News From Nicaragua: Multizona, Apostasia, Late Night Baptisms, and Happy New Year!!

Me with My Snowflakes on Christmas!

Familia y amigos,

Whats up? How is everyone doing? I hope all of you had a great Christmas and you are all enjoying the snow. That’s awesome that you’re having snow! I had a dream that I was skiing last night, I went off a jump, felt the drop and everything and woke up from falling off the top bunk hitting my knee on the ground. It hurts super bad today but I’m just glad it wasn’t my head. I’ve been taking ibuprofen but we don’t have any ice. I’ll be fine. Its pretty swollen but I’m sure the ibuprofen will help with that.

Here we had a pretty good Christmas. I had a great time talking to my family and just hanging with my companions.

I want to thank all of you that wrote on snowflakes for me. I loved each and every one of them, and it was probably the best present that I got. I feel so blessed to have so many people supporting me.

Anyway this week was great. We had a multizona (multizone conference) on the 24th. It was super awesome! We listened to a message from Presidente Russell, had an awesome meal, played some games with the other zones, and then had a slideshow of our families. Presidente Russell y Hna Russell were super generous and gave us some awesome gifts. It was awesome to be together as a mission close to Christmas, get to know some more people, and to feel the spirit!

We met this crazy guy this week, who is puro apostasia (pure apostate). He is a pastor for one of the churches here. He was trying to tell us all of this super weird stuff about Joseph Smith and every idea he had was super dumb. His main problem with Joseph Smith was that he was saying that the timeline of Joseph Smith having "the vision" and when he restored the Church didn't match. It was dumb. The most crazy of his ideas is that missionary companions are always a North American and a Latino because the North Americans are brainwashing the latinos. He told my companion to wake up and realize what was happening. It stinks because there is a super positive person who lives in his house, so we´ll see what happens with him.

We had 2 baptisms this week, both on Saturday. They were Herty's wife and Ana. The baptism of Herty's wife went super smooth and everything, and I'm sure she's going to be a faithful member here with her husband. Ana was a different story. We went to interview her on Friday and she told us that she had to go to work, and was saying that January would be better. She passed the interview and everything but her work was the only problem. On Saturday the APs were in Rivas and came to talk to Ana and Milagro about being baptized. Milagro decided she didn't want to be baptized this week. We had 6 misisonaries in their house at 9:30 pm talking to them. We asked Ana what was stopping her from being baptized that night. There was nothing so she was baptized at about 10:30pm Saturday night. The harder part was her confirmation. She called us on Sunday and told us she was at work and her boss wasn't going to let her leave to come to the church to be confirmed. We were super discouraged but when we showed up, she was already in the church. A miracle for sure.

After our baptisms we’re pretty empty for investigators right now. We did meet this person who came to church on Sunday, and she had all of the lessons in San Marcos, a city super close to here. We're going to try to baptize her this Saturday.

We don't have any plans for New Year's and we will be working all this week, there's no rest! I'm sure the streets will be dead, but theres nothing we can do about it! We will have to figure out what to do!

The zone finished with 19 baptisms for the month of December, the most in all of 2014. We're working hard and have great plans for this next year. I don't think we reached the mission goal for the year, which is a bummer, so I'm sure well be working even harder this next year.

I hope all of you have an awesome New Year this week and I love you all!

Elder Hanson