August 2, 2010

Well Dear Family,
This has been an interesting 5 days. I feel like I'm on Elder Shrubb withdrawal, and it's hard/weird to work with a different missionary permanently, unlike exchanges where whatever happened happened and then Elder Shrubb would come back. It's just hard getting used to a different attitude and personality all the time, climatizing to Elder Shrubb was ok since I didn't really know any better at all, especially in field missionary work. Also just switching from having district leader companion to being junior of a team is a weird switch.

Shona is doing ok, I think she has a testimony or at least an inkling of one, she did struggle with the idea of no coffee and smoking and while I think she knows she needs to stop using them, she doesn't see how she can. She also flaked out on church Sunday because she's just afraid of church and I think trying to keep the Word of Wisdom and all. We are going to have FHE with the Branch President's family and her at President McCall's house tonight, so hopefully that will work out.

Ann has like 4 missionary projects going on really, she has her friend that didn't come to church this week because of a family B-day party but is interested and wants to come next week, another friend she periodically has lunch with that is a less-active that said those years of activity were the best of her life but the church was too restricting, her daughter and her partner who are sorta warming up to the church, the daughter more than the partner, and her grandson who she has a close bond to who I've met a few times. He's really cool and likes and respects us, but he would have to change a lot to accept the gospel, but we'll work with Ann on all those groups. She really is an awesome recent convert.

Well that was a fun synopsis. Umm on the other hand of things I really liked the Carter pictures, do you think I could have some for my family album that are standard photos? I'm afraid the ones of him and Piper will bleed or get ripped and I can't put them in my album. Also I found out if you want you can send me CDs with conference talks so if you want to collect some about missionary work, or some from Elder Holland that would be cool.

So yeah right now is a little harder than when Elder Shrubb did mostly everything and I trusted him because he's such a good hard worker and now I'm trying to figure out how I can be the best junior companion possible. Ehhhh I'll survive. I just need to get used to the changes and not stress and not compare trainer to follow-up trainer and the steal the best of both.

I think I also neglected to say that Monday is P-Day now so that'll be an interesting adjustment, so maybe Sunday night emails are the thing to do now.

Well I have more time so I'll tell you all about my super dodgy Priesthood lesson.
So we had no investigators at church (again) and so we were in Priesthood and one of the Elders got up to teach the creation. And like the first sentence he said was "And now some of what we'll talk about is controversial, and yes we will talk about the Big Bang Theory" So I knew this was gonna be terrible from the beginning. Well it only got worse when he handed out blown up photocopies of Facsimile 2 in the Pearl of Great Price, so from then I knew we gonna talk about Kolob. So by now I'm kind of glad we had no investigators show up for this lesson and I'll just share some of the things we covered. Supposedly in a letter to his brother Joseph Smith said that Jesus has been working for the Father for 2,555,000,000 years (2 Billion), that the Earth has been around for that long, if you divide that number by 365,000 (Kolob time for something) it comes out to 7,000 or the amount of time the Earth is supposedly been here, in Kolob time. That only has so many confusing issues, the first of which I hit was that the Earth takes 365 days and a quarter to make a full revolution so why not 365,250 for that figure, and other things. Then he briefly talked about Ex Nihilo (out of nothing) and how the Earth was organized not made out of nothing. That one was pretty standard knowledge I think, but still kinda random. Then he talked about 'Gaia' or the spirit of the Earth and I'm not sure if he was implying it was sentient or not, but it was just weird. Then he talked about how when the Earth was made it was originally Pangea and how that changed after the flood or something, and then at the end as we were running out of time we started talking about evolution.

What did you learn last Sunday?

So yep, life is interesting here in England.

Love all!
Ryan