Christmas Service

Today has been an absolutely crazy day, so I don't have a whole lot of time to email.  Sorry about that. This week has been amazing! We did a TON of service. One day this week we did 9 hours of it. We volunteered at a non-denominational church to help with getting some Christmas gifts into boxes for a sub for Santa deal at Mesa Jr. High School. We volunteered at the food bank and made 200 food boxes, and we also helped a lady move a bunch of stuff out of her house and into a storage unit.

This morning we woke up at 3:30 and hiked to a place called flat iron. It's a giant cliff that you can climb up the back side until you get to the cliff and you can look over it. It's probably 300-400 ft tall! It was pretty sweet! It was by far the hardest hike I've ever done. It was pretty hard until we got to a washout toward what I thought was the top, then it really got hard! It was the steepest thing I've ever climbed for that long. It took us almost an hour and a half from there to get to the top. It was a really great hike, but I definitely am exhausted now! When we got up there I threw a rock off of it and it took forever to get down to the bottom.

The area is doing really well. The work is really picking up from where we started at in the area 4 months ago. We don't have anyone that is super progressing or ready to be baptized, but we're still searching! We are looking forward to March which we have set a mission wide goal for 100 baptisms that month. This month we're focusing on finding people to teach so that in 3 months we have people to baptize. We are trying to take everyone we know to the Christmas lights at the Mesa temple. It's really nice because we only live about 2 miles away from the temple, so we bike it all the time. The lights here are, no joke, way better than the ones in Salt Lake. I kept hearing that they were when I first got here, but I didn't believe people. I got there and it definitely has more lights than Salt Lake does and they're beautiful. The concerts they have every night at 7:00 are great too! On Christmas day the whole mission is singing! It's going to be way fun!

Have a great week everyone! I wish I had a little more time to email you guys. Merry Christmas! I loved all the letters I got this week too! Thanks for all the letters!

Love,

Elder Mullins

Most of our zone volunteering at the stake 5K

Santa's bathing in public

Santa Selfie

Me and my friends having a party

Post 9 hours of service

Our awesome Christmas tree a member brought us

Biking selfie

A member bought and stuffed some stockings for us

At the temple lights with Francine, Cedric, and Jonathan