Elder Tyler Nielsen- Hawaii Honolulu Mission: Week 19: Surgery, Giving Machine, and The 12 days of mission

Aloha everyone! This week marks the official season of Christmas and I could not be more excited! We're really trying to hype up the Christmas devotionals coming up and we're already seeing Christmas miracles!

First things first we had another lesson with Barry and Randall. The lesson was about missionary work since that's one of the lessons required for baptism. No surprises here, but Randall definitely had some of his own thoughts about the matter . Nothing to contrary, but it definitely was a little slow to get the lesson going. Some of his questions were really good though. Usually when Randall has his moments when he goes off, Barry is really quiet and just nods as we're talking. BUT, when we got into the meaning of missionary work, how it reflects how it shows our love for God and others, Randall got really quiet and Barry started saying really good insights. We included a scripture from the Book of Mormon about the sons of Mosiah wanting to serve as missionaries in the land of their enemies the Lamanites. The Spirit was so strong! Elder Thompson and I, Barry and Brother all had a really good discussion and then I turned to Randall and asked if he had any questions. He simply smiled and said, "Yeah, I agree." It just goes to show how important it is to teach by the Spirit. And the best part? Barry is on date for baptism January 9th!!

So if you don't know about the giving machines, they are like charity bending machines for charities put out by the church. How it works is there are different items from different charities that you can donate for. For example, for a donation of $5, you can provide kids with after school sports equipment. All donated money goes straight to the charities and is a great way to serve every holiday season! They put one in the Pearl City mall! We got to go volunteer and answer any questions that people had. One of the rules that they gave us was to not wear our name tags. The placement of the machine was odd because it was in a kinda hidden hallway across from the bathrooms. It was really fun though and a good amount of people came by.

That same day, we had an Elder from the Big Island come to Oahu for a ingrown toenail surgery. It was in Northshore so we had to drive past Mililani! It's still there!! We were early for his appointment so we got a snack a Foodland since I've never been there before. It's as hype as it sounds. It's basically the go-to place for all foods Hawaiian. You know me. I got a musubi

The surgery was freaky. He got like 5 shots in his toe and then he pulled it out. *shivers*

So another fun thing that went on this week was we made a cool video! President and Sister Walker had new missionary work goals for this month in general and they wanted to get all the missionaries hyped about it. They asked us to ask around and get help from missionaries all around the mission to make a mission parody of the 12 days of Christmas! We recorded the Walkers first. It was funny because after every take President kept kissing sister Walker. It was adorable but it took a while to find a take we could use. Then we asked missionaries from on and off island to submit clips of their part so that they could be part of it! It was not shared on Facebook but was screen shared during our mission weekly zoom call. Fast forward to today, everyone keeps asking for the video.

But anyway that was my week in a nutshell. We're getting really excited for the events we're inviting people to. We want a huge turnout so that a lot of people can get into the spirit of Christmas!

Hope you all had a great week! I'm praying for all of you and let me know if you ever need anything. Love you all! Aloha!

Love, Elder Nielsen

Pictures