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)