Thanksgiving

November 28, 2022

Thanksgiving

Jordan with his dad and stepmom

We had a great and eventful Thanksgiving weekend here in Illinois. We have much to be thankful for, including each other, our wonderful family, our Savior Jesus Christ, a prophet to lead us, good health, safety, and the opportunity to serve a mission here where we love the people.

We had a unique opportunity today. As some of you may be aware, our mission president’s wife is Elder Rasband’s daughter. Elder and Sister Rasband came here to be with President and Sister Chase for the Thanksgiving day weekend. We were blessed to have a zoom call this afternoon with Elder and Sister Rasband and Elder and Sister Chase just for our mission. He taught us how much President Nelson loved each of us and needed all of us to be faithful and is thankful for our service. He assured us that our calls were inspired from the Lord. He also referred back to his latest conference talk, “This Day” from the October conference. He said that he was assigned to talk about flooding the earth with the Book of Mormon, and especially sharing digital copies of the Book of Mormon. Interestingly, Dave was asked at the last minute to teach Elder’s Quorum today. The assigned talk was “This Day” by Elder Rasband. As part of the lesson, Dave taught the Elders how to digitally share copies of the Book of Mormon. We continue to believe that there are no coincidences in the Lord’s work. Elder Rasband also answered questions from a number of missionaries.

We had another great experience this weekend. Jordan was baptized yesterday and confirmed in Sacrament meeting today. His dad was able to both baptize and confirm him. We are very proud of Jordan and felt honored to be able to teach him the gospel and help him commit to follow Jesus Christ.

We were asked by Sister Chase to organize service projects for all the missionaries in the Joliet and Naperville zones for Thanksgiving day. President and Sister Chase realize that Thanksgiving day is a special family day where it might be hard for the young missionaries to go visit people. The young missionaries might be especially homesick on Thanksgiving. The Chases wanted service projects to give the missionaries an opportunity to serve on this day. We organized four service projects for the districts in these two zones.

The Joliet district (our district) came to our area to help cleanup Starved Rock State Park. Sister Fesperman from the Ottawa ward volunteers regularly at Starved Rock. She arranged with the park to get cleaning supplies and along with her husband and son lead groups of missionaries on the trails in the park to pick up trash and clean up graffiti.

The Bolingbrook district prepared and served the evening meal at the Daybreak Shelter in Joliet.

The Aurora district made blankets for Project Linus, a national organization that provides blankets for children in hospitals, shelters and foster care. We acquired fleece to make 13 blankets. With the help of a member here in Ottawa, we cut off the selvage and squared up the fleece. We then cut off the corners and marked each side for the missionaries to cut strips. The missionaries could then tie a knot in each strip to complete the edge. We picked up the completed blankets on Friday and plan to deliver them in December.

Finally, we provided materials for the Naperville district to put together gift bags to distribute to essential workers who were required to be at work on Thanksgiving day.

We also had some additional opportunities to serve here in this area. We had two Saturday distributions at the food bank in November. The regular monthly distribution was on November 12^thand a special Thanksgiving distribution on November 19^th. The food bank prepared 450 boxes of food for a Thanksgiving day meal. We arrived at 8:00 am to help with traffic control as cars began lining up for the distribution. We distributed the boxes as cars would drive through the parking lot. By 11:00 we had completed the distribution. Unfortunately, this was another cold day with a strong wind coming off the Fox River that runs next to the parking lot. We survived, but we expect that the next few monthly distributions will be even colder.

We are looking forward to an eventful and fun December. We have what we need to make fudge and try to get to as many of the members and friends in our area as possible to wish each of them a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas to each of you. We hope that December is filled with joy and peace.

Love, Elder and Sister Curtis