Merry Christmas!

This letter has been posted by Kelsie's mother.  Kelsie does not maintain this blog, and she is not on Facebook.

December 29, 2014

Hey Mom and family!!!!

So. The stars have been aligned. Transfer calls have been made. And.... you guessed it.... I am officially finishing my mission in Ceres 3rd Spanish branch. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No one saw that coming!!!!! haha! I've been preparing to leave for like 3 transfers now! But President Clark called me on Saturday, released me as a Sister Training Leader (which I'm actually pretty happy about, I was getting pretty done with it) and called me to train! So I pick her up on Thursday I think. And I only have two transfers left, so I will be staying here. My fourth companion in Ceres. I can't believe it.

Sadly, lots of changes have been made up here. I've been serving in the Turlock North zone... they had made two zones out of the Turlock Stake. Normally zone boundaries are stake boundaries, so each stake is one zone. With the formation of the CA Modesto mission, they decided to collapse our zones into just one again.... and they are closing Elder Boswell and Elder Kane's area. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Sad day. Two of my best friends. Again. So now for the first time in my entire mission, the zone leaders will not be serving in my same area, and for the first time in my entire mission, there will only be two companionships serving in my area. So that is a big deal for me. But it's ok. I've been very blessed my entire mission to be very close geographically to my district and zone leaders and also very close friends with them. My last two transfers I'll be pretty out of the loop, but that's ok, because my new companion and I are about to work some MIRACLES UP IN CERES 3!!!!!!!!

Side note, Sister Horning is getting transferred down to Porterville zone, opposite end of the mission. She will be in the same conference grouping with Sister Contreras, Elder Kane and his trainee (doubled in to a new area) and Elder Boswell and Elder Benites are now ZONE LEADER COMPANIONS in Hanford. They all left me TOGETHER. Sad day. But it's ok. They'll still call me. Elder Benites always checks up on me a few times a transfer, he called me last night to talk about transfers, he's the best!

Back on the main note. So.... as I said in President's email, I am very likely to baptize close to 10 people this month. They've been straight up miracles. One family is a family E. Boswell and E. Kane have been working with, but now their area doesn't exist so they gave this family to us, and a different family to E. Jorquera (the chilean who came out the same time as Sister Contreras and Sister Horning. He is also training this transfer.). Then we set a date with Ana's family!!!! I think I've told you a bit about them. EB and EK found her on the street, she asked them for material to read and for sisters to come teach her. So we went immediately. Three days later she had to go to the hospital with a high risk pregnancy to have a C-section. So we kept in contact while they were there. The baby wasn't doing good, so we talked to our branch president, who got in contact with missionaries in the hospital's area and they gave a blessing to the baby. Ana told us about the experience later and said she just felt this peace and power that she's never felt before and she will never forget. The baby was released from the hospital the following week. Ana also needed some help with finding a crib and clothes and things and the branch has been all over it. So her husband was so touched that we called and kept in contact and that the branch rushed to the rescue he said "No one in my church would do that for me or my family" and HE WANTS TO LISTEN TO US TOO!!!!!!!!! AND THEY ARE MARRIED!!!!! So we very might well baptize an entire family, a father, a mother, and the two oldest daughters, together on January 31st. So excited. 

Ceres 3 is about to go crazy. E. Jorquera is a super powerful missionary. Our branch just went from 6 missionaries with kind of enough to do with two big leadership callings.... to no leadership, four missionaries, two missionaries who are well experienced and two trainees who always work miracles because their faith is so strong and they don't have any experience to rely on except for the Lord. It's about to be torn up with unprecedented success. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm SO EXCITED.

So Christmas was super awesome. After we skyped with you we ate some food with Hermana Mayorga and then EB and EK showed up shortly after to skype their families. While they skyped, we went and hunted down Frozen (we went to 5 Red Boxes and finally found a member who had already rented it haha in a different ward) and we hunted down a bunch of board games and then we hunted down E Jorquera and E Pugh and brought all of our hunts to the Mayorga's where we played board games as a family all day. We played Balderdash, Sorry and Apples to Apples. I won round two of Sorry, it was so fun! I love our family here so much. It's really hard to see them go. Then we ate a little more and at 6 we headed over to a different member's house and watched Frozen. And yeah, I can relate to Anna a lot hahhahahahaha it was sooooooo funny! I also hate Hans. WHAT A STINKIN JERK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my gosh! I also loved the "you can fix him!" Song hahahahahaha claaaaaaaaaassssic "never been in love before" mistake hahahaha... although he turned out to be the one. Also funny. All in all it was one of my favorite Christmases ever.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about this last week. so we have an investigator on a street called Olivero. It seemed pretty scary but then again, so does every where we go, so we just went during the day and it was fine. But we put that address on our Progress Report for branch counsel. Our branch president looked at us and said "You know that Olivero is known throughout California because there are so many gangs there and so many people are killed there?" E Boswell looked at us sternly and was like "you will not be going there after dark". So that was pretty cool. We're totally safe during the day and we never went at night anyways.... but it's a cool story haha.

so that's it for this week I think! I love you all so much! See you in 12 weeks!

Love, Sister Zollinger