Christmas already?

Skyping with Elder Knaupp! Best part of Christmas Day! His Dutch sounded pretty great to us!

For Christmas I got a sort of children's atlas of the Netherlands from one of the members. The pages are filled with colorful maps and loads of pictures and diagrams of historical, scientific, and other information concerning the Netherlands, all in Dutch far past my vocabulary (It's fine, I love using the dictionary to look up words, there's so much cool stuff in there to learn). I'm super excited, I love books like that and learning new Dutch from it's written form. I'm especially grateful for the music, ties and socks I got from my family. We also got three huge boxes from the ward full of fancy foods that will last at least a month or two.

This week felt really long looking back at all that happened. One of the reasons I'm grateful that I'm staying in Zwolle a little longer is because of the examples of the people here. People who despite their imperfections or multiple other reasons to give up trying continue to cling to what faith they have. Other people who despite opportunities to just serve themselves choose instead to serve others with integrity and hope. Some of these people think they're failures and are just hoping to be healed, nothing more than to quietly be granted peace through Christ. This humility and purity of intention is a good example for me. What I think I am seeing is God's character shining through these humble people that are doing their best to move forward. All the examples of different people and their weaknesses and problems that we are exposed to as we try and teach them actually make my own weaknesses more clear when I see that I am not so different in comparison with Christ. Sometimes seeing these faults in others and myself can be discouraging, or at least humbling. I am grateful to be here and be able to learn so much and I hope I can really internalize the truths that are being demonstrated. I believe that through Christ we can be changed and that that change comes through acting in faith and humility. I know that steps toward Christ always yield blessings. I look forward to being able to say "I know" about more things.

This Sunday we had one investigator in church, a new one that we met with on Saturday. She is very humble and doesn't know much about christianity but she wanted to come to church. In our five man gospel principles class she showed some promise, the teacher Brother Spijkerman lead a beautifully simple lesson that lead us to an understanding that we learn through our feelings. Ilkay the investigator, (she's turkish) stayed for all three hours and although she's not easy to read, I think she had a very good experience and that she'll be coming back. The members, by the way, were very welcoming, a lady grabbed Ilkay right as she came in to bring her into Relief Society, which I was very glad of.

Love, Elder Knaupp