Week 72...12/21/15...FEZIZ NAVIDAD

Hola Familia y Amigos! Que tengan una Feliz Navidad! I hope you all have the greatest Christmas of all! And that you can all remember the true meaning of CHRISTmas. I love the word Christ-mas. Because in Spanish mas means more. More of Christ. Christ Mas. I love it. I hope that you all can have a season con MAS CRISTO. It will make this season the best of all if you can fill it with the love, and joy of our Savior Jesus Christ. I know He lives. I know that He was born and lived and died. But that He rose the third day to be the Savior of the world. Unto us, a Savior was born, that we may have hope, joy, and peace in a world full of hurt, despair, and chaos. He is the greatest gift that has been given, that ever will be, and the greatest gift that we can give. Share it.

This week was full of sharing the Christmas spirit with everyone! We started off the week bright and early at 3:00am on Tuesday morning to get to our Christmas devotional in San Marcos. On the way, we were overwhelmed to see just an amazing sight of a sea of clouds with mountains that looked like islands. It was just incredible! This country is so full of beauty.

The sea of clouds, and modeling attempts.

The sea of clouds!

We had a great devocional with some talent show and a great lunch! President also had all of the people that memorized ''El Cristo Viviente'' come and recite it in front of everyone. It was so cool to be part of the 4 in our Zone to do it. It really has such power to share such a document by memory.

Me and Elder Wilden in the Devocional (He's a branch president up there!)

The lunch!

The rest of the week we had activities every night. If we weren't presenting the ''A Savior is 

Born Video'' with our district we had an even bigger activity.

On Thursday I went on divisions with Elder Keck and we found this one super cool guy! He started off not being that positive but we just tried to have the faith that he was going to understand our message and he did! He had an awesome bunch of questions and we invited him to our activities we've been planning.

On divisions with Elder Keck, I threw this piece of grass into a river and ended up catching myself a little snack! Actually, I threw the speared fish and it was quickly eaten by a chicken.

This week I made my debut on national Guatemala Canal 5 punto Rojo television. So that was pretty exciting. The studio was pretty sketchy, just a tin roof over all of the camera equipment. But it was pretty cool! Elder Wolfgramm and I announced our lantern activity and everyone was just super excited for it!

Me & Elder Wolfgramm

Me in the studio. They had just got done interviewing some Rappers so It was kinda crazy seeing two different worlds in there

Friday was the first-ever Lantern Launch in the park of Coatepeque. We showed videos and sang hymns as 24 missionaries and had people sign up to be able to launch lanterns.

We shared copies Book of Mormon and Tons of Pamphlets. Finally to end the night we sent off 100 Lanterns! Everyone loved it! They came from everywhere to watch! Honestly, it was an answered prayer. We prayed all week for good weather and then started praying that no one caught anything on fire. They both were answered as nobody caught on fire! 

The photos of the lantern activity! (notice how full it ended up getting.) Definitely, some heavenly protection was here, one of the lanterns hit the big tree in the park, but didn't get stuck and continued rising into the sky rather than catching the plastic Gallo beer tree on fire.

Then on Saturday, we tried to get permission for Denis to get baptized but his mom kept coming and going and we could never get it.

We got asked to help with the Ward gathering and me and my companion helped cook all of the food.

Elder Huesca

Chicken, salad, pineapple drink, and more CHICKEN!

Sunday we had a miracle happen. . .
Last week we found a family who's Dad is a serious alcoholic. He had a month of just being super drunk. We came to his house and told him that we had been sent by God to change his life and that God needed him in His church and that he needed to stop drinking and come to church next week. And guess what!? HE DID!
His family is so pumped! They came to the Convivio on Saturday and he came to church the last 2 hours so that was awesome! He said he loved every minute of it!

Elder Moritaya and Elder Rodas!

Then we had the Coro Navideño! We had a stable set up outside so that we could get all of the references of the investigators that came. We had them take photos and write down their direction so we could go and drop off the photo and visit them! We had a ton of people come!

Me in the stable.

This is the photo we took with all of the investigators.

This dog just chilled the whole day right next to us.

I found this awesome hat that moves by itself and put it on. It destroyed my hair because we were running alongside cars to invite them to the Coro. And with all the sweat and such I became required to keep the hat on. It was definitely a bad hair day after that.

Me Elder Sanchez, Elder Vides, Elder Retana, Elder Huesca, Elder Sanchez and Hna Cabrera and Hna Gunderson

ME Hna Garcia, Elder Perez, Hna Bustillo

Elder Keck

The Coro was amazing! So much young talent! The Piano player was younger than 12 years old! It was made up of Malacatan and Coatepeque so there were a lot of familiar faces! It was a great event! We had a ton of people come and they loved it!

The Coro Navideño

Today as a Zone we went and did Zumba! It was a blast but I'm super tired!

Me and Elder Vides

Hope all is well! We've got another activity today in the mall so we've got to get over to that! FELIZ NAVIDAD A TODOS! Can't wait to talk to the family this week!

Love,

Elder Pugmire

Some of the lanterns got ripped in the activity so we’ve spent some time patching them up and Elder Huesca and I have had a fun time inventing some things so that they work!