Less than a month til Christmas!!

Hola! Christmas is in less than a month, woot woot! & the weather is beautiful and perfect today (we did a little spring cleaning...kinda weird right before Christmas) and the only reason I can really understand Christmas is almost here is because they have Christmas candy out in the stores, other than that, I probably wouldn't believe it.

It was a good week...we had Zone Conference on Thursday (that was my Thanksgiving) and we went over our purpose as missionaries and it was a good reminder and motivator to work as hard as you can...because that's why we're all here!

So last week when we went to Katikati, in an effort to save km's since we were planning on driving to Hamilton for Zone Conference, we decided to bike to our dinner appt that night. It was a rough ride, about 10 k's, about 35 min, up and down some hills and I was extremely tired in the middle of this long stretch up hill and thought we were never going to make it, but it was kind of fun at the same time. Even though girls in skirts on bikes is probably one of the most messed up ideas ever. Seriously. It's awful riding a bike in a skirt. Anywho, it'll be interesting being in a biking area.  & I was shocked that my legs weren't sore the next day. I haven't ridden a bike in months! That's my picture this week...us and our lovely bikes. I'm working figuring out a name

The most exciting thing this week was when one of our investigators who we've been teaching for probably 6 weeks FINALLY came to church. She's been saying she wants to, but I think the biggest thing is that she's pretty shy, but we've been taking fellowship to meet her, so she felt comfortable knowing people a head of time and then we took her on a tour of the chapel last week (she's out in Katikati). The biggest problem with her is that she won't give us her phone number for some reason, she said she just doesn't like giving her number out, so we can only talk to her when we're out in Katikati and couldn't call her Sunday morning. So we got to Katikati and were so excited when we saw her car in the car park and she had a really good experience. Yay! And all the members were being so helpful with her and her baby, I loved it. She's definitely planning on coming again. She's so good and believes what we've taught her, but it's been hard, obviously, getting her to church and working on getting her to read more from the Book of Mormon.

We had a pretty intense encounter with a dog this week while tracting. So apparently it's a law that you have to have a sign on your gate if you have a dog. We were walking up to one house that had a tall, wooden gate and I was thinking, "Big gate...they probably have a big dog." But I didn't see a sign, so I went in. Then it was a pretty long walk up to the door, in between cars, up the stairs, and then around the corner was the door. The door was open, and as I was knocking, I saw this huge dog sitting on the other side of the couch RIGHT by the door and turned to Sister Perry and said, "Big Dog!" and she BOLTED out of there, and so that scared me more, and then I hear the dog barking, so I'm running as fast as I can trying to keep up with Sister Perry, end up losing a shoe and sock, but I could hear the dog right behind me and didn't think it was worth it to stop, so I just ran out the gate. Sis Perry was dying laughing when she saw me with only one shoe on. I was hoping that he wasn't going to eat my shoe, then about a minute later, the owner came out, we gave him our missionary shpeel, he wasn't interested, and started walking in, and then I asked for my shoe. My goodness, I can feel the adrenaline rush thinking about that. I was shaking so bad afterwards I was so scared, haha. Not cool having to run in flats!!

One more: my Zone Leader, who rode in our car to Zone Conference, asked if I could express myself via hands or facial expressions and not so much with my voice, haha, some things never change.

One of my favortie General Conference talks was Elder Scott's talk about the power of scriptures and it just really hit me how important and beneficial it is to memorize scriptures. I decided to start working on that more, it's just hard because I want to use my personal study to study more, but I've decided I just need to take the time to memorize scriptures! I'm also surprised how well I remember the scriptures from seminary and just realized thankful I am that Sis Johns really helped us to memorize all those in seminary because they're just good to have! Like Elder Scott said, they're friends that you can call on at anytime that won't change over time! So I guess I'm encouraging everyone to memorize a scripture this week! The two I memorized this morning were Moroni 7;16-17 about the Spirit of Christ (I guess that was re-memorizing since it's a master scripture) and also Alma 7:23-24, just values we need to have in this life in order to be blessed! I love the scriptures and it really is a wonderful blessing to have them and be able to study them everyday!

That was kind of a long email, sorry! Hope everyone is whipping out the Christmas decorations! I don't know when we're getting a tree...but I want it NOW! Love you all!

Love,
    Sister Mullen