Elder Conner Miles - Washington Yakima Mission: December 12, 2016

This week was a pretty awesome week! We had the chance to take

Elder Miles and Elder Aguirre in Leavenworth, WA

part in a really cool service opportunity for the city of Leavenworth. Leavenworth is this German-like town that is up in the middle of the mountains about 30 minutes from Wenatchee and every year they have this huge Christmas event that people from around the world come to. They say on average they get 15-20 thousand people per weekend for each week here in December that come to this event. There are several members of the church that work with the city and they recommended missionaries to help with the event. One of the members got in contact with President Lewis and he agreed to send missionaries up there every Saturday for the month of December to help with the events.

Elder Aguirre, Sister Hirsche, Sister Lowham, Elder Miles
These were the stars and bells they walked through
the crowd with

This last Saturday Elder Aguirre and I had the opportunity to take part in this event and it was honestly so cool. The city honestly looks like a little old German town and it was packed with people. It was a great chance for the church to get some good exposure for people all around the world, the hardest part though is that we weren't allowed to do any proselyting. So we couldn't bring up the church unless someone asked us about it. So to try and talk to as many people as we could Elder Aguirre and I would offer to take pictures for people and then chat with them as we were taking their photos. Not many Gospel conversations got started but we did get to talk to a lot of people.

We also got to help with their lighting ceremony, which I am sure is on the internet somewhere. Elder Aguirre and I help with giant stars and two sister missionaries rang bells as we walked to this little gazebo thing. When we got to the gazebo they did a countdown and then lit up all the lights. It was pretty awesome. The lights, with the snow falling, was quite the sight.

Also this week on Tuesday, we had our Christmas Gathering in Quincy! And I got to see both Elder Allsop and Elder Klossner for the first time since the MTC. It was so cool. We had a chance to see so many missionaries and it was a really neat experience. We had to do a musical number and share a short Christmas story. So our zone sang "Mary, Did You Know?" (the Pentatonix version), and just shared the Christ story using scriptures from the point of view of Mary. It was super awesome and went really well.

The week has been great. It's been pretty busy but things are going really well. We have found several more investigators this week and the work is coming along. We just need to find those people who have to the desire to make a change. This week has also been super cold and snowy. We got our first snow storm and it snowed for a good long while. The week has been great and I couldn't be happier! Love you all!!

Elder Miles

Washington Yakima Mission