'tis the Season


When your family sends a
Christmas tree & cookies...
Hey everyone! 

This is going to be a short one, but there is one main experience that I want to share with each of you. 

As you know, we are working with Adrian, who has been making tons of progress recently. You will be pleased to hear that he is still doing fantastic. We had originally planned on having his baptism on January 13th, but he is so pumped about all of this that he wants to do it on the 30th of this month! Talk about awesome! He has been super excited and happy about making this choice to follow Jesus Christ! He has such high faith and is so excited to continue to make changes to follow Christ. 

Best donut shop ever.
Probably the coolest part of everything has been that this will be his first Christmas believing in Jesus Christ. He told us yesterday that he had no idea how to even celebrate it! It was a really humbling experience for me to think about that. We basically explained how the whole Christmas thing works, and he has nobody to celebrate it with, so we are making some pretty cool plans as to how we can make it awesome. 

So, think about that this week. Why do YOU celebrate Christmas? Are you treating it in the way that you should? Are you focused on yourself or are you focused on others? I know that the more we turn to others, the more joy we will feel this week preparing for the big day. 

I love you all, and I hope your week is grand!

Elder Barlow

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Closing Time

Image
It's hot. Hello everyone!! As you may or may not know, this week is the final full week of my missionary service! That is a really crazy things to say but I am so grateful for the things that I have learned and the people I have built strong connections with. I wanted to share with you three lessons that I have learned during my missionary service. There are many, but you’ll have to ask me for details later ;)  First off, I have a deep conviction of how much God truly loves all of us. I know that we are His sons and His daughters. There is nothing more valuable to me than that important fact. I get to interact with lots of different people as a missionary, and the coolest thing I have experienced is that for some reason, whether I know these people well or not, I develop such a strong love for them and a desire to help them. I know that is because I am doing what I can to help people come closer to God. So remember that! God loves you and He always will! Second. It
Read more

The Inferno: The Final Week

Image
When Sister Benjamin gives birthday presents.   Hello everyone! That's right, we are coming up on the last week of  what I classify as the inferno. It's been a pretty brutal summer as  always, but actually not as bad as it was when I came in last August.  I'm definitely becoming more accustomed to extreme heat ALL the time.  But September and October will still be 90s and 100s, and once  Halloween hits then we get into the good stuff. So next week I'll  actually have more exciting subject titles. Anyways, this week was awesome. We had something called "stake  Conference", which basically means all of the congregations in the  South Phoenix area met together in one building for two hours to be  taught by some leaders of the church. For us, since we are both adults  and mission leaders, we had two more two hour meetings on Saturday,  and then the normal meeting on Sunday. So 6 hours of church! I LOVED  it!  You may or may not know that we believe that the
Read more

Finding the 4-Leaf Clover!

Image
Devotional with Elder Christofferson He y everyone!  Man, it has been a busy week for sure! Running to and fro, north to south, east to west, you name it we did it! We had transfers this week and I found myself in the Chandler/Gilbert part of Arizona, which is super cool! It is a lot different than any other part of the mission I have been in. Lots of members of the church, lots of really nice houses, and everybody already knows who we are! Haha.  I’m now covering a small place called Chandler-Gilbert Community College, so I’ve now covered all 3 colleges in the mission! That is pretty cool, haha. My companion, Elder Smith, is the man! We already know each other well! He is from near Provo, Utah and we are having a good time. I’ve definitely found a 4-leaf clover here! 😎🍀 The New Squad We had lots of lessons this week! I got to know everyone which was super cool! We have a girl named Codi preparing for baptism in April, so we met with her and it went really well. We a
Read more