Happy New Year!

Hey everyone happy new year!

Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and made some fun memories! I won’t ever forget my 2 Christmases and 2 New Years here in the Philippines. The filipinos are so thoughtful- they’ve looked out for us missionaries lots these past weeks. I’m happy to be here!

We’ve kinda been jumping around to random houses these past few weeks. There were 6 of us in a tiny apartment but this week we got a set house at least until transfer day on Jan 10 haha! We are super blessed. There were a few sisters who headed home to start school so an area got closed until transfers so we’ll be staying over there for the time being.

Elder Fiesta had to head to get his license renewed the day after Christmas. It was soo PACKED! If you think the DMV is slow in America you should see it here in the Philippines haha. We were there for hours but as he was doing his thing I was lucky to be sitting next to super nice people every time we moved to a new spot! There are so many people ready for the gospel here it’s just really important trusting God will help us find them.

An elder in our mission had their mom pass away last week so Elder Fiesta has been with him a lot lately traveling to Quezon City for funeral services and things. It has been awesome to be updated about them though because the Elder has really helped the non members and less actives of his family feel the peace the gospel brings the past few days. They also did a temple tour which sounded like a huge help. I worked with an awesome missionary named Elder Palmer from Panguitch for about 2 days while Elder Fiesta was gone. It was fun to learn from him and work with him. We taught a member family in his area the Restoration- a message I think most members don’t mention enough! I’ve shared the story of Joseph Smith hundreds of times here but it never get old ;)

On pday we went to Mall of Asia to eat some lunch and go bowling. We bowled last week as well haha it’s starting to become our favorite thing to do. I’ll try to send some pics this week. Got a few pictures with some random people haha. On Sunday the ward used chocolate bread for the sacrament so I can check that one off the bucket list. Haha! New Years E ve was last night and it was super insane. People were starting to party pretty crazy at about 3pm and it went through the night. At about 10 I was doing some follow ups in the alley way by our house because there’s service there and our neighbor who I’ve never met just walked up to me and gave me a full cake! Haha the people here are so kind. I’ve had a cold this week so luckily I was pretty tired and slept through the craziness. Everyone else in the house was having a hard time though haha. I guess people were banging on our door most of the night trying to get in but they failed to do so.

Have a great week! I’m excited for our investigators to come back to the city this week- most of them went to their families in the province this week. We should be able to make some good progress in the area this upcoming week :) My goal this upcoming year is simple- to read the Book of Mormon every day. I know that as we do this God will be able to help us in anything we are working towards doing. With His help, we will do so much more than we’d ever be able to do on our own.

Love elder reber

*Looks like most of the pictures this week are from pdays. It's fun to see pics at the mall-I think Park will miss the three months of celebrating Christmas next year! Although it appears they do a lot of playing, I still think they have plenty of time to work!