Elder Samuel Burge: Last P-Day Before the Mission Splits

That's pretty crazy that they made two elder's quorums, I can't even believe that there's enough elders for that. Dad is in the elder's quorum presidency, that's a pretty big calling there! That's crazy that Jason Lund was called as the elder's quorum president, I can only imagine how much work that calling has to be.

That's really cool that Kayleigh got to listen to "Joseph Smith" talk and share his testimony, I bet it was a pretty neat experience. Glad to hear everybody is doing pretty alright, minus some phones almost exploding.

This last week was pretty good. After we wrote home at the library we went to the Nike employee store! It was pretty big actually, and everything was pretty inexpensive (for Nike clothes and shoes). I bought a few pairs of Nike socks, and these sweet running shoes! They're really simple running shoes, so it's like running bare-footed. They're pretty awesome, though I probably won't use them a whole lot for the time being. Too tired from biking around all the time.

We took our preparation day today instead of Monday to go to a place called OMSI, which is a science and technology museum. It was pretty cool, but some of their exhibits weren't open because they're setting them up. It was pretty neat, because it was in Portland. There's a lot of hands-on experiments/demonstrations about renewable energy sources, fossils, the cycles of pregnancy (which was really gross), and technologies to help people who don't have limbs, disabilities, etc. It was pretty cool, but it's geared towards kids quite a bit. Still though, it was pretty fun.

I actually did some family history a day or two ago with this lady that we're teaching. She's really interested in family history work, and so we got together with a family history consultant in our ward, went down to the church, and did some family history. I mostly just filled out my pedigree chart on FamilySearch, but Beate (the lady we're teaching) and Sis. Lobo (the family history consultant) went to town with all sorts of genealogical records, census', etc. She's from Germany so she was interested in learning more about her family's history. It was actually pretty cool though, I didn't think I would like family history as much as I did.

We also had a really good lesson with this younger girl we're teaching, Michella. She accepted to be baptized, which is really good, but we have to talk with her parents about getting permission to have her be baptized. The ward mission leader, Elder Schmidt, and myself have been trying to meet with her mom, but she's super busy so it hasn't worked out. We'll see how that goes though, it's definitely exciting to see somebody I started teaching accepting to be baptized.

The final transfer before the mission divides is this Monday, and President Morby has asked EVERYONE in the mission to come to the transfer meeting we usually have. It's going to be crazy; there will be like, 250 missionaries there (not to mention all the people that gave them a lift to the meeting). I don't know if I'd get transfered out of my area yet, but anything could happen at this point. It will be interesting to see what happens! We're also having what's called a mission tour on Thursday. It's where a general authority, Elder Whiting, comes to the mission to speak with us. That should be pretty cool as well.

There's this fellow in this apartment complex near us that we visit named Ron, and he gave us some of this home-made bread and it was DELICIOUS! Wasn't as good as Mom's bread though, it got me to missing her homemade bread. It was still really good though.

Well, I love you all and hope you're having a good week.

-Elder Samuel A. Burge