So, Happy Thanksgiving! That time again already! Seems like just yesterday I was with Elder Francis (the first time) chilling in our tiny room on Thanksgiving hoping we'd be together for Christmas. Weird. Last Thanksgiving of the mission though! Crazy! I'll see you next year! ;)

President Toone just announced the Thanksgiving policy this morning and basically we just get 2nd P-day. I won't complain about that. Surprisingly he said if we take an investigator we can even go to a "Turkey Bowl". I don't think we will, but I'm shocked nonetheless. We might even get to watch a movie with our zone! *fingers crossed*. Other than that, we'll have probably 2 dinners. NBD.

So last week we had our Zone Meeting for this transfers training stuff. One of the things we talked about and introduced was our new "theme" this transfer: 你好奇迹
(ni hao qiji) Which means, "hello miracle". Honestly it doesn't make sense in Chinese... or English, but that's our theme. What we committed our zone to do is to pray every morning in companionship study for a miracle that day. Then we look for the miracle throughout the day, and at the end of the day we say a prayer of gratitude for the miracles we received. Pretty cool eh? We have definitely seen loads of miracles. I'll see if I can recall a few of them!:

Most recently is the fact that our super-recent convert Bailey Ellington visited with her family this week and her parents didn't even bring up her baptism. They were super antagonistic towards it and was begging her not to, but apparently all of that was smoothed out! So sweet!

Do you remember me talking about Janette? She was taking 3 institute classes and decided she wanted to meet with missionaries. She had already read the BoM and gained a testimony of it and was basically ready. We had to pass her off to a different ward because of a bunch of complications with her living situation. Long story short, she decided she didn't want to make the lifestyle changes. We met with her one last time and she just said that she appreciates everything but that she's still going to just take institute and wait for... ever. We encouraged her to pray about the things she had concerns with, even though we could tell she already knew the answer, she just didn't want to live it. So that was that and we went our separate ways. Well randomly last week she texted us saying "I got the answers I was looking for and I'm going to make those lifestyle changes". So, we got her in touch with the other missionaries again and as far as we know, she's still going forward with baptism. Pretty sweet!

I can't really remember the other miracles. Maybe I'll hopefully keep track this week probably. Convinced? Me too.

Anyway, God is a God of miracles! Part of my training included the importance of exact obedience. I demonstrated the principle by talking about Moses and how every time the Lord told him to do something, he did it with exactness and was able to see miracles. Included in that was the fact that the magicians of Pharaoh could replicate the miracles as well, and that the adversary has power as well. Plenty of disobedient missionaries still have success, but in the long run they deny blessings for themselves and/or their investigators and recent converts. Anyway. Obeying the commandments brings blessings and stuff.

Welp, happy Thanksgiving! We have a lot to be grateful for! I'm grateful for my family, the gospel, music, friends, and much more. We are blessed.

Peace love and blessings
-Elder Cox