Monday, December 31, 2007

Thanksgiving Feast

November 27, 2007

Thanks for the DearElder Package. I got it today, and now we have so much food in our room. Speaking of tons of food, Thanksgiving was awesome. Jeffrey R. Holland came and gave us a devotional in the morning. It was really great, he's such a good speaker. For lunch we had our all-you-can eat Thanksgiving Feast. Afterwards we had a devotional by the Church Humanitarian Director where he talked about all the stuff the church does around the world. After the Devotional we assembled 10,000 First Aid kits for the church to use. For our dinner, we had a brown paper bag filled with a stale turkey sandwhich and caffeine-free coke.
It started to snow about an hour ago. The thermostat in our room doesn't work, so the room is always 65 degrees.
Sam McGavin (From Arcadia Ward) is coming in to the MTC tomorrow. He is going to Peru. Kayla left last week, and Ryan Palmer comes in a few more weeks. Time flies by so fast here.
Yesterday we were at the R.C., which is the place where we answer phones. We also call people to see if they got the items they requested and ask them if we can send missionaries over. Of the 12 referalls we go, I was able to get 2! I also talked to this lady who was a history teacher in Illionois, who said she was teaching her classes about Nauvoo and the Mormon movement, and showed all of her classes the Restoration DVD! I personally feel that the DVD is the best and most powerful one the church offers.
I know it's a bit early, but here are some things that would be good Christmas gift ideas:
1. Any or all CDs by Steven Sharp Nelson
2. Any CDs of instrumental of hyms, preferably piano, violin or cello
3. Lot and lots of stamps
Well I have to go. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and I hope cousin Josh's broken arm gets better soon.


December 4, 2007


Thanks for the packages, although I can't believe you trust me enough to send me Christmas gifts weeks in advance. My companion won't let me open them. I got the cookies last night.
This week has been fairly normal. A few highlights were: one of the Hermana's in our district was getting a procedure done at the hospital and asked me to give her a blessing. We also were able to watch the First Presidency Christmas Devotional Sunday. It also snowed like crazy on Wednesday, and now all the snow has pretty much melted away.
One big experience I had was yesterday the the Referral Center. Our goal as a district was to get 30 referrals in 1 1/2 hours, which is about 3 per person. We set this goal many days in advance, and I personally had been praying hard so that we could meet our goal. I was feeling confident because last time I got the most.
What we do is call back people to make sure they got the things they ordered (DVDs, Bibles, Etc.) Most of the time we get answering machines, but if we get a live person, we usually (depending on the order) ask if we can send representatives over to deliver a Book of Mormon, and a message. As I was making calls, I was hung up on at least five times, I had people mad at met, etc. The time was almost up and I didn't have any referrals, and I was feeling kind of bad. Then, on my last call, I got a referral. We ended up with 25 total. Starting in January, our district gets to spearhead the live chat feature on Mormon.org.