Entering into my favorite time of year!

Why hello there! 

How are you all doing this week? This week by super fast and it honestly was just a great week. Happy Halloween to you all and day of the dead. It was a pretty exciting week here with those two holidays. But, can you believe that it is already November? Time is going by so fast, we are now entering into my favorite time of year. It is now officially legal to listen to Christmas music and I am taking full advantage of it. I love it!

I love Christmastime so much.  Everything is turning Christmasy here!  I have seen Christmas trees! Christmas lights!  Even Big Coco-Cola Signs with Santa!  I love this Season!

This week we had some pretty exciting events. We had a visit from one of the Seventies named Elder Alan Walker. He is from Argentina and is pretty cool.  We had a zone conference with him and Presidente Carreón and also a meeting for all of the zone leaders. Both of meetings were great and I learned a lot. I am so thankful for the blessing of having modern day Apostles who can teach us the directions that God wants us to apply. I feel like God is very very interested in what is the work of salvation right now. I feel like everything that the Prophet and the Apostles talk about is about this work. We all need to step it up and help our Heavenly Father in His work. 

Hermana Carreón was speaking about "Hastening the Work of Salvation". In order to "Hasten" the work, we can't just be sitting around waiting for missionary miracles, but we need to take an active part in making these miracles happen. At the conference, Presidente Carreón asked me to sing "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" and it turned out really well. Actually today, I came to the office and we started getting everything figured out for the Christmas Concert Fireside that we are gonna do here in Tijuana.

This is the outline of the program. Presidente wants to do 2 firesides in Tijuana & 1 in  Mexicali & Ensenada

This week we spent a few hours helping some members of our ward move to a new house in a different ward. It was a lot of fun. One thing that I loved though was that they had a non member friend that was helping them out also. We loaded up their trucks and I went with the non member buddy in his car. It was like a 30 minute drive in between houses and well, It was really cool to just talk to the guy in a very casual way about the beliefs of the Church and the basic doctrine that we teach. I imagine that that is how it will be after the mission and I will be able to have chances to share the gospel in casual ways such as that. Honestly, it was really cool and I was able to share my testimony with him. 

We had a very interesting lesson last night with the a family in our ward. The other night they were walking by the Church and noticed that a ward was having a halloween party. He got very upset for the fact as he says that Halloween is the day of the devil. He then got very upset that in the Church they would allow people to celebrate this day and decided that he was going to step away from the Church. As we spoke with him, we helped him realize the fact that the people in the Church were not worshiping the devil and that he really does know that the Church is true even though some people celebrate Halloween. He was honestly just really caught up on that. 

The thought came to my mind of the quote from General Conference last month, "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith". And I was able to share with him this idea and help him realize that he really knows that the Book of Mormon is true and that Thomas Monson is a Prophet. Once we helped him realize that he realized that he had no reason in leaving the Church. It was really cool to be able to testify to this brother about the simple things that help us have a testimony. A lot of times, we get caught up on the so called "deep doctrine" or on little subject matters, when we should be strengthening our testimonies in the basics.

Yesterday at Church was a really cool day. We honestly didn’t have a lot of the investigators that we wanted at Church, but we were able to have some really cool trainings in the Priesthood classes and a great Ward Council. This ward really is starting to very missionary minded. During the trainings we gave in Priesthood, we received over 25 referrals. And honestly, everyone is working very hard to do their part. I love to see it when a whole ward pulls together and works in the same cause. We were focusing a lot on that this week of the whole idea of that we are one. Not missionaries and then the members, but that we all work together. One thing that was really cool this Sunday was that a kid named D.

that we have been teaching is getting baptized this Saturday and well honestly, we hadn't announced it to anyone, but by the time Church was over, everybody knew about it because people asked and shared interest in him. I thought that was great! 

Well have a most wonderful week one and all! I love you all soo soo much! You are all my heroes. Remember who you are and act accordingly. 

Elder Tommy Anderson

The picture of some person stuck on the fence is my companion Elder Llanes. It was pretty funny. We gave our keys to the church to somebody and we tried taking out the trash. But seeing as we didn't have keys, we couldn't get into the parking lot where the dumpster is. So we tried throwing the bags into the dumpster... but we missed. So my companion tried jumping the fence to throw the trash away, but he got stuck... Haha it was pretty funny.