"Hey! Elders! Come to my house! Teach me!" If we come unto Christ, we will naturally become better people through Him, and that is the greatest part of our Gospel.

Hello to all and a Merry Christmas!! Oh yeah, that's a fun thing they do here in the Philippines. They start celebrating Christmas stuff in September. They just say that they celebrate Christmas in all of the -BER months haha.

So this week was just full of a lot of finding and such. It feels like I just moved into my last area again. I remember when I got transferred to Libon we literally only had one investigator to teach, and that investigator wasn't even interested in the church. That's kind of how it is here as well, so we are working really hard to get more and more investigators. This past week we found a total of 16, but only about 8 of those are promising, so we will see where that goes.

One super cool experience of last week was with an old man named Emilio. We were tracting in this one area that we have, and this random old guy called out to us from nowhere and said, in English, "Hey! Elders! Come to my house! Teach me!" He really struggled getting those sentences out in English, so we spoke with him in Tagalog and he literally just started walking to his house without any further explanation, so we decided it would be best to follow him. He lives pretty deep within this one community, but when we finally arrived to his house we asked him why he wanted to teach us, and he just said because he knew that God would bless him if we taught him. This past week we have taught him a total of 3 times, and he has read the Book of Mormon every day and absolutely loves it! We asked him who his favorite characters were and he goes, "Well obviously, Nephi and Lehi!" He absolutely loves The Book of Mormon. Our next goal with him is to just get his wife involved in the lessons, because she's always at work when we teach him. But fear not, her time will come.

Elder Maliu and I have changed our tracting approach to a new and improved version of the Restoration lesson. We teach the whole thing in about 5 minutes and we've really just cranked it down to the pure doctrine of the Restoration, and by the end of the lesson, we are really able to tell who is prepared to receive this message and who is not. It's amazing finding the people who are interested in this message and in this gospel. I really love it and I think it's interesting to see that what the Prophets and Apostles say is absolutely true: The Book of Mormon is the foundation of our testimony in this Gospel. I've really come to believe (Before my mission I would just say it but not believe it) that if a person reads the book of Mormon with a real intent to change themselves, not just to read it but to ACTUALLY try and become a better person through it, it will happen and they will come to know that the book and the message it contains is true. Our message is not only that Joseph Smith is a Prophet, but our message is that through this Gospel we can truly find a way to change ourselves to become something better than we ever thought we could. As Moroni invites every one of us to do in the last chapter in the Book of Mormon, "Come unto Christ and be perfected in Him." If we come unto Christ, we will naturally become better people through Him, and that is the greatest part of our Gospel.

I love you all and I have finally got some pictures to send to you! Have a great week!

These are all just some pictures in our area. The area is so beautiful and surrounded by beaches :) The big black guy is my companion, Elder Maliu, and the little Filipino is the 19 year old guy who always works with us, Brayan Ramirez, and is always smiling