The wettest two days of my entire life!

Hey everybody,

This weekend has easily been the wettest two days of my entire life! A big storm was rolling through Portland this weekend, lots of wind and heavy rainfall. I was completely covered in waterproof rain-gear and I'm still a little damp from Saturday! It was crazy, but I enjoyed it a lot. I still love the rain, but we'll see if I'm whistling the same tune after the new few months of constant, drizzling rain.

We've actually been doing quite a bit of walking the past week or two. One reason behind that is the fact that my brakes were 100% worn down and I literally could not slow down my bike in the least bit. I tried to buy new brake pads and mount them on my bike, but I wasn't able to adjust them right to where they were compressing against the wheel. I had this really awesome guy in our ward teach me how to replace and adjust brakes on Saturday and his wife ended up feeding us lunch- it was really nice of them! I'm glad though because now I know how to adjust the brakes on bikes, and I love learning how to fix things I've decided.

This week was a lot better than our past few weeks - we lost quite a few people to teach but luckily God's given us more people to teach! We knocked doors at this apartment building and found a woman named Emily, who's from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we've picked her up as a new investigator. It's really interesting and fun to teach her because she's only been here a few years so she has a hard time getting into religious talk because her main language is French. Crazy enough, we had a priest in the ward who loves speaking different languages and he came with us and busted out this miraculous ability to speak French- it was really cool! She'd heard all sorts of rumors about us, but she's so awesome because she figured the best source to learn more about what we believe is to actually talk with us! She made some pretty funny jokes about us doing things involving fire and her having to pray out the evil spirits we'd bring into her apartment! It was pretty funny!

Yeah, I really liked that quote – Calm seas never make skillfull sailors. That's something about missionary work that I think is so interesting - how much you learn. Always things to reflect on, it's quite a learning experience. I was thinking about how much I've learned about self-discipline. Waking up on time, doing things even when they're not always what you want to do, just a variety of things that I do daily that help to build discipline. It's interesting.

Alas, we're still doing missionary work pretty much the same. I haven't heard anything about us using social media or anything like that, but I'll be sure to let you know if I ever do though. Well That's all I've got for this week.

Love always,

Elder Samuel A. Burge