My goodness. I do enjoy the Christmas season, I must admit. I do have to say, however, that it’s not really like Christmas if there aren’t certain qualifications: It must be cold, there must be snow, and one must be with one’s family.
Apart from those certain qualifications (which are not currently met for me), this has been a great time of the year thus far. We’ve had quite a bit of success this past week, as well. We’ve been looking hard for new people to teach, and this week we made some great advances in that field. We’ve also gone several times in the past couple of weeks to the Christmas lights at the Temple, which are superb.
Pretty much what I’m trying to say is that I’m really enjoying myself right now. We’ve got some great plans set up for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well. We’ve been invited over to several amazing members’ houses to spend part of the day on Christmas, so we’re pretty excited about all of that. Plus, we had an amazingly spiritual fireside last night. That was amazing.
Completely on the other side of things, however, is something looming over our heads. The State of Arizona has passed a law that goes in to effect at the first of the year. This law imposes tens of thousands of dollars of fines on any company found to be employing illegal immigrants on the first offence. On the second offence, said company loses its business license. Needless to say, that’s a price that no company can pay (small or large).
What does that mean for us? Well, we’re not sure. But if it works out how the state wants it to work, that means that round about 90% of our investigators will be left without work and will have to seek employment elsewhere. So, they’ll be leaving. That means that we’ll be left with, more or less, 10% of the current hispanics. That will make it awfully hard to do missionary work among them.
The point is that we’re not sure exactly what’s going to be happening, but it appears that the situation will be changing drastically for the Spanish-speaking missionaries in all of Arizona. But we’ll have to see.
But we don’t let that ruin the Christmas spirit, either. It’s too enjoyable time of the year to let that make us all worried. I’m mostly just saying that we should pray that we can keep some hispanics to teach here. That would make our lives much better.
Anyway, everybody have an amazing week! I think that the library’s open on Christmas Eve, so if it is, I’ll send the next update then. If it’s not, then we’ll talk to you next Wednesday! Enjoy!
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