Dear Friends and Family:

Thank you all for the letters and packages! For those of you who are not part of my family, one of the traditions we do each year is we find a nativity set and we deliver a piece each day for 12 days before Christmas, ending with Jesus Christ on Christmas Eve. This year, one of the things that my parents sent me was a pre-prepared set for the 12 days of Christmas. Elder Hunt and I decided to do it for a new convert in our ward named Tony, who otherwise is doing nothing this Christmas. If any of you are in a position to contact him, please refrain from letting him know who is leaving the Christmas gifts each night. Today is day 4, he hasn't caught us yet!

We had a pretty good week. We did not have any baptisms, but Elder Hunt and I were very excited to be consistent with the number of investigators we had in sacrament meeting. We had two investigators come early enough to see the sacrament being blessed, and both are preparing to be baptized this weekend as well. Both of them are struggling with one thing - one with the Word of Wisdom, and the other with finding somewhere else to live or getting married so that she can live the Law of Chastity, but both of them are solid potentials and both of them are very happy to be preparing to be baptized.

We found Anteniqua about three weeks ago, but she couldn't come to church because at the time she was on house arrest. But last Monday she went to court and had everything cleared up, so she was able to come to church and had a wonderful time. I don't think I've told the story of how we found her, so I'll tell it now. We were going through the ward directory, trying to make contact with as many people who we didn't know as possible. We tried to visit an inactive member who lived in Anteniqua's house, only to find that he had moved out long ago. But we said a prayer with Anteniqua, and she accepted baptism, church, and everything. We found out later that she had been praying earlier that day for God to send someone to come and knock on her door. We then, unwittingly, showed up and answered her prayer. :)

We found Johnesha around the same time as we found Anteniqua, three weeks ago, but each week something else came up that prevented her from coming to church. We were very close to dropping her, but we decided to go back one last time and ask if she had read the scriptures that day. We did so, found out that she had, and we kept seeing her. Two days ago she came to church with her three daughters for the first time, and loved it. She is doing so well. We're so excited to watch her progression!

Two other investigators came to church about 30 minutes late. They left an hour early as well, and they caused a little contention in the Haitian Creole Sunday school class, but they are still interested in hearing the message and preparing for baptism, so we are going to keep going back and try to work around the rough edges. It should be fun.

Thanks,

Elder Slade

PS. We are not allowed to go to the temple. I've only been to the temple once since leaving the MTC, and that was a special occasion when the entire mission went to the temple together about a month after the Fort Lauderdale temple was dedicated. It was an amazing experience, but it seems like I will have to wait until the day I fly home to go to the temple again.

PPS. Our call to our family will be no more than 30 minutes, we don't know when it will happen, and it will only be over skype if we can find a member who is willing to let us come over and use their devices for a while. It's still up in the air, but we will call for 2 minutes on Thursday morning just to tell you all what time we are getting on.