed pretty interested, so we are going to try talking to him this week and see if we can get him to come to church.

I hope y'all have been doing #LIGHTtheWORLD. It's a great opportunity to serve others. I would invite everyone that reads this email to try to share light the world with at least one person this next week leading up to Christmas. Just see how it goes.

That's all for this week! The picture is of a nativity my mom sent me. She also sent some snowflake lights that I used to make the nativity extra cool.

Elder Bates