Back To Santo Domingo!

Hello!

Ami ta bai na e oficina pa sirbi manera e proximo financero!

First off mom, thanks, those are lessons that I will need for the rest of my life.

Well, I got a call last night from President Hernandez during night church here in Aruba, and he told me that I will be going back to Santo Domingo this transfer to serve in the mission office as the next financial office elder!!!  That actually means that I will be in charge of a lot of the finances for the mission, and most of the finances for the missionaries!!  What an opportunity, I am going to love that!!!  That was another huge blessing from the Lord!

Aruba really is a place that I loved, and I didn't want to leave it, but this will be a fantastic opportunity!  I will love to come back here throughout my life.  I am really excited now to go into the office, and that really helps me leave Aruba behind, and I think that that is just how the Lord plans it.  You do your time and do the best that you can, but then when your time comes, it's time to move on and look forward to other things.  I will never be able to thank the Lord for the unbelievable blessing and privilege, and the once in a lifetime opportunity that it was to be a missionary in Aruba.  I will forever have to show Him my gratitude for that.

So, I'm going into the office, and the area that I will serve in there is called Gazcue.  It's actually in the Santo Domingo Zone, the exact same zone I worked in for the first 6 transfers of mission before coming out here.  So get this, there are 16 transfers in a mission,  I spent my first 6 in Santo Domingo, then I spent my next 4 in Aruba, and that leaves me with exactly 6 transfers left, and it's possible that I spend them all in Santo Domingo.  That would mean that I spent 75% of my mission in the same zone, haha.  That will really be awesome to have been a part of that zone for so long and see so many miracles done in the same stake!  (Here zones are aligned with the stakes, so Santo Domingo is a stake too.)  My new companion will be Elder Ellis, he is great!  We will probably be in a triplet with Elder Leonares, the other office elder.  He is Dominican.

Victor was baptized on Saturday, it was sweet!!! I was privileged enough to be able to perform it, and then he was confirmed on Sunday.  What a great blessing from the Lord.  I am so grateful for all of the lives that I was able to be a part of here.  I will forever think of Aruba as paradise.  It truly was for me!

I wasn't able to get any good pictures of the baptism, so I had to attach one that I took of the beach earlier before the baptism.  It was pretty much dark by the time we did the baptism and got out of the water, so I'll have to get some of the other pictures from Elder Jensen.

So I am going to fly out on Wednesday in the morning.  Elder Holt (Jeff's first companion in the Provo MTC)will be the new district leader down here, he will do great, he is such a great missionary!  Elder Miller is coming down here, he is an awesome missionary also!  I served with him when he was companions with Elder McBride in Santo Domingo when I was there.  Great guy, and he and Elder Jensen will tear it up out here!

Another quick thing.  I would love it if you could add a couple more email addresses to the list of people that you forward my emails to weekly.  They are President Buckley, and the Chilton's, a young American couple who moved here recently.  I would love to keep in contact with them and have my emails go to them.   Thanks so much for the help!

I think that's about it, I sent off all of the Christmas items to you guys this morning, sorry, you'll have to figure out who's is who's when they get there.  Mom and Dad's are the two shirts in Papiamento, and then there should be a Dushi Yui shirt and a Del Sol shirt for each one of the brothers and sister.  Leah's is the V-neck one, haha.

We played golf today with President Buckley, it was awesome!!  So I attached a picture of that too.

It has been such an amazing experience to be out here serving a mission.  It has truly been an adventure, and now I get to go down the next path that this adventure takes me on.  It has been unbelievable the lessons that I have learned.  I truly have learned that we are going to have trials in our lives.  That's part of this life.  We all will have trials.  But if we will hang on for a little while and endure them well, then the Lord will bless us beyond anything that we could ever imagine and beyond anything we ever deserved.  I am living proof of that.  How grateful I am for the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and the guidance it is to me.  I know that Jesus Christ lives and that this is His church, and I know that He knows how we feel in times of trial, and I know that He personally will walk beside us during them.  How eternally grateful I am for His infinite love.

I love you all and can't wait to hear from you again!

Love,

Elder DeSpain

P.S.- Start sending everything to Santo Domingo like normal like you used to!