Today is Sunday, December 20th, 2020.
What a wonderful week before Christmas!! It is always a thrill to meet new members of our Canada Montreal Mission team, and Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, we welcomed six great new missionaries!! Let me introduce them: Elder Kolten Bevans (Raymond), Elder Carter Flexhaug (Lethbridge), Sister Heather Gwilliam Edmonton, Elder Samuel Hornberger (Sherwood Park - Aron & Sharisee Hornberger’s son), Elder Kayvit Lopez (Airdrie), and Elder Orin May (Medicine Hat). Maybe you know some of these enthused, determined young adults??!! Orientation meeting on Wednesday gave us an opportunity to interact, and visit a bit, and then before we knew it
their excited new trainers arrived at the Mission Office and whisked them away to their brand new areas!!
Definitely another watershed week with nine departing missionaries: Sister Lydia Hall (Sandy, Utah), Sister Madison Hall (Ogden, Utah), Sister Maranda Murray (Eagle Mountain, Utah), Sister D’Anneka Watson (Edmonton), Sister Madeline Wight (Camas, Washington), Sister Hayley Vargas (Layton, Utah), Elder Henry Dahl (Meridian, Idaho) Elder Tanner Madsen (Ephraim, Utah), and Elder Nikolas Pinger (Gilbert, Arizona) who all departed by Friday the 18th…just in time to be with their families for Christmas! Thursday evening (the 17th) was a highlight as we listened to these dear ones share their fervent testimonies of ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,’ the Restoration, the wonderful Plan of Happiness, and their sweet faith-building experiences. We loved their sharing of beautiful conversion stories where they learned how the Savior’s Atonement has changed them as well as their friends. We already look forward to many Mission Reunions with all our Canada Halifax, and Canada Montreal missionaries!!
And now it is Saturday, December 26, 2020!!
What a beautiful Christmas week where, along with you, we celebrated the wondrous birth of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Our missionaries create the most beautiful FaceBook posts which include inspirational messages as well as amazing musical numbers. FaceBook pages for our five zones include:
Atlantic Zone: Followers of Jesus Christ in the Atlantic Provinces
Ottawa Zone: Disciples of Christ - Ottawa
Longueuil Zone: Disciples de Jesus-Christ au Quebec
Montreal Zone: Disciples de Jesus-Christ au Quebec
Mount Royal Zone: Disciples of Jesus Christ in Montreal
Check out the ‘new’ way of finding, and contacting people through social media!! You will be so, so impressed!
Office meetings were great and we were most thrilled Monday afternoon when our newest Senior couple - the Roberts from Magrath arrived! Elders Baird and Garside have been serving as our outstanding Housing Elders, and after training the Roberts will be back serving as full-time Mandarin Elders. Since April and May when our complete complement of Senior missionaries had to leave (except for Sisters Breckenridge, Little and Mecham), we have had this incredible team of young missionaries who have single-handedly taken care of housing, finances, and general secretarial needs. With minimal training, they each just slid into their new responsibilities with ease and confidence. Sister Little, since she is in the same office space, has been the Grandma oversee’er, and has endeared herself to every missionary in the office as well as every visiting missionary. We can’t even think about letting her return home to Fairfax, Virginia in February… A few other senior couples have shown up on IMOS, so we think that means perhaps the borders will open sooner than later…and we keep praying!
Monday evening the Senior sisters joined us for a spectacular ‘Illumi’ light adventure..in Laval, where we walked and walked and were in awe of the 30,000 light structures with 20 million lights. Music of course accompanies every display, but ‘O Christmas Tree’ was the only Christmas carol we heard as we were walking through the ‘massive forest of ‘paper trees!’ Impressive display of lights, with moving t’rex dinosaurs, spiders, trees, waterfalls, cute forest gnomes, and thousands of other LED lit things were everywhere…but NOT a single Nativity, or sign of what Christmas is all about was to be found, and that was a sad statement on what is happening in the world. Otherwise, it was a wonderful evening with our Sisters!
Interviews, and visits with our Atlantic Zone missionaries on Tuesday and Wednesday, with another evening out with our Senior Sisters, as well as the Roberts, where we headed the hour and half out to Drummondville to visit the National Historic Site…’Village Quebecois d’Antan' which was all decked out in lovely simple lights, AND we were thrilled that there WAS a life-size Nativity!! Such a fun spot that reminded us Upper Canada Village with dozens of old pioneer homes, and all bedecked in Christmas garlands and lights, with Christmas carols playing in the background. Another wonderful evening!! Snow was lightly falling, and of course that added to the ambience of the night!!
My second cousin Emma Morrow Marshall (from Ottawa) who would have celebrated her 100th birthday, that day - December 22 passed away last month due to COVID, and her memorial service was being held while we were in DrummondviIle, so, I did my best to multitask and listen to the service as we walked around, and then as we drove home. Again, we were so grateful for the miracle of zoom technology!!
Thursday evening our Christmas Eve Devotional was such a spiritual feast as so many missionaries shared favourite Christmas memories. We loved hearing such sweet stories of Christmas’s past, where families united, where they served, and where they showed love to others; and where they practised Christlike discipleship. I’ll share one story of a beautiful sister who was reactivated in High School, and because of her Ward support she is serving an amazing Mission. She recalled a very meagre Christmas where her recently divorced Mom was barely able to provide for her family, and, they did not expect to even celebrate…One night the doorbell rang, and through her tears she recounted finding on the front step, a big pot…filled with money. WOW…What a memorable Christmas!!
Christmas Day - yesterday was awesome…at 10am we started with a Mission wide Zoom Testimony Meeting, and thought we’d go for an hour or so; and two and a half hours later we had to cut the meeting off!! What an amazing Christmas gift…to hear the heartfelt testimonies of so many of our dear mission family!
And oh how we LOVED visiting with our dear family. Thank you all for your cheery visits, and interest in us and what we are about. We are so very grateful for your love and support. Everyone is growing up on us!! We visited with everyone of you….(and even saw Solon’s gerbil Radar!!) We get pretty melancholy knowing this is our 3rd Christmas as missionaries!! How this blessed adventure has flown by…so much still to do, so many lives to help strengthen….
We ‘Press Forward!!’
Last night (Christmas night) we had a sweet, humbling experience as we delivered fresh buns to ‘Chez Doris' - a women’s shelter where teams of our missionaries regularly serve. With Elder Duncan as chief chef, Elders D’Eon, Zhou, Sutherland, Alley, all worked together and served chicken dinner for 40 down and out women, (drug addicts, mental illness etc.) most who live on the street. Elders Clifford and Williams along with Sisters Margrin and Hawkes sorted food, created hampers, and made rice krispie treats, and Sisters Gottenbos and Nabrotsky provided cheery Christmas music with their voices as well as the ukulele!! Such a beehive of awesome service! After our brief visit to ‘Chez Doris,’ and seeing our missionaries glowing because: ‘they were in the service of their fellowbeings,’ we determined to make that a new Christmas tradition!
Zoom has opened so many wonderful possibilities for everyone, and again this morning we were thrilled to listen to Elder Henry Dahl report his mission to his home ward in Meridian, Idaho, and Sister Maranda Murray report her mission to her home ward in Eagle Mountain, Utah! We love it when our returned missionaries share their zoom link with us! And then we got to listen to Berkley speak in Forestry Ward!
This week we look forward to Mount Royal Zone Interviews Tuesday and Wednesday with Mission Learning Conferences New Years Eve and New Years Day, so we will welcome 2021 with a bang!!
Last week we were thrilled with our Key Indicator report showing
4 BAPTISMS !!!
Our faithful, determined, obedient, hard-working missionaries are seeing the fruits of their labours…..it is harvest time, and what a wonderful way to celebrate Christmas…(many people call it a white Christmas!!)
Maybe you like to read of some of our sweet simple Miracles! - 2 weeks worth!!Read on!!
Miracles Week of December 20, 2020
Décembre 20th, 2020 Miracles de Missionaires:
Petawawa Elders:
“These last two weeks have been pretty good. Especially the last few days it seems like we have had a good amount of success just miracles that God has had in the works for a longtime. We ran into someone from an ad we put up and she came out and told us that it was a miracle that we reached out to here because she had been going through hard time, and she asked me if I was an Elder and I was like.. . YYes, how do you know what that means. Then she was like an Elder gave me cookies a few Christmas' ago when I was sick. So missionaries planted seeds and we are hoping to harvest.
Also last week a couple of people the missionaries have been teaching for a long time, which we had dropped because we could not get in contact, reached out and was like "hey we are quitting smoking tonight!" so that they did and now they have gone 8 days without smoking. So thats pretty amazing eh?”
New Glasgow, Nova Scotia Sisters:
“Something cool happened this week! You can share it with Sister Low as well! We bought a Christmas tree from a guy that had a Christmas tree lot and was selling them in the grocery store parking lot. My family had our own Christmas tree lot and we sold them as a family for a few years. So I got talking to him about that and then he asked why we were in Canada and what the name tags were for... so of course we told him all about it! He was very nice and picked out a tree for us! Then he started helping another customer so we left but we are going to make him cookies and bring them back to him with a thank you note for the tree and then hopefully talk to him more! It was a cool little miracle that lifted our spirits!”
Cornwall Elders:
“You can share with Sister Low.
I had a miracle this week on Monday. I dropped off a Bible here in Cornwall, the lady had asked for a Bible and I told her that my friend and I could drop it off for her. Elder D'Eon and I got to the house and a man came out. I said “are you Jesse?” he said "yes Jesse and Josie" he took the Bible and went back into the house, this all happened in seconds. I got in the car and said “what just happened?” I didn't know his name was Jesse - just her's from her messaging me. After driving for a few minutes back to our apartment I thought that was weird, then I remembered that I had told Heavenly Father earlier that day that I would stop complaining about all the things that were not going my way and that I would give myself and my time to him.)”
Levis Sisters:
« Right now we are teaching Anouck, and she is just amazing. She has such a desire to know, so she goes and does. For example, she wanted to know if the Book of Mormon was true, so she sat down, and started reading it on her own, and she prayed about it Then she paid attention to her feelings and dreams, and wrote them down. She knows her own tried and true ways of receiving personal revelation, and she acts upon them. She is just so amazing! «
New Glasgow Sisters:
“This week we went to Walmart to buy some ingredients to make cookies to deliver to people and we asked one of the workers a question. She immediately recognized us because of our name tags. We were sort of shocked because usually people don't know who we are, but she told us that she was a less active member. We had been texting her and hadn't got a response, but luckily we happened to run into her and got to know her a bit better. The chances of us running into her were so slim, which made me aware of the Lord's hand in our day!”
Quebec City Sisters:
“We saw a really small but cool miracle this week: a friend of a member who we taught a few weeks ago hasn't been responding to us. We talked to the member, and she suggested we try calling the friend because she prefers to talk verbally with people. The night after, we decided to randomly call her, and we caught her just a t the right moment. She talked about some hard things she's been going through lately and how the Book of Mormon brings her peace. We invited her to come to church and have a lesson afterwards with her member friend, and she accepted! We're so excited, and we finally got to mark her as "being taught" in our Area book, which helped us fulfill our goal for the week! A very small thing, but it was a tender mercy this week.”
Quebec City Sisters:
“I'd like to just share something I realized this week. You can share this with Sister Low too, but maybe not on the blog ;) Over the summer, when I did one transfer in Hawkesbury, it was probably one of the most difficult transfers I've had because the work seemed to be moving so slowly. Sister Mendoza and I really struggled with feeling like we were fulfilling our purpose even though we were hardly teaching any nonmembers.
Flash forward to today, and something incredible happened. During that transfer, unknown to us, we found three people that are now on date to be baptized within the month. A fourth might be coming up soon, in Africa. Gerry Copple, the Jewish man being taught by the Kirkland Elders, was reached out to by Sister Mendoza during a long Facebook finding session. Jason and Valerie, from Hawkesbury, were found using a Bible ad near the end of our transfer there. Now, they're getting married the day after Christmas so that they can be baptized. I am just so taken aback. We could have never guessed. We felt like we were just yelling into the void, but it turns out that the elect were hearing us. My testimony of Heavenly Father's hand in this work has grown so much. And, I have also really discovered that the section in chapter nine of PMG called "no effort is wasted" is not just there as a pep talk to keep us going. It is there because it's true--nothing we do will ever, ever go to waste. This is the Lord's vineyard, and he is capable of doing His own work.”
Fredericton Sisters:
“So I shared how we found Chris in my last letter, but I can share how we found Robert! So Tuesday night during dinner we get a call from the branch president in Edmundson. So he called us and started to say how he got a phone call from this guy (Robert) telling President Grange how he wants to have a stronger relationship with God! So President Grange referred Robert to us! Robert is the kindest soul and really wanted to learn. We taught him the Restoration and Gospel of Jesus Christ and we was really accepting of the gospel! Oh and we committed him to read the Book of Mormon introduction and we asked him how it went. He told us how much he loved it and how he started to pray about the Book of Mormon! So yeah that is truly amazing!”
Montreal Villa Marie Sisters:
“We have a miracle! We called Fatou, a former friend, about three weeks ago but only got her answering machine. She then called us back a little while later and said she's so grateful that we had called because she had lost our number and she had been looking for it. So that was pretty cool. She has two cute daughters who have been going to primary these past two weeks and just this last Sunday Fatou joined in with them and all three of them went to Sacrament meeting as well as primary! We had a lesson with her that same day and at the end of the lesson Fatou asked what the Book of Mormon is because they heard people talking about it in Sacrament and primary. So the member that was with us explained a bit about the Book of Mormon and we are going to drop off one at her house for her and her daughters tonight! Super exciting!”
December 27th, 2020 Missionary Miracles
Granby Elders:
“We had an awesome experience during our weekly planning session while talking about referrals. We had just gotten done discussing some ideas for helping the members with referrals, when we get a call from an inactive member giving us a referral!!! I guess sometimes all we need to do is express a desire and willingness to do something, and the Lord will give us opportunities to exercise that willingness.”
Montreal St Lauren YSA Elders:
This is what they did on Christmas Day:
“Anyways, we spent about 5 hours riding the metro from Angrignon to Frontenac, delivering muffins and cookies to members and friends. In the cold, and freezing rain (and honestly, not dressed for it). One thing I realized, was I really enjoyed that, and I thought I wouldn't, which made me worried about knocking/street contacting in the future for hours on end, so that was nice. However, nearing the end of our trip, we were coming from Frontenac Station near the top of the Green Line. We had to get on the orange line, and normally we’d just choose to switch lines at Lionel-Groulx, closer to our apartment. However, this time we decided to get off at Berri-UQAM, initially weren't sure why, but felt it was the better option. We were waiting to get on the train at the Orange Line, and we were able to help this lady find her way to get to Jean-Talon, which was nice. It's really standard for homeless people to ask us for money, and as much as I want to give it to them, as you know, we're not allowed to, but we still get people asking us multiple times a day.
However, while we were waiting, there was this homeless guy coming up to various people asking them for money. I was getting ready to say my usual phrase "I'm really sorry, I don't have cash on me" or something to that degree. As he came to me, I was about to say that, but I was not able to say it, my tongue was bound. He told me he needed some money to get to a shelter on the west island. I then felt a very strong impression to give him the only cash I had, which I had just got on p-day. I hope he was able to get to the shelter. However, I learned a really interesting principle about spirit of the law obedience, because I've heard a lot of people talk about it as rather than it being spirit of the law, it's principle of the law. It's a mindset I've had too, where you prioritize guidelines and rules less, when they become inconvenient. In which that is valid a lot of the time, but I feel like I had a truly "Spirit of the Law" experience, where I actually had the Spirit tell me to do something.”
Hochelaga Elders:
“A while ago, (16 years ago if I'm not mistaken) my paternal grandparents served a mission in the Toronto mission. For the entire time, my grandpa was a branch president in a little branch in a place called Bancroft, ON. A couple weeks ago, I emailed my grandma (my grandpa passed away a couple years ago) and she told me that Bancroft and Petawawa must be close by because she and my grandpa would always see signs pointing towards Petawawa whenever they head south to go to Toronto. After she told me that, I looked up Bancroft on Google Maps and was surprised to see that it was just an hour or two southwest of Pembroke. It is just south of a town called Barry's Bay which is in the Petawawa area. Surely our areas shared a border. I told her that I had actually been to Barry's Bay twice and she told me that she and my grandpa had been to Barry's Bay to take someone to a doctor's appointment once. In other words, me and my grandparents both served as missionaries in the same city, out in the boonies of Ontario without even knowing it. This to me was really cool because part of me has been wondering why I had been assigned there. But somehow my family seems to have a connection to that region. I don't think there's any way you could have know that because I didn't even know it, so I take it as another sign that you are the one who God has called and delegated authority to to lead and direct our mission. Thank you for all that you do manage and care for us!”
Victoria Spanish Sisters:
“Another miracle we saw here in Victoria was that on Friday, when we were messaging people who had liked our posts on Facebook Sister Davis came across a lady who actually lives here in Longueuil. Sister Davis had just started messaging this lady, and the lady did not reply to what she was asked but instead asked where our church was, we gave her the address and she said she would like to come to a service. We told her that she was more than welcomed to come, we told her about all the covid regulations and then asked her when she wanted to come, and she said this week, we told her that church started at 11:30am and at 11am we got a message from her saying that she was already at the chapel. We were a little nervous because it was the first time we were meeting her, after the service we asked her what she thought of it, and she said she really liked it. Then she asked when our next service was, we told her that it was every Sunday, so she asked us to reserve her a place for her and her son again for next week, how amazing is that? Sister Davis and I almost started crying of joy, because we had been working hard, praying a lot, and had not seen any "success", it was a good reminder that Heavenly Father truly sees our efforts, and that if we don't give up, He will bless us!”
Laval Elders:
“In my interview I told you about Eureka wanting a spiritual experience, and you gave me the suggestion of having her pray with us during a lesson. It was super powerful and I can't thank you enough for the direction you gave us. Everything lined up so perfectly, our invitation was Moroni 10 last lesson, then that was the Sunday school lesson, then we taught her on Monday. At the start of the lesson she explained how I testify of the book of Mormon, and that I know it is true, but she has never really had that conviction herself. In that lesson we read from the introduction and in Alma as well. We explained that we wanted to give her that testimony and spiritual experience. We told her we were going to pray first and wait then she could pray when she wanted and we would wait after the prayer. Everything went smoothly and her prayer was very powerfully sincere. We knelt for like 10 mins after her prayer, we then discussed and ended the lesson on a spiritual high, it was so powerful! I pray everyday for her and I hope she continues to receive those experiences she is looking for. «
Halifax Sisters:
‘Teaching is awesome. We had a lesson with her on the Plan of Salvation and she loved it. We invited her to Sunday School and she came!! She even made a comment!! She's so good!! Another friend we are teaching is named Ria and we are trying to help understand more of God's character and His love for her. She then ended up volunteering to say the closing prayer. We were so so happy.”
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Have a wonderful week!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
We are grateful for your love and support of us, and of missionaries everywhere.
Challenge for each of us to Light the World everyday…Smile, and pray for opportunities to share our glorious message!
Love
Grandpa and Grandma, Dad and Mom, Richard and Gayle
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