Maligayang Pasko ang magandang pamilya ko!

This has been a great week! We started the week with having our annual Christmas Conference. Is it already time for that again? Crazy... The Devotional was first in the morning. It was amazing! I felt so motivated and excited to be better. A lot of great news came! First our mission had a goal for 2014 to have 1000 baptisms. We exceeded our goal! So for 2015 our Mission Standard has been raised and by raised I mean almost doubled when it comes to the amount of lessons in a week and quadrupled when it comes to the amount of baptisms.... yeah. at first I was like oh no... I'm going to die. haha I mean I'm already working hard right? Then I remembered a scripture, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" This is not my work, it's the Lord's and if President Barrientos has received this revelation, then let's do it. The Lord is hastening his work, just like he said he would in D&C 88:73. It's time. I'm so lucky to be apart of this work at this important time!

After our Devotional we had an amazing race. yes mom, I know you love that show. well that's what we did! We had to run all over Laoag and figure out clues and due certain tasks... did I mention I was wearing a skirt... yeah awesome. but It was really fun, I forgot how competitive I am.... I was sprinting everywhere. 

After Christmas conference we just worked really hard and taught way more lessons than we usually do. I didn't think we could work harder, but when you have a positive attitude and keep a prayer in your heart. Mircales happen! Get ready for a year full of miracles in the Philippines Laoag Mission! 

Love you! Have a great Christmas!

'Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God'

grabe pamilya ko. november na. ang bilis. wellllll this was the first week of the transfer and it was a good/ difficult one. 

My new companion is sister Morallos and she's from Tacloban, Philippines. She has been in the mission a little over 10 months now. She's awesome and was home when the huge typhoon hit one year ago... she's got crazy stories! 

This week was so fast... 

somethings that happened: 

-we walked for two hours because there was no transportation... we may or may not have gotten lost and my feet may or may not have been bleeding by the end. gotta love it. 

-lots of parades. haha oh man the parades here are so funny. people just get on their motors and drive in a line with lots of people walking and holding balloons. no floats. but literally everyone is involved. nobody could do anything because they were all walking in this parade. 

-we worked hard. We had a lot of awesome appointments we saw a lot of great changes in these people that we're teaching. 

- I was so stoked for sunday we had visited our investigators saturday night and we had expected a turn out of 15 investigators at church. turns out there were more parades and none of them showed up.

I was really disappointed and have been praying about what I need my investigators to understand. I got my answer. 

'Seek ye first the kingdom of God.' 3 nephi 13: 33 

I feel like sometimes we forget which things are most important and push spiritual things aside because 'they can wait'. the truth is, they can't wait. This is the most important thing. The awesome promise is if we seek first the things of God, he will give us EVERYTHING we need in return! 

Love you all!

Sister Abelhouzen