Have a mentioned how much I love Nampa!

Oh my goodness. I LOVE NAMPA! It is seriously just the place to be...but don’t actually move here because too many people are moving here and it’s making the campsites rather upset. When people find out I came out from Arkansas they usually say "oh I’ve never seen Arkansas" and I typically respond "yeah it’s the hidden gem of the south"... because #arkansaspride. But let me tell you Idaho's treasure valley is a hidden gem that has just been found! Did you know it is one of the top growing places in the country? Little crazy. And to top it off Nampa's city logo is "the heart of the treasure valley". So yes, Nampa’s gone crazy Martha. But I LOVE IT! 

This week was jammed packed with teaching lessons, finding others, and inviting people to our special Christmas sacrament meeting. So many people open their doors here! It’s amazing. Also, our bishops and wards are just wonderful and very missionary minded.

We received two very solid referrals this week and we are so hopeful for both of them. We also got a car this week... to share... but still we are so grateful. This area really needed that car. Unlike my other areas, although still crummy in winter, were designed to be walking areas, this area NOT. Like this area is huge... like two hours to walk to from one end to the other. The mission is really short on cars though so we are all just sacrificing what we can. 

Christmas sacrament meeting was amazing! We invited so many people this week and so many people came. The mission usually has about 110 people not of our faith come to church, and so for Christmas this year, we were hoping to get 200 mission-wide – almost double what we normally get. Everyone was a little skeptical, but promised to pray for it and work really hard. You know what God does when you have a bunch of kids working hard and praying? He provides miracles. As a mission we had OVER 500 PEOPLE COME! What the what?!?! It was so crazy. God is so good. Everyone is ecstatic and so excited to work with these amazing souls who decided to come and worship with us. 

Well, my friends, I want to thank you all for keeping the missionaries in your prayers and taking care of the missionaries in your home wards. Christmas is hard sometimes as a missionary but it also tends to be the most rewarding part of the year. God really showers blessing down on those who sacrifice their time for Him. He truly does love all of His children and wants them to return to Him someday. That is why He gave us His son. That is why we celebrate Christmas. Jesus Christ truly did come to the earth. He talked to the outcast. He healed the sick. He established God's church. He felt our pain. He carried our sorrows. He bore our sins. He died for us and rose again. He is our reason for the season. I love Him and I love my Heavenly Father. I know them and I know they know me. I am so grateful to be a missionary and have an opportunity to serve them and be an instrument in Their hands every day. 

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. 

Sister Aase 

I'll be Home for Christmas !!

So surprise! Transfers came and although we were assured many times that no one would be leaving right before Christmas here I am.... leaving.... right before Christmas. Wild. But I'm going back to Nampa. MY HOME! I've missed Nampa so much and I'm so happy to be back. It's honestly the greatest Christmas gift President could ever give me. So yes I am in Nampa now and will be covering 3 wards. I'm with Sister Ellett. She is pretty new (this will be her 4th transfer) and she is from AZ! I love my AZ sisters! 

So this past week was a really fun one. We had our Christmas Zone Conference. Man o' Man it was a blast. I got to sing a song with my dear pal Sister Ray. It was a song we created together in Meridian titled "The Life of a Sister" and it goes into all the ways that we are better than Elders haha. It's pretty fantastic and had a lot of the Elders baffled. My favorite haha. Then we also performed a Hula number with a bunch of sisters from the mission. Hula is so fun! I loved learning how to do it and laughing with my friends while doing it. 

We were finally able to teach Emily this week which made me oh so happy. She has been through a ton and her religious journey is super crazy. The amazing thing that is happening though is that she feels prompted to take these lessons now and so she is putting her WHOLE SOUL into it. She has these crazy journals and highlighters and is treating these discussions as a college course. It's pretty grand. Yesterday when Sister Anderson and I went over to see Emily we talked a lot about testimonies and how we can't gain a testimony on knowledge alone. It is just not possible. We expressed to her that she was going to, at one point, have to start praying and putting just as much work towards her relationship with God as she is with these discussions. It was an awakening moment for her and she realized the big piece of the puzzle she was missing.

We had this huge stake nativity activity this week. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The whole church was filled with Nativities from different countries. Some super modern, some over a thousand years old. It was so neat and so many people from the community came. ( I vaguely remember our stake in Minneapolis doing something like this when I was a kid. So it was cool to see and have little deja-vu moments here and there.) 

We also got to go back to the old folks home on Saturday and I got to talk to some of my favorite people for the last time. It was so great. 

So other than that I had a lot of goodbyes that I had to say these past couple of days. Goodbyes are the hardest. But it's amazing that I can love people so much... literally in the matter of weeks... that saying goodbye is so tough. 

I love you all and miss you like crazy.

Sister Aase

  

Saying bye to my pal Ray, Low-quality picture with high-quality Emily, saying bye to the Brushes (we wrote in our journals with them every Sunday night), and my goodbye to the Browns (Judy said she was doing her vogue face🤣 what a hoot) 

And Here to Stay...

Welp, it snowed this week! Like a lot. So my green beast is here to stay and now it has some friends, the yellow monsters (aka my crazy snow boots). Haha. The snow is honestly beautiful and I'm so grateful that I have warm clothes so I don’t have to die out here in cold Idaho. 

Not much happened this week. Lots of walking in the dark, some cool street contracting, and getting to share Christmas messages with families. Those are basically all the highlights. 

Man luckily the letter you got "last week" *wink wink* hopefully kept you entertained today. 

Love y'all 

Sister Aase 

Abby posing w/Michael Pope, who served

with me in my Canada Montreal Mission a 

few years ago (ok, like 32) - We were never

companions, but I was fortunate enough

to serve with him in many districts and zones.

He's been so great to send photos of Abby

when he sees her.

This is Abby's companion, Sister Anderson

Abby and other Sister Missionaries

out providing service as part of the 

Light the World project.

I'm guessing this was at a district meeting

The Green Beast is Back!

Okay y'all, so last pday was a little crazy so I didn't get to send an email to tell y’all about my week. So today you get two emails! Yay! 

So burrrrrr. It got super cold this week. You know what that means. My green beast of a coat has officially come out of the closet. So get ready for pictures all season long that will look like I'm wearing the same exact thing. 

Lots of highlights this week. To start I got to go to the temple with Shanell this week. Man alive I love that girl. Even though we had to give her over to Boise and couldn't see her baptism, it made me so happy that we could at least see her in the temple. Also, I got to see my number one Sister Maschino again so that was a plus.

We had an amazing lesson with my friend Sarah this week. Whenever you get a new companion it takes you a second to get into your groove and teach well together. ANDERSON AND I FOUND OUR GROOVE! It made me so happy. We both walked out of their just elated. 

I got to volunteer at the Meridian's Winter Parade (which is basically just as big of a deal as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade so I'm not even upset anymore that I couldn't see that *said through tears). It was so fun! We got to be the ones that would tell the kids *cough adults* to step back so the parade could come through. In Idaho, missionaries are basically famous, so there were definitely times where I felt like I was part of the parade because these kids would just yell "missionary missionary". It was funny and great. 

Last highlight. Saturday, Dec 1st, was the kick off to “Light the World” with the day of service. And serve we did. We started by going to one of our wards breakfast parties and helped take things down afterward. Then we went to a retirement home and served them lunch and talked to them for a while... scratch that... really long time. They really like to talk. They said the funniest things to us. So Sister Hansen (another sister missionary in our apartment) has dwarfism and seriously the number of confused faces and funny comments we got from these people was just hysterical. Sister Hansen was cracking up. I think when you’re old, you can pretty much say whatever you want and everyone will just find it funny or endearing. We ended the day of service at Sarah's house decluttering the heck out of it. It was so much fun. She's a hoot. 

Welp I think that is all. Hope you have a good week and continue to light the world in small ways!

Sister Aase