Happy Thanksgiving!

We attended a ward Thanksgiving dinner on Friday and had the fun experience of sharing a table with a women that had a delightful Scottish accent. Robina had recently returned from a visit to Scotland to see her brother and she enjoyed asking Elder Avery what he remembered from his missionary days. She has a son that has been serving in Iraq and will be home any day now. Anyway, it was a delightful experience and we look forward to Thursday where 6 missionary couples will get together at the Mission home. I am taking a few family favorites as each couple will do. I hope each of you have an enjoyable Thanksgiving with your families and friends. We will sure miss our family but are so happy they are all getting together on Saturday. This strengthens my testimony of how important families being together forever really is and that we must do all that is in our power to make that happen.

Val Culverwell sends us the Ward Manna each month and I so appreciate her taking the time to do that. I really enjoyed Bishop Holt's message on personal revelation. "How many of us have received impressions, ideas, solutions to problems, strength to meet challenges and comfort to bear disappointment and sorrow, and have not recognized it as personal revelation?" I hadn't thought of it like this and I really appreciated his insight.

Even thought the number of people coming to the office has slowed down considerably, we seem to have plenty to do. I have been in the process of changing the employment bulletin board in our office. Our focus is on provident living, self-reliance, and serving others, which is easy to find plenty of information on. I also wanted to add to the employment section of the ward's bulletin boards. It is all about helping people help themselves and maybe that is why so few are coming in, because they are being required to work hard in their own job search. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a life time."
We had a great experience at the Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid night where 50+ people attended. Sister Weger interpreted for us and we felt good about the very helpful information that was shared. We hope the one in December is attended by even more people as it covers a bigger area.
After meeting with the (mostly Spanish speaking) Hidalgo 1st Ward this week, (good meeting by-the-way) we asked some of our volunteers to translate our handouts. We felt like we could shorten the time for future meetings if the written material didn't have to be translated. We sure appreciate this help from these good people.
We do have some great experiences with people getting jobs that I don't always share because the details would take so long to tell. But I did want to mention one because I think I spoke about Tito in one of my blogs. He is the one who is 4' 8" and is a 'giant' of a man. He was hired this past week with a medical housekeeping agency, that we had found out about and told him, and he was on 'cloud nine'. He also got a temporary job doing some brick work, while he was waiting for his background check to come back, and we talked with the woman he worked for when we visited the Edinburg 1st Ward today. She was delighted with him and we always feel good when these job situations work out because occasionally someone disappoints us.

We are reading from the Missionary Reference Library the book entitled, "Our Search for Happiness" by M. Russell Ballard. We feel like we are sitting across from him in this wonderful conversation. Let me share one paragraph; "When Jesus Christ becomes a reality in your life, you find yourself wanting to do what He would do and respond as He would respond in an effort to bring your life in harmony with His. And an interesting thing happens whenever you attempt to place your feet in Christ's footsteps. If you really concentrate on trying to walk the way He walked- loving, caring, serving, and obeying each step of the way- one day you'll look up and discover that His path has led you directly to the throne of God." It is such inspired reading!

We were in the older part of the town of Pharr and stopped at a family bakery to get a treat. Felipe and his wife Irma have owned and operated the business for 20+ years. They got married when she was 16 and he was 18, 48 years ago. He as a jovial fellow and quite the talker. They have all kinds of old relics around the room of just about everything imaginable. I saw the Valentines I had as a kid in the 50s'. Cool! The decoratred sugar cookies of all shapes were beautifully decorated. I'll have to take pictures when they start making the Christmas cookies and hope the pictures show what talent it took to do them.

I am learning so much on this mission and the refining process that comes, when I open my heart to let it happen, is such a blessing. My heart is so full with Reverence for our Heavenly Father and His son, Jesus Christ. They love us so much!

With love,
Los Averys