Elder Samuel Burge: Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our week was pretty alright- for the holiday season starting to hit. Our week still had some lessons (which worried me quite a bit). We did give him a blessing, but I don't think he was miraculously healed. We're trying to help him get back to church after a long stint of inactivity but it's hard for people. We've had some pretty good success this week- had some great lessons with two people that we're teaching! I've been thinking about our teaching pool and it's a wide variety of characters- a spiritualist pagan, a sweet firefighter with a bodacious/awesome mustache, some struggling housewives, and a few really cool families.

We actually found, taught, and set a baptismal date with somebody in less than three days- which is crazy! He's a younger guy we met walking down the street. He was outside his apartment having a cigarette and we started talking with him. He's got such a strong faith in Jesus Christ... His faith was, however, strengthened after having a small stint of schizophrenic visions/hallucinations. And this sounds crazy, but I don't think all of his visions were necessarily because of his illness- they made him a believer in Jesus Christ, taught him that sexual immorality, alcohol, and violence were displeasing to God, and that he needed to be baptized. It was crazy weird, but unfortunately we had to give him over to the zone leaders since they're in charge of the young singles ward.

Thanksgiving was great though- I had an awesome day. We woke up and ran a 5-k with the ward, and that was exhausting. Afterwards though we went and sang songs of thanksgiving at a local senior center (which was fun). We went over to the Staskiewicz family's house after that and played Risk with their two boys- and afterwards went over to the Walker's house for our Thanksgiving feast! It was great, we had a lot of fun with the Walkers and the thirty other people there! I didn't eat as much as I figured I would've (I did a lot more damage to the turkey at home- I only ate one plate food this year). Either way though, it was delicious! Sister Walker is known for her amazing cooking skills!~

I'm glad they were able to send you some pictures of us- and I'm glad that you didn't miss me too much during Thanksgiving. Glad that shooting my beautiful face with a 22-rifle was able to calm the sea of tears you were shedding over me being gone (We had a blown up picture of his face that we used for target practice).