Happy December!

December 3rd 2018~Happy December!!! Only Three P-Days Left!!!

Hello and good morning to the best Family ever!!! I am so very excited to send out this email today! I had so much fun reading all about your week and I always appreciate them so very much!!! I don't have a ton of time today because our P-Day got switched to Thursday for this week for our Temple trip! I will send out this big email for my blog and then we are going to work for the rest of the day! I'm so excited to go to the Temple and I can't wait to talk to you more on Thursday! We are just doing some laundry really quick and then we will shop for food to last us for the week and then we will head out for more work! I'm really excited about Thursday and I'm so thankful that Bishop Cook is willing to take us! We found out that we are doing the 6:30 Endownment session and so we will be waking up very early and then Bishop Cook will be back in time to go to work. Then on next Monday the 10th, I get to go to the Statue Of Liberty and I'm so, SO very excited for that! Time sure is going by faster and faster by the minute and it's so exciting to think that I have 2 weeks left! I'm so excited I can hardly wait!!!!!!! Here goes my week! It sure was a great one and so much happened!

Last P-day was really great and I had so much fun talking back and forth with you! I'm so happy and grateful that we can stay in touch so easily and that we can talk back and forth throughout the day! It has been a huge blessing to communicate so much! I am very happy that each of you are doing so well and enjoying your Thanksgiving break! We had a very great day and it was so nice to be able to look around some stores and I always enjoy shopping and finding good deals! They have tons of cool Christmas decorations out and so it was fun to look at those! It is so fun to think that I only have about how much time I was in the MTC left! The MTC felt like a few minutes at the most and so I can't imagine how fast these next 3 weeks will go. We can do this! I'm going to enjoy these next 3 weeks so much and enjoy my last few days being a missionary! I am really excited for zone conference this Thursday and getting to bear my testimony with all of the other departing missionaries will be so fun! After 6:00 rolled around, we decided to walk to the people that we were going to visit and it started to pour rain while we were out. The forecast didn't say anything about rain and so we were a little confused. We tried to visit all of the people that we met during our activity on Saturday and got a hold of Terrance! He seems really solid and we are excited to teach him! It has been pretty weird without Edward around. We are trying to find more solid people while he is away and then focus on him again once he gets back in 2 weeks. By that time, I will only have 1 week left! Wow! We contacted quite a few people on our list and talked to some nice people on the streets while we were out walking! It was such a great day today and I'm so refreshed and ready for a new week! Thanks again for all of your fun emails! Thanks so much for the Facebook message! Love & miss you so very much!!!!!

Tuesday was another very awesome day! I am getting so close to finishing the Doctrine and Covenants and so I'm really happy about that! I hope you all had a really great day and enjoyed work and school! We have some exciting news! We worked it out with the Bishop and our Temple date will be on Thursday December 6th! I'm so excited to go to the Temple and it will be so great to see the city again! So that means I get to go to the Temple on the 6th and the 18th right before I go home! We went out tracting and found some really cool people! We were knocking on doors in a very nice neighborhood and we met a man named Jim Wobonowski and he said that he grew up Catholic and his wife his from Russia and is Russian Orthodox. The funny thing was is he kept getting us confused with other Churches. He said "Now, you are different from the Mormon Church right?" He then asked us if we were from the Latter Day Saints Church and we said that they were both referring to us and so it cleared up in his mind thst we are the Church of Jesus Christ and so we were happy about that! Then we met a former investigator that hasn't been contacted by missionaries in 3 years and they said in the notes that they couldn't get a hold of him. His name is Neil Kenny and he is in his 60s and was in the Marines for many years. He says that he is interested to keep learning but he is going out of town until the new year. Then we had a really fun dinner appointment with the Jensen Family! Tanner just came home from his mission in Guatemala and so it was really fun to hear all about his experiences! He told us that he came back and was amazed with something as simple as running water. It was pretty funny! We had some yummy bacon Mac n cheese with garlic bread and salad! It sure tasted really good after a few hours of Tracting! Elder Solomon was asked to do a special musical number for zone conference and was also asked to play the hymns and so he practiced them so they would sound really nice! I still can't believe that this is my last zone conference! I'm really excited to hear the closing testimonies of the other missionaries coming home this transfer! It's hard to beleive that there are 20 of us leaving this transfer! I found out that Sister Smith from our Stake will be there at our zone conference and so it is fun to think that 2 missionaries from the Nibley Stake will come home on the same day! Also, I found out that they put up a few "giving machines" For The Light the World initiative and they put them in front of the Temple and so I'm excited to try them out! I hope you all had a very amazing and fun day! I hope you are having lots of fun in Washington DC Abbs!!!! Love and miss you always and forever!!!!

Wednesday was so great as well! We had a busy day planned and we had a lot going on! I hope your day was awesome and that you all had a great day at work and school! We woke up and there were tiny little snowflakes falling but none of it stuck. We think that there won't be any snow here for Christmas but Elder Solomon really wants to experience his first white Christmas. Sister Campbell asked us if we could give her a blessing today and so we went over to the Church to give her a blessing. It is always so great to excersice our Priesthood and help others who need it. I am so glad to be a Priesthood holder and I am so grateful for the blessing that it is in my life! So we gave her a blessing and then I enjoyed your potatoes that you sent me and I thought of you the whole time and how excited I am to make dinners with you when I come home! I was very excited to see an email from you and I loved seeing the fresh snow! Thanks so much for thinking of me! We got to go down to Lake Hopatcong and we helped a very nice lady in her 20s move pallets of wood flooring to her new apartment that she rented. The big delivery truck dropped it off and she had a connection with a man named Ryan that she works with! Ryan is a member from Utah and works out here in New Jersey and Hoai is from Vietnam and graduated from Rutgers University! It was quote the workout and she even bought us pizza and chocolate to take back to the apartment! So I wanted to update you on our Temple trip! So we will be switching our P-day next week to Thursday December 6th and Bishop Cook is going to pick us up early in the morning and drive us to Manhattan and we will do one of the early sessions and so we are very excited to go back to the Temple! So on Monday, we will have the chance to send out 1 quick email to everyone and let them know what is happening and then we will have a regular day of missionary work on Monday. Then on Thursday, we will go to the Temple and after we are finished with the Temple, then we will have P-Day until 6:00. Sorry to confuse you! Hehe! We got it approved with President Hess and we are all ready to roll! It will be so fun to go and see my old stomping grounds and show Elder Solomon the sights of the city! We will just be going to the Temple and then driving right back and we aren't allowed to do any sightseeing since it is out of our mission but we will have so much fun anyway! I hope that all makes sense! So P-Day won't be this Monday but we will have time to do a few necessary tasks like laundry and shopping and then on Thursday, we will go to the Temple and then have a regular P-Day! So then on the following Monday, we will get back on track with the regular P-Day schedule. It will be so awesome! After we did some tracting, we had dinner with Sister Stevenson at the Church and she made us some yummy kielbasa with stewed carrots and onions! She also made us some homemade bread and we had ice cream for dessert! It was such a great day and we got so much done! We called and texted Edward and he is doing really well! He said that he was just about to leave for Saint Thomas and so he lost cell service and so we were glad that we were able to talk to him. I hope you had a great day! I was thinking about you a lot! Thanks again for the fun email!! I hope you are staying warm in the snow! LOVE & MISS YOU SO VERY MUCH!!!!!!!

Thursday was so very amazing! I love zone conferences and they are always so much fun! We had a really awesome day and I hope you did too! I saw on the weather that you got a lot of snow! It was a really fun day today and it was so much fun to see all of the other missionaries from the 2 zones and I even got to see Sister Smith! She is in zone 5 and I'm in zone 2 and they had 3 other zone conferences with groups of 2 zones. We drove to a town called Short Hills and it is about 15 minutes farther than Morristown and so we left a little bit earlier so Elder Solomon could practice for his musical numbers with the other missionaries. Zone Conference was so amazing and i had so much fun bearing my last testimony! The whole zone conference was all about finding the "elect" and some different ways to use all of our resources that we have been given! I also have some very exciting news! Elder Solomon and I won the cleanest apartment award!!!! We got it inspected while we were still in Franklin and they told us that it was going to be impossible for someone else to have a cleaner apartment! We won $10.00 extra dollars for the month and so I was really happy about that! I will use it for a nice haircut! Sister Hess made a really funny comment that made me laugh! She announced to everyone while we were all having lunch that Elder Solomon and I had one and then Sister Hess said "Oh, it looks like we have a departing missionary that wins the extra $10.00.......maybe he can use that money on a date!" Hehe! Everyone laughed and thought it was so funny! They had some really yummy ham, rolls, salad, and oranges and they had lots of really nice Christmas musical numbers! It was really fun to win the cleanest car award last time and the cleanest apartment this time! Then we broke up into zones and so there were 2 groups and we went upstairs in the Church and had a really fun game that our zone leaders came up with! It was a "companionship unity" test to see how well we knew each other and it was the same format as the "Newleyweds" gameshow. Elder Solomon and I know each other really well and we ended up winning the whole thing and we knew each other best out of anyone in the zone! So what they did was they had 2 chairs facing away from each other, back to back, and they had a companionship come up and they had different questions. They randomly pulled out questions and they gave each missionary a sign that said "Me" and "my companion". They started out by having all of the companionships come up and they asked 3 questions to each companionship. They questions were, "Who eats the most out of the 2 of you or, who spends the most money on P-Day?" And both companions had to both choose the correct answer. If I thought that Elder Solomon eats the most then I would put up the "my companion" sign and if Elder Solomon put up his sign that said "me" then we got a point, it was really fun and we both chose the correct companion the whole game and didn't get any wrong! It was really fun and we got a giant Kit-Kat! Sister Olivia Smith was there too and she bore a really great testimony and it was fun to see someone from back home! It was such a special zone conference and there were 3 of us total from the 2 zones that are going home this transfer. We found out that there are 20 missionaries going out and 20 coming in on Decmeber 18th and so this is a huge group and lots of missionaries will be home for Christmas! It's so excited and everyone was coming up to me and saying goodbye and it was really wierd I'm not going to lie because I don't think it's hit me yet! Hehe! It won't seem real until I'm on the airplane! Hehe! We got back to our area and I was so excited to see an email from you! I was so excited when I saw your picture pop up! Thanks so much for registering me for the test! I really appreciate it so much and that time will work perfectly! I hope you all had a really amazing and fun day! I thought about you a lot today and mentioned you in my testimony and told everyone how much I love and appreciate you! Today was so great! LOVE YOU ALL TONS!!!!

Friday was so amazing too! I saw that Nibley got a lot of snow and our forecast said that we would get some snow within the next few days too! I hope you all had a really awesome day and enjoyed work and school! I can't believe that tomorrow is December! November flew by so fast and it's so fun to think that I come home THIS month!!! We had a really great time at the food pantry and we didn't have as many volunteers come and so we were really busy the whole time. We helped a ton of people get their food and we stocked up the shelves for the upcoming week. I was thinking about you the whole day and was sending my love your way! We had some lunch and then headed out for more work! Elder Schow and Elder Geertsen asked us to go on a split tonight and Elder Schow came to our apartment and Elder Solomon went "all the way" to Franklin! Hehe! It wasn't far for them to go but it's always nice to work with other missionaries! Just as we were about to exchange with them, they called us and told us that they needed to move the split until tomorrow morning. We are very excited for tomorrow because it is the "Light the World" day of service and so we are going to pass out hot chocolate to everyone shopping! We bought some hot chocolate and cups and so we are going to set up a table and "Light the World!" It will be a very fun way to serve others and it will remind me of last year when we did this at the Manhattan Temple! It will be so great and we bought the cups and hot cocoa mix and we are going to put it in 5 gallon containers and Light the World! We got to tract tonight and the first door we knocked on, a very kind man in his 80s opened up the door and we asked him for a referral and he thought for a minute and told us to go across the street. So we went across the street and a lady in her 20s answered and said that she was the homecare aid helping a group of seniors. She took one of our Light the World cards and so hopefully they go to the website! It has been pretty hard to find people at home recently and we haven't had as many opportunities to teach but the important thing is that we are trying! We just keep plugging away! I hope you all had a very awesome day today! I hope Abby has a great and safe flight back to Utah tomorrow! Love and miss you all dearly!!!!

HAPPY DECEMBER everyone!!!! I am so very excited right now! It is officially the month that I come home and I am so very excited to see you!!! Also, Happy first day of "Light the World!" I always enjoy serving others and seeing people happy! I hope each of you had a really great Saturday! We woke up and headed off to the Church first thing so we could get 2, five gallon water jugs for our hot chocolate! Brother Mills was kind enough to meet us there so he could unlock the scouting trailer to get the jugs. We got all of our supplies ready, did our studies, and then drove back to the Church to split with our District leader and his companion. I got to drive since Elder Solomon went to Franklin for the day and he said it was fun to go back to our old apartment! We got to do our hot chocolate stand and it went really well! There was a German market festival that was going on near Lake Mohawk and so there were tons of people gathered. We met the other Elders at the Church so we could make our hot chocolate and we mixed the mix into the 5 gallon jugs and then headed out to Main Street in Sparta and we have out a ton of hot cocoa! I noticed something really interesting a few minutes after we started. Nobody would take the hot chocolate and so it really surprised me! For a while, we had a hard time giving any away and it surprised me that nobody wanted FREE hot chocolate! Did I mention it was FREE??? We decided to take the cups and start giving them to people and then they could fill their own cups and once we did that, more and more people came up and it was a huge hit! Lots of people were very grateful and really appreciated the warm cup of cocoa to keep them warm because it was really cold tonight. It was really fun to get to know Elder Schow better! He is from Arizona and lives pretty close to Elder Solomon! Elder Schow has been out for a little over a year and is the oldest of 4 kids! It was fun to work with him for the day and we had lots of fun with our hot chocolate and I even got a picture for you to see! I hope you had a very amazing and fun Saturday! I sure was thinking about you a lot and I hope Abby had a really great and safe flight back to Utah! LOVE YOU TONS MY DEAR FAMILY!!!!!!!

Sunday was such an amazing Sabbath day! Wow! What a great Christmas devotional that was! I had so much fun watching it with you! It was really fun that we got to watch it at the same time and I loved all of the talks! I was so very excited to get your email and see your pictures! I always get very, very excited to read all about your week! I am so thankful for your fun email and pictures! I really appreciate them so much! We had a very great Sabbath and fast Sunday and the best part was being able to read your email! We woke up, got ready for the day and then headed of to Church! We had lots of great testimonies and lots of people went up. I am so glad that you all had a great week! I was really happy to get your email this morning about Abby getting home safely! I was hoping she would take a detour and come see me! Hehe! I was so excited about the First Presidency Christmas devotional and I couldn't wait to watch it! I got a fun email from Grandma Lindberg and Grandma Evans and I was so thankful for them! I was so excited to hear that you were all getting together and watching the Christmas devotional! We got to come back to the apartment at 8:00 and watch it and so it was very fun to watch it with you! It is always such a fun way to start off the Christmas season! I'm getting so, so, SOOOOOO very excited to see you all and it sure is coming up so quick! We went to tract for the rest of the evening and we found a very cool lady named Donna Venutra and she was so kind! It was such a cool miracle that we found her because we both felt strongly to knock on her street and we got to talk to a ton of people as a result of knocking on that street! We met a really cool teenager as well and Elder Solomon and I both thought he was a return missionary! Hehe! He was really polite and friendly but it was hard to talk to him because his dog was barking up a storm and he wouldn't go put him away and so we told him we would come back another time! We shared a scripture with Donna and she is really interested to go to the Light the World website because she was looking for things to do to help other people and so it was perfect! We got back to the apartment for the night and I was so very excited for your email! I was so happy to hear that you had another awesome week! 1 week closer to Christmas!!!!! It was a lot of fun to see Abbys pictures of D.C! I really enjoyed having her over here on the East coast with me for a week! It was really fun to think all week that she was so close by! It's funny how I say thst 250 miles is close! Hehe! I enjoyed every word of your email and I enjoyed your homemade treats so much! It's amazing how long I've been gone but at the same time, it seems so fast! I am so thankful for everything thst you wrote to me and I hope you had so much fun watching the Christmas devotional together and eating treats! I can't wait to email you tomorrow! Thanks again for the wonderful and fun email and pictures! You are the greatest Family in the whole wide world! LOVE & MISS YOU ALWAYS & FOREVER DEAR FAMILY!!!!!!!

P.S: I am typing up my personal Family email to you right now so I can talk to you about the questions you asked! I'm very excited to answer them and talk to you more!


Well my dear and amazing loved ones, it has been so much fun to talk to you today and I'm really looking forward to talking to you some more on Thursday! I am very happy and glad that you had such a great week and enjoyed putting up the Christmas decorations! It was really fun to watch the Christmas devotional with you last night and knowing that we were all watching it together! I am really looking forward to talking to you some more on Thursday! I'm not exactly sure when we will get back to Newton after the session and so I will email as soon as we are back. I'm so excited to go back to the city and I'm looking forward to using the Light the World vending machines! It will be so much fun to show Elder Solomon the city and do a session with him! We won't get to look around but I'm hoping that we can grab a $1.00 slice of pizza or go to the Casbah food truck right outside the Temple which is always delicious! Elder Solomon is anxious to see the city and so it will be a very fun day! I hope you have so much fun this week and enjoy getting ready for Christmas! I am really excited for all of these fun events coming up! It will be so awesome to go to the Temple twice in the next 2 weeks, the Statue Of Liberty, and flying home!!! So many changes are coming our way!! I can't wait to talk to you on Thursday! In the meantime, keep being amazing and know that I love and miss you always and forever! LOVE & MISS YOU TONS!!!!!!


Love You Always!
~Elder Lindberg