Happy New Year!

Dear Family,

Sadly this ones going to be short. Today was another zone activity. I reaaaaaaaallly wanted to write letters to ever one all day but keeping unity in the zone is more important. I'll have to write you all next week!

There's a ton of things I would like to say. Us missionaries in Thailand cannot go tracting door to door because it's against the law in Thailand. It's not just a mission rule, I discovered. Elder Ewing and I are still doing great. I started speaking only in Thai. It's been about a week now and I have almost only spoken in Thai, a task not very easy. My biggest goal for the New year,besides doing my best every day, is to follow Preach My Gospel. Preach my Gospel comes to us through the apostles and the Prophet. I firmly believe that it is the will of the Lord and the way that He wants us to do missionary work. So, to accomplish this goal I started to study Preach my Gospel and write down all of the things I need to do from it. Among those is speaking the mission Language as much as possible. So, I'm doing it. Already it's been quite the blessing. Elder Blackhurst and I switched off together yesterday. He is the MTC group behind me, so basically he's still struggling to understand much less speak. And being in my area the burden of leading and talking came to me. What a blessing it was to find that I could understand the people that I talked to and even taught the whole first lesson to a new investigator. It was Awesome. But don't think that I was the only one teaching. Elder Blackhurst is doing great (even if he does like to beat on himself) and I made sure that we both had opportunities to bear testimony. Being on a mission has certainly helped my to see clearly what is truly important in life (people).

Sang and Naa are even more awesome as members now, born again and given the gift of the Holy ghost. They told us that they were willing to go teaching with us! That is a true testimony and understanding of the gospel.

We have some new investigators too. :D

Another goal of mine is to build unity in my companionship, district, and zone, and Ward/Branch. We asked for a list of the ward members and their callings and we are working on memorizing them all. We asked for our zones investigators names. We asked for Elder Miles and Blackhursts investigators too. That we we can pray for them all and have power in our prayers. I really want to strive to focus on a section in Preach my Gospel called the Christ like Attributes. No matter how much I work on other things these are always more important. No matter how much I work on these things, I can never be satisfied where I am. I think If we truly understood the Atonement and the Love of Christ it would drive us to change and to act much more than we imagine. When you think you REEEEAAALlly love someone, it's amazing that you can always love them more.

Anyway, I am out of time and a bit beyond. Now I need to be off and teach English once again (every Wednesday eve).

I LOVE YOU ALL,

Elder Lilly

P.S. I happily removed money from my account and am working on getting some new pants tailored. Guys I've eaten too much rice, it's starting to show. Haha I meant to say guess not guys. Oh well.