Just a quick note for tonight, as it is getting late and we had a late night last night and we will be getting up very early tomorrow to go teach a seminary class. We returned to our duties with the Red Cross today. For the last two Mondays being Family Days we the hospital was not open for normal business. This evening we home taught 3 of our soldiers who are either here permanent party or here TDY. Since we are a Branch our members need to be Home Taught, so we have taken that duty upon ourselves to Home Teach the entire Branch until otherwise assigned. They are all military members, so it is in the line of duty any way.

Back in the saddle again! We had a good group of soldiers at Church. Although we did have one sad experience. One of our soldiers was not allowed to come with us; the Platoon Sargent would not allow him to come because he did not have one of their own as a battle buddy. He was in tears, he wanted to go to church so badly. We told him we would work out a solution. We have elevated it up to the Chaplains.

We met a sweet sister and her family this evening. She has 3 little girls, dad is deployed and will be gone a year. We certainly hope she will take us up on our offers to be of assistance in any way we can. These dear sweet sisters, they are so strong, brave, and true!

We have had a real fine day today. As stated earlier, our soldiers are all back in town. We heard one Platoon Sargent say, "Thank goodness they are all back safe". We suppose from that remark, that in the past they have had some accidents and deaths over the holidays; so we suppose that nothing like that happened this year. We got out to post a little after 0800 this morning and started off on the eastern most end of the long row of barracks and worked our way west. We met 3 of 4 of our newly arrived soldiers, the fourth one we found out where he resides, but he had checked out. We were able to find most of our soldiers and visit with them for a few minutes, see how there Christmas went and welcome them back. Then we went over to the 73rd ORD BTL and met up with 3 of the 5 of our soldiers there. So it was a very successful morning.

We then dashed home, ate lunch and left to go pick up the Elders for our afternoon appointments with them. We started off visiting the Escobido family. We had a real nice visit with them and had the opportunity to talk about the Book of Mormon, its purpose, its testimony of the Savior and so forth. We had a good Spirit there; we believe they came to a real fine understanding of the little lesson we gave them.

From there we went to visit a very old fella (64), 64 may not be too old, but his body looked as if it had seen 84 years. He told us some real interesting stories; one was about a son he never knew he had. The two of them just happened to meet by chance at an H&R Block office. Anyway, we talked for about an hour and then moved on to the next appointment. The man, Johnie, was not there, but another fellow was. We told him we were missionaries and asked him if he had a copy of the Book of Mormon, he said no, so we gave him a copy. He began to read it as we were leaving.

Our last appointment of the day was with George. The young missionaries had met with him once when they told us about him. We asked if we could come with them to teach him the next time. Well, the next time just about fell through, but miraculously, it pulled through. So we met with him and thereafter the missionaries, both, were transferred; that left us to bridge the gap. Our new Elders did a great job teaching him tonight and he committed to reading the Book Of Mormon, praying about it and coming to church tomorrow. It was an incredibly good meeting.

The last thing we did was take fliers of our next FRG around to all the missionary apartments to give to the military families in their wards. It has been a great and productive day! We love days like this!

This evening we began our study of the Doctrine and Covenants in Institute. Brothers Child and Miller were our soldiers who came out. Hopefully, in the future, we will have more attend. We left each attendee with a challenge to read and study each week so they could come prepared to do as the commandment teaches in 88:118, to teach one another the doctrine. Institute is very enjoyable and if more soldiers would come out they would see, as well, how enjoyable it would be for them.

In preparation for our next Family Resource Group meeting, we made up some fliers and then took them to Sister Fordham to approve, unfortunately she was not at home, but we left a copy of them on her door step. She volunteered to be president of the FRG. Next we went to see the Stocks, but she wasn't home either. After that we went to see Sister Scroggins, we found her home and had a nice visit with her. Her youngest son had had a very bad rash so she and sister Gowans had fun talking all sorts of medical stuff together. From there we went to our Missionary Correlation meeting. That is about it for the day!

This morning we drove two of our young missionaries up to Irmo, SC for transfers. We had an enjoyable drive with them. We were sorry to see them go, they have only been here a short time, but the Lord has other things in mind for them. After we returned we went to meet our new missionary who was transferred in. He is a nice young man, Elder Dixon. They will be without a car to cover their very large area, so we told them we would help and support them in any way we can. So we drove them to our apartment, feed them dinner and then went out to an appointment, unfortunately the appointment was not at home. So we dropped the Elders off at their apartment and we drove home. Elder Gowans felt impressed to call the Murray family, he is deploying very soon. They wanted us to come and assist in giving him a blessing before his departure. It was nice to be with the family on this special evening. We were able to talk and to visit for a while. We know  Heavenly Father will be with them.

This has been a reinvigorating day! This afternoon we had the opportunity to Skype with many family members while they attended the Gowans Family Christmas party. Most everyone was there. The only family not there was Jacob and family and Becky and family, but we were able to Skype with Becky and family earlier today. It was nice to talk and see them at the same time; of course mom and dad, being the oldest are always the most amazed. We were surprised, however to learn that many of the younger ones had never Skyped before.

After our Skype session was complete, we readied ourselves to go pick up the Elders and take them to appointments that had been arranged for tonight. While we were together we obtained all their information on all their current investigators. We will help bridge the gap from the time our Elders are transferred to the time we get new missionaries in town. We will be doing much of teaching over the next month or so depending on what happens in the next few days.

We had a real nice visit with a less active family, the Escobidos and then one with George who had his second lesson today. He seems to be very excited about what he is learning, and so we should all be excited about the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Plan of Salvation.