Community Nativity Exhibit

Not a ton happened this week. We got to help out with this nativity exhibit the stake has been putting on. I'm not sure if I told you about it. for about 5 years now this stake has put on a "community nativity exhibit" where members donate nativities for the weekend that are set up and people can walk around and look at. There are also a ton of musical groups and stuff that are performing as you walk around, too. It's really neat because the entire community of Lubbock contributes. There are choirs from other churches and schools and they have a concert type thing there every night. Yesterday, instead of the concert, they showed the Christmas Devotional and we got to see that. All the missionaries took different shifts and so Geverts and I got to help Thursday and Friday. Thursday we hosted (pretty much just walked around and answered questions for people) and Friday we pretty much were put as guards for the temple, haha. The nativity was in the stake center and the temple is right behind it and so I guess they had a problem with people thinking it was in the temple. so that wasn't as fun because we didn't get to see the cool nativities, but it was nice just to be able to relax next to the temple.

One cool thing that happened this week was on Saturday. We were pretty bummed because all our appointments for that day cancelled and we just found out that some of our pretty solid (we thought) investigators were now going to a baptist church. We went back to our apartment to grab something and when we were leaving (to go contacting or something) we saw this guy in our apartment courtyard-type-place looking pretty depressed. We sat down and started talking with him and found out that he had just been in a fight with his wife and had been struggling with some addictions for a while. We talked to him for a while and toward the end of our conversation he was able to talk to his wife and get back on less-bad terms with her and we gave him a BoM and he wanted us to come over and talk with him more another day. It's really neat how the Lord will always put us in the right place if we're just trying to do our best. He'll make sure what needs to happen will happen. As long as we're doing good of our own free will, God will put good opportunities in our path.

Love,

- Elder Carlson