Mele Kalikimaka

We wish all of you a merry Christmas, wherever you may be, please know that we love and care for you. We know that, in addition to our children and siblings we write to on this blog, many other friends and loved ones are reading these weekly updates on Facebook about our wonderful mission activities as well. We hope and pray your lives are filled with happiness, and you have a joyous Christmas holiday season with friends and family. We wanted to do something special this Christmas, so we bought nearly 200 tins of Christmas cookies at Longs Drug Store, pasted an appropriate message on the back, and handed them out after church services on Sunday. Love to share the Joy of Christmas!

The month of December provides multiple opportunities for us to serve our fellow man and extend them a helping hand of love, kindness, fellowship and compassion. We are blessed as full-time missionaries to have time available to devote our full attention and resources towards the things that we feel can make a real difference in our wards and communities. We feel that coming here in late summer has turned out to be a real advantage for us. It allowed us to establish friendships and a real connection with the people we meet at the Kupuna breakfasts, the food Pantry, Aunty Blanche's homeless shelter, the IHS centers, and activity nights at both wards so they know our service is genuine coming from the heart, and not out of a sense of obligation because it's something we're supposed to do during the holidays. Probably the most important thing we've done so far on our mission is to provide consistency to our service. The people we serve know that we love them because we are making a consistent effort to care for them week after week.

We played Christmas Bingo at every place we visited this week. Some of the individuals we meet are really struggling as they try to turn their lives around, and have limited opportunities for fun activities and social interaction. So we try to give them positive experiences through various types of games and activities. It also helps them feel at ease around us, break down barriers, and hopefully give each of them a favorable impression of the Church of Jesus Christ, and they can see for themselves how we try to follow the Savior by what we say, and what we do. Our goal is to fertilize the soil so that when the seed of the restored gospel is planted in their hearts at some future date, it will grow into faith and testimony.

This week we had two more opportunities to volunteer at the Giving Machine in the mall. We attended a Christmas party at the Waimanalo shelter, and were overjoyed to see the happy faces of the children as they opened gifts donated by the community and local churches, including ours. We are witnessing a miracle going on as homelessness and despair is gradually being replaced by hope and a sense of community as one by one families are being rescued from tents on the beach and given shelter in the small homes they are building on the property there. 

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