Happy in New Zealand

Hello! How are you guys doing? Wow thanks for the emails. It sounds like your doing fine and getting ready for Christmas! I cant believe its snowing there and is so cold. Here it is really warm and sometimes really hot. It doesn't really seem like Christmas here because no one really makes a big deal out of it. They don't put up any lights or hardly any Christmas decorations. The only lights there are is the temple Christmas lights. They are really awesome. Well my week has been really really good. I've had some really cool experiences and some spiritual experiences. I love being on my mission so far. The people here are so friendly its unreal. Even if they reject our message they do it in a nice way or let us in to talk and have a drink. The members are extremely nice too. They feed us A TON of food and then they give us a bunch of food to take home for later. We don't really need to go grocery shopping because we get so much food from the members. Last P day we got to go to the Hamilton Gardens! They were SO cool. I took a lot of pictures but if we ever come back to Hamilton we need to go to the gardens so you can see them. It was really fun. I will send you pictures as soon as I get that cord because I don't know how to send you any without it. That's awesome Ryan has already been snowboarding! How is it Ryan? I'm jealous but I love being out here and I know its where I'm supposed to be. Its going to be really weird not being home for Christmas though. I really wish I could write each one of you an email... but me and Elder Sessions have to ride with Elder king and Elder Bapcock (our district leader) because we don't have a car. They only want to stay for an hour...so I don't have a lot of time. But next time I'll try and stay here longer. We had district meeting which was really cool. The Elderly couple from the temple visitor center came and told us we were going to go up to the temple every even night of December. The 12th was our first day. Its really cool. The temple is gorgeous and the lights are so cool looking. They have choirs and people singing Christmas songs and everything. There is a ton of people that come to the lights here. What we do is go around and talk to people. We try and get referrals and teach people about what we believe in. We are doing it again tonight! I'm excited. I have never been inside the temple yet...the first time I've ever saw it was on the 12th. It is a really cool visitor center and temple. Okay well we have gotten a lot of new referrals this last week. Me and Elder Sessions ride about 20 minutes on our bikes to our area and we talk to everyone on the way. We have got a TON of teaching appointments for this upcoming week. We have had a lot of success at teaching and finding people to teach. We have a ton of potential investigators and we have a lot of investigators. Right now we are teaching a really nice lady named Shelly. We have taught her a lot of the lessons. She has came to church too. We are working on teaching her daughter Danelle and her son Krien. They are really nice people and we think we will be getting to baptise them pretty soon. It is an awesome experience. We are also getting close to setting a baptism date for Romish. He is from India. He is extremely nice and has gone to church a lot and is reading the Book of Mormon everyday! We also have been going to the Lua Lua family. The dad was inactive and we have got him to come back to church and he has two unbaptised daughters. We have been teaching them and believe they will probably want to get baptised too. We are also teaching another less active family named the Falilae family. The mom has a younger brother living with her and I'm pretty sure he will want to get baptised soon too. Our goal before the end of the year IS 6 BAPTISMS BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR!!! cool huh?! We are having a lot of success and blessings from the Lord. We are also teaching Brenda. She is a really nice Maori lady. We mowed her whole lawn for her a couple days ago. We have taught her lesson one and two. We are also teaching a guy name Wihi, he is 25 and is really awesome. We have taught him and his sister lesson one twice. They are having trouble believing in the Book of Mormon and the prophet Joseph Smith. I'm loving teaching and I've felt the spirit a lot when I teach! I'm getting pretty good at teaching. And I know the Lord is helping me in so many ways. We have a lot of investigators so we dont really have to track much. We are usually trying to visit and teach the investigators we already have. We are working with the memebers a lot. They are really nice and very helpful. I love the ward here. I spoke in church yesterday! I talked about charity and bore my testimony. It was in sacrament meeting. Christmas day we have dinner plans all day long. Breakfast lunch and dinner I'm going to be really full that day. Well I love and miss you all, until next time.
Love Elder Tyler Kitchen