Reuniting with the MTC companion and DL!

Dear Family,

I have some pretty big news this week. Hopefully i can make this email a little longer than some of my last ones because i know how much you love to hear from me. So as you know, the holidays have been a little crazy. Very few meetings and we still have our tags off, even thought the whole stani thing is pretty much over and done with. President scheduled a lot of the meetings for this first week because its a hard time to get meetings, so we had a training already and zone conference. At zone conference we finished up our Book of Mormon reading with the questions: How can i become a better Missionary? and How can i strengthen Faith in Christ? It was an awesome experience. I dont think i will ever read the book of Mormon without a purpose or question in mind again.
So at the training that i had at presidents house (about 20 missionaries there) he pulled people aside to talk to them about transfers. Its nice because in our mission transfers isn’t really a secret or a huge surprise. I think that is the right way to do it...but anyway, i found out my transfer!
Oh before i forget, next tuesday will be p-day because transfers will be on wednesday the 12th!
...I will be serving with ELDER ABLETT!!! I am staying in my area and elder Ablett will be coming up to me! Is that crazy or what? And it seems that I will be serving as District Leader as well, so we will see how that goes, seeing as I can hardly speak the language. I’m super excited to serve with elder Ablett- we are going to be the youngest companionship in the mission and it will be a great growing opportunity for both of us. Aside from Learning the Language at an accelerated rate, I’m sure that we will learn how to be leaders in the mission field. It’s a great opportunity and I couldn’t hope for it to be any other way. I always hoped to serve with Elder Ablett again, I just didn’t think it would be this soon! I am going to be his second companion in the mission field and he will be my third! haha so nuts, anyways...everything is going great, i set a bunch of new years goals, one of which is to read Jesus the Christ. I have never read it before and i hear that its a great testimony builder. Oh i also plan on doing push ups every day, i didnt specify how many, so i suppose thats a good thing haha...um I made some other goals, ranging from spiritual, mission related, physical, and Language goals...This will be the one year in my life that i will be dedicated to nothing but the Lord and doing his work. So i figured it is important for me to set some goals that will help me to become a more effective tool for the Lord.

Not too many crazy experiences this week, like i said its mostly just been meetings and stuff. Oh, Happy Christmas by the way! the 7th is the Russian Orthodox Christmas here, so yeah, Happy Christmas

Tell the family that I love them and tell yourselfs that you love yourselves, because without love, all we have is hatred and awful dark secret combinations. So let your light so shine. I will end this letter by testifying of Faith. Faith is like a meter of power. The more we exercise it by reading the scriptures and praying and such, the higher the meter goes. And much like on Tony Hawks Pro Skater, when the meter is flashing you can do special moves and get a lot of points. so yeah, get your faith meter flashing and then you can do some wicked awesome moves and make all the other gamers jealous.
I love this work and i love my mission!


Love elder paul!