Happy New Year!

Dear Family, Happy New Year!!! We are so excited for the upcoming year of missionary work and are in the process of setting difficult, but achievable, goals. Goal setting has really helped our companionship work together with more unity! We were so grateful to be blessed with our Christmas baptisms last week and the happiness carried over into this month (and new year) with aconfirmation yesterday. She is so rock solid! After church she interviewed with the President for a temple recommend--she will be going on the 7th!! We are so excited. I know that as she keeps the temple as her goal, she will be blessed to have an eternal marriage within someday too, and she really will be my forever sister. I love her so much! In the recent convert section, it was, as you know, taken over by our dear Sister who is moving. She, as of Thursday, is in America and has been given the information to contact her bishop there. I hope she does. We were able to get her packed and ready to go--during which we were able to have a sister from the Singles Ward come over and help. She was set on not accepting help from anyone else, which was very disappointing. It would have been such a great way to fellowship her and I know the English branch was very willing to help. Unfortunately, she can use her free agency. We will keep her in our prayers and I included her in my fast. Goals wise--very very very sad about our RCs at church. We only had three this week--which is sad since it was finally starting to increase. Most were out of town for the New Year, but some said they just simply didn't want to come. It always hurts so much to hear that. But we are working with the ward to rescue them! I hope to report better news next week. Something we are happy with is that after our friend left the Lord blessed us to find six new people!!! We have so many new lessons set up for this week! A definite blessing. So we are excited to be on the rise again. Gospel study wise, I've started to read Jesus the Christ and it is so amazing. Reading that and the New Testament together has really helped strengthen my testimony of the Divinity of Christ. Add in the my Book of Mormon reading and well, there is no way my testimony could not be growing! I love the simplicity of the Gospel. We act in faith in accordance with God's will and we will be blessed. It is that simple! I am setting goals now to keep that pattern strong in my life so that especially after the mission I can continue to learn and grown. I love this Gospel and I love being His missionary! Love you family ---Sister B. Smith