It's Christmas time in the City!

Hola mi familia y amigos!

       Well before I jump right into Christmas I guess I should recap how Thanksgiving went! I hope everyone had an awesome day. Even though holidays tend to be a lot different as a missionary, I feel like you really discover the true meaning of each holiday, and it's actually really amazing. We were able to spend some time with Sis Spencer y Sis Findlay which was like a little bit of a classic thanksgiving feel. Then I'm really fortunate and we got to go down to see Dano! :) and then we got to go visit Ylaura, our recent convert! It was a great thanksgiving :) 

      I know I mentioned the Christmas Initiative with He is the Gift last week, but it's really become a huge part of our everyday proselyting, especially since there is such a huge focus with it in New York City. On Friday we had some really cool street contacts using the He is the Gift pass-a-long cards (if you want some they were sent in every issue of the ensign this month!) we even contacted a man selling churros who was super interesting!! Getting 3 churros for a $1? That's just the added bonus ;) we also got two new investigators through showing the video to a less active! She had two friends over and they were super interested so we're seeing them this week too!! It's incredible the impact it's making. 

      Funny story of the week. So we're at a lunch appointment with a catholic lady who just really likes the missionaries. One of the dishes was super nasty pumpkin pastry things with like bones and chicken. So.....we may have snuck them into our bags with napkins and threw them away after. Haha oops. 

     On Saturday we had an MTC for the members (CCM para Los miembros) and it was a huge success!! We had cool missionary name tags for everyone, breakout sessions about how to share the gospel (including one on social media and with He is the Gift), the bishop spoke AND president Morgan came and spoke at the end too! It was so cool! Hopefully it will get our members really excited about missionary work!

    This week was packed with a lot of amazing lessons and success and finding....and I can't share it all. BUT I do have 3 last really amazing things that happened this week. First of all Sunday Ylaura came to an investigators with us as a member present and was amazing! She bore a strong testimony and participated, you would never know she's a recent convert. Second on the way to a member dinner after that appointment we were on the bus and this guy turns to me and asks if we were Mormons. We ended up having a really amazing conversation about how he's passed by our church in the past and has been wanting to learn more and find a religion, and ours has always kind of stuck with him. But since he works a lot it's been hard to pursue anything. But he was super excited to give us his information and hopefully the English elders will have an appointment with him soon! It was just a really amazing experience to have someone approach us first for once! Okay last miracle of the week was yesterday....we taught 12 LESSONS!! Yep 12. Pretty incredible. We taught 4 on the street during our APF and showed the He is the Gift video. And then Sis Gifford's sister is visiting (she's also on medical release from her mission) so I went on a member split with her and taught 3 lessons while Sis Hall and Sis Dodson taught 4 lessons, on and we all four taught one together too. It was incredible. And I learned a lot from Eliza (sis Gifford's sister) it's always cool to see how different people do missionary work and understand people. 

     We got to go to the city today! So sorry if this email has a ton of typos, it's never easy to write while on the subway haha. Also I'll be sending quite a few pictures with this! Trio life has just been so fun and we've done so many cool things...I guess a picture is worth a thousand words? 

     I hope you all have an amazing week! I love you all and am so excited for this Christmas season! It's such an amazing time of year to refocus our lives on the savior and start feeling the true spirit of Christmas! Make sure you watch the He is the Gift video and visit Christmas.mormon.org and #sharethegift 

  

xoxo

Hermana Smart