Elder Evan Baer: Canada Calgary Mission: "Christmas Is Carnage"

[Title references this line from Babe]

December 26, 2023

圣诞节快乐!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! AND HAPPY BOXING DAY!!

The Christmastide season has begun! I just learned this today that Christmas Day is the first of the 12 holy days of Christmastide that continues through the new year until January 6th called “Epiphany,” celebrating the visit and gifts of the wise men from the Orient. (*side note that I think is cool* The magi visited the savior about 24 months after his birth, and the holiday to celebrate is observed about 12 days after the celebration of Christ’s birth.) All that goes to say, feel free to keep the Christmas spirit up for a little while!

Anywho, I sincerely hope all of you had a splendid week and a good Christmas day! It was a good week ramping up to a wonderful weekend for me!

Last Monday my companion reluctantly let us go to Long and McQuade, a music store a lot like Summerhays where I got a new violin case!!! Had a good member meal that night and then practiced a lot for Zone conference the next day, which consisted of some silly games and some good ham.

I had a really uplifting experience on Wednesday at a train stop near our house. We had a huge stack of Christmas pass-along cards that we thought we could start passing out. We ran out after 45 minutes, they were going like candy! Right before we were about to leave, this guy walks up to us and asks us a question on how our beliefs would describe the word “precision.” I didn’t know exactly what he was getting at, so I started making up some random stuff (that was definitely Spirit led) about how detailed and precise God’s creations are, to which he said, “I totally agree! It’s as if….” and continued to tell us cool patterns he found. This was a perfect moment to hand him the copy of the Book of Mormon that Elder Labrum decided to bring, and we told him honestly about how it’s the most correct, most “precise” book on the earth today. He seemed a little bewildered but pretty excited. I ended the day by making some DI-VINE tomato soup!

Friday consisted of basically nothing but random service. We helped one of the branch presidency members clean out junk from the houses of people he’s renting to, and we also sort of helped with a Ukrainian-English class grad party. We found another stack of pass-along cards and handed them out at a different station. This time we were met by quite a few people who looked like they weren’t enjoying life too much and who also made it verbally obvious how much they disliked the Church . . . good to know. Gotta love the mission experiences.

The 23rd (or “Christmas Adam” as I like to call it) was quite slow. Lots of fliers hung up, I made some cookies for the upstairs neighbor, and we snuck a nap in there somewhere. We did have a little lesson with our friend John about the restoration, which was actually our first in-person lesson in about a month. Very good lesson followed by a very good Live Nativity that we walked over to right afterwards.

We did have a little miracle leading up to Christmas Eve. Our district texted every single person we could find in our “area book” app asking if they wanted to come to church, and the next morning we had TWENTY new people show up!! Really good sacrament meeting for sure. We were invited to a member's house afterwards for some games and more good ham.

Christmas Day was awesome! After shredding open some anticipated packages, a super cool member from Taiwan treated the district to a Dim-Sum restaurant with lots of strange-looking food that usually tasted pretty good! Another awesome Canadian member who served in Taiwan invited us to eat dinner with his family. That was really special to me, the atmosphere there had a truly warm Christmas spirit and it felt as if I was eating with family, friends, and neighbors from home.

Here’s some last little Christmas Cheer for you to enjoy brought to you by Elder Baer’s moments of staring into space. The Live Nativity depicted how Mary took the baby Jesus and “wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” It reminded me of a favorite bible translation into Pidgin-Hawaiian which defines the manger as “inside one ting fo hold da cows food.” I thought about how being laid in a trough for cattle might be foreshadowing to moments later in Christ’s teaching regarding cattle when he says, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” When we consider ourselves in the place of cattle, we see that Christ offers edification and nourishment as well as a yoke that eases our load. By feasting on His word and “yoking” ourselves with Him (or making covenant ties), we are making our lives easier and happier. The manger also has some resemblance to a sacrament table, where again we are edified and offered a way to lasting change. Perhaps as we enter a new year and wonder what load we will need to carry, we can remember our Savior and his promise, “I will give you rest.”

Big thank you to all of you for the kindness and support you’ve given—through letters, gifts, and especially from just being yourself. You are all an inspiration to me, a “guiding star” that helps me better understand a characteristic of the Savior. Merry Christmas!

–熊长老

photos:

good night and morning views of Calgary