11/18/19: www.lighttheworld.org

 Hey all! Not to pull a Walmart and just totally skip over Thanksgiving and just jump into preparing for Christmas... but Light The World has begun. Do it. 

Ok ok ok another wonderful, spiritually charged, productive week working here in Los Banos!! Just as the isolation was starting to get to us we were able to join the rest of our zone and travel to Fresno for a Temple trip!!! It was so awesome and very refreshing and the days following were honestly some of the busiest of my short time on the mission yet! Blessings! If you have a Temple near you I encourage you (with the small teaspoon of ethos that I have as a missionary) to please take advantage of it. 

Speaking of the Temple, we are finishing up Temple prep classes for a lady in our ward, Sister Maka. She is a single mother in our ward and (ok all moms are super but her especially) SHE IS A SUPER MOM. We taught and baptized her son this week too which was really fun because all of his Tongan family members came! (side note but something I love about the Tongan culture is the singing!! After Zayden came out of the water everyone just started singing this beautiful traditional Tongan hymn and it was super cool!) Zayden and all of his cute little siblings are just these adorable super high energy little Tongan children and all together they made lessons very interesting! I admire Sister Maka so so so much because there is so much going against her right now but she is still one of the happiest, most loving people I have met. Super awesome miracle... Her youngest son was super super sick during one of our lessons and had been for about a week so we called the bishop and another priesthood holder for a blessing. They came ASAP and gave the poor kid a blessing and it was crazy... as soon as they left the little boy got up and just started doing his normal high energy craziness. Do with that information what you will but Sister Maka's total and complete faith plus that blessing led to an absolute miracle.

This week we also set a hesitant baptismal date with Vinnie! Vinnie is 19 years old and a week ago he was listed as one of our DO NOT CONTACTS... the reasoning listed was that "the area was too unsafe for sisters"... hmmmmm... okay definitely all for being safe and stuff like that but we always passed by this area and this boy was ALWAYS outside... and okay the reasoning definitely felt like a challenge more than a warning... so when he was outside one night we stopped by and talked to him! He was super nice and SUPER interested!! we gave him some chapters in the Book of Mormon to read and when we came back he has red them and MORE. We invited him to church and HE CAME and as it turns out one of the Brothers, Brother Betham,  in the english ward was his football coach in highschool!! So after church we went over to Vinnie's house and he told us that he had read 3 Nephi 11 and that he recognized that is talked a lot about baptism and that he believed he needed to "make baptism his mission" and then asked us if we "do that"... absolutely Vinnie we do that and you just used my favorite 2 words-baptism and mission- in one sentence. Vinnie is totally ready for baptism but his parents are not crazy about the church (and as we found out are the reason for the do not contact) so it might take a little bit of time... anyways we are having lessons at The Betham's house that way we don't have to keep meeting on the street! 

Hope everyone is doing well! Have a wonderful week!!

Hermana Allen

Photos: 

Zayden and his siblings, temple pictures, we love going to eerie houses for member dinners