Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dearest Family, 26 Dec 2011

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas! It was so great to hear your voices. Congratulations Lisa and Will on the new baby girl! I can’t wait to see a picture of her. Have you named her yet?

Well, unfortunately Mario and Lixi weren’t baptized this week. We’re hoping they’ll be ready next week, along with Denia. She wants a little more time to get to know the church but she really is ready. She has such a great testimony of the gospel. She was telling us about her experience growing up going to the Catholic Church and how it never felt right to her. She said, " I wish I had met you two and learned about the gospel earlier in my life when I was a young girl." Hopefully we’ll see her baptism soon or even better with her family. We taught her mom and her brother for the first time this week. She was a little nervous about how her family would react but when we met with her mom she gave us permission to baptize her. Please keep them all in your prayers.

Love,

Hermana Jackson

P.S. Thanks again for all the Christmas gifts and treats. Mom, here’s a picture of Hermana Nava and I with our headbands in front of the tree. And the other is a picture of us and our zone leaders.

Feliz Navidad

Dearest Family, 19 Dec 2011

Feliz Navidad!!!! I hope you are all enjoying the Christmas season. I'm so exited to talk to you all this week!! So, I tried to figure out what day I can call you but my leaders said we have to wait till our meeting with the president to find out. But they told me I get to call you some time in the week for just one minute to tell you what when and at what time. It would be great if you could call me but I’ll let you know when I call you. I'm going to try to do everything I can to call you guys Saturday morning. Alright, I only have a few minutes to write. ..aahhhh! But I had a really great experience I want to share and hopefully I can write enough to do it justice. So we are teaching a girl named Denia. She is 22 years old and we set a baptism date for her this Saturday but until this week she still wasn't sure if she knew the church was true. She has been reading the Book of Mormon and praying and said she hadn't received an answer yet. So we invited her kneel down with us and pray right then and there to find out if it was true. So she did and wasn't sure. Then I asked her how she expected to receive her answer and she said she wasn't sure but maybe through a dream or something. So we explained to her what the holy ghost feels like read D and C 9:7 through 9 and while she was reading she looked at us with a surprised look on her face and said whoa! I feel like my heart got split open but it doesn’t hurt and that something warm is being poured into it. She felt the Holy Ghost and knew for surety that the Book of Mormon is true. It was a beautiful experience. Maybe I’ll write more about it next time but I’ve got to go!

Love you all!

Hermana Jackson

Monday 12 Dec 2011

Dear Family, 12 Dec 2011

How's y’all doin?! Getting ready for Christmas?! Mom, dad, do you have the tree up yet? I know it always takes a while for you to get it set up. haha. Well, i hope you are all doing well. Well, for the past few months Hna Nava and I have been teaching Keren (Sandra’s daughter) She is 17 and wasn't very receptive when we taught her and her brothers. But all of a sudden she decided to start coming to church and even seminary! They even made her secretary. And the other day she said she couldn't have us over because she was visiting less actives with the some of the youth. but she still doesn't want to be baptized ugghh! we found out that she has a different idea of how the holy ghost works so we're going teach a little bit more about that and hope that she eventually receives her answer about the book of Mormon.

Well, I’m out of time, but there's not too much new stuff to write about anyways.

Love you all!

Hermana Jackson

Some slightly sad news

Dear Family, 5 Dec 2011

Guess what… we've got a new rule and the mission that says we can't be on the internet for more than 30 minutes. That means we have to write the mission president, report our data, and our write our families in a half hour. So it’s going to be tough. My letters are going to be a lot shorter from now on but I’m going to try to prepare better so i can write more. So what I’m going to do is not read your letters while I’m on the internet. i will just take pictures of the screen and read them after. Then i will respond to what you write the next week. So if you want me to respond to something sooner, just write something in the subject and I'll read it while I’m on the internet…but if not, I'll get to it next week.

Anyways, about my week…this week was great! even though it was freezing. Even though it doesn't snow or anything here, I feel like it’s worse than Utah because they don’t have anything to heat the buildings so I have to sleep with a sweatshirt, socks, scarf...everything! haha, but this week was wonderful because we set 2 baptismal dates for a family. The Godoy family is really big and only about 2 or 3 of them are active in the church. So we went to their house to visit them and then we found out that the dad isn't a member and one of the youngest hasn't been baptized either. We talked to the dad (Mario) a bit about the church and he said that he didn't want to be baptized before because he wanted to be absolutely sure about his decision. We talked to him about baptism and also how he is the head of the family and how his family can be together and how he can recieve the priesthood if he is baptized. He was really receptive so we left him an assignment in the book of Mormon and returned a few days later. He had read the assignment and said he has a testimony of the restoration and we invited him and his daughter to be baptized December 24 right in time for Christmas! Yay! It is a miracle seeing the changes he's made and that finally this family will be united together in their faith.

Hope you are all doing well,

Love you lots!

Hermana Jackson