HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Leihdeih hou! Happy New Year! I'd love to brag that I got to celebrate New Year's 15 hours earlier than most of you, but as missionaries we don't get to party much over here, haha. Wishing you all a year full of love and prosperity and all that jazz. :) This past week has been good! Some highlights: Our ward mission leader Tanner left for Utah this week! To say goodbye, he made us the most fabulous Mexican meal. What a blessing he (and his food) is. If you see him hanging around Salt Lake, take him out to dinner or something, haha. This week we've been blessed to meet with some new people! I'm hoping that we can continue meeting with them. I already feel so much love for them and I can already picture them as full-blown members of our ward, haha. We've also been focusing on building relations with the ward, and holy cow, I love all of these people so much! The wildest, most interesting ward in Utah has nothing on the ones here in HK, but they all work so well together and I love each person here so much. This week I've studied a lot about miracles. I've been working on reading through Jesus the Christ (I'd definitely recommend, if you ever have incredible amounts of motivation and brainpower, haha. It's a tough read but it's so so so good). It struck me how sometimes people don't believe that something is a miracle because they can't understand it at all (like Christ turning the water into wine), and other people don't regard miracles as miracles because they can scientifically understand how that miracle worked, but in reality, a miracle is a miracle regardless of whether we understand it or not. It also reminded me of the talk in the last general conference by Elder Hallstrom about miracles, in which he talked about how sometimes the lack of what we perceive to be a miracle is actually a miracle in and of itself. We are definitely, without a doubt, surrounded by miracles every single day, and we just miss them because we either take them for granted or just can't recognize them. It's one of my goals in 2018 to be better at recognizing and being thankful for the everyday miracles that I'm privileged to experience, and I'd like to encourage you all to do the same. God's hand is in the details of our lives, even if we don't recognize that it's there. Sending you all lots of love! Thanks for everything you do! Gayauh! Sister Wasden 郭姊妹 Pictures: 1. Okay, so this one needs some explanation. Sister Risenmay and I accidentally matched, and then artsy Sister Risenmay noticed that we also happened to match the pink buildings and blue sky outside, so we tried to get a picture to show that, but the lighting was bad so you can't see it. So now it's just a picture of us sitting in our cluttered windowsill, hahaha 2. We had a weird day and there's nothing better to fix that than face masks 3. Our ward travel day was today and one of our sweet members bought us these treats! Frozen strawberries with a sugary syrup and rice paper over them. SO GOOD. Me, Sister Risenmay, Ying Ying (one of my favorite 7 year olds), and Sister Leung (our fab YW president)