MTC, week 4

Dag, familie!

Things are going pretty well here. I've been running miles at a time during my gym time lately. I'm hoping I can hit five miles straight before I leave. I ran two yesterday, and I'm hoping to up it to three on Friday. The only downside to running more and more will be less and less time to play foursquare. It's surprisingly fun. But I've probably already said it.

Today I splurged and bought a hymn book and an English dictionary. (I'm a nerd. I know.) But I figure it'll help me if someone uses a word in Dutch and I don't know what the English translation means. I know. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a walking dictionary.

Yesterday at the devotional, we had Elder Claudio R. M. Costa speak. My zone is telling me that he talked about a lot of stuff. He told us his conversion story, and within a month of reading the Book of Mormon, he was planning "the best singles' activity ever." He met his wife there. It was cool. He made the sister missionaries teach him all seven discussions in two days, and he was baptized the second day.

In class a few days ago, we watched a devotional that Elder Bednar gave about recognizing the Spirit. He told an awesome story about how when he was serving a mission in Germany, he had to go pick up Elder and sister Packer from the airport and drive them to the train station so they could go to Berlin. He gave Elder Packer a twenty mark note in case they got hungry on the train. When they got to the border with East Germany, the train was stopped and they checked everyone's passports. Sister Packer's passport was a three-year passport extended to five years, and the East German government wasn't accepting those. The officer was getting really agressive about it (they later found out that they were actually seizing people with that kind of passport), and so Elder Packer put the twenty mark note in Sister Packer's passport and gave the passports to the guard. The guard went into the office and came back, giving them back their empty passports. (It was a "righteous exchange," not a bribe.) He then let the train continue.

Elder Bednar didn't even remember the money, and when he was at a region meeting when he was a 40 year old stake president, he asked Elder Packer if he remembered when they'd picked them up from the airport, and he told him that story. It was awesome.

I just thought that that story was amazing, and I'm kind of disappointed that that devotional isn't accessable on the church website.

Yesterday I talked to some elders who are going to Japan, and they said that the missionaries in the affected are have been transferred to safer missions, and that they'd still get to Japan; it might just be a little bit longer. Brother Bond told us that all the missionaries are three times as far away from the power plants as the government says is safe. A cool thing is that all the missionaries in the affected area were at a zone conference. All of their living quarters were destroyed.

This week has just been a lot of studying, as usual. I've started to read throught the Doctrine and Covenants, and I'm splitting my study time mostly between that and Jesus the Christ. It's really cool how easy it is to apply those scriptures to my life.

Dead Duck wasn't the only headless duck, and there were headless girls and broken shamrocks. But they're still good. I'm going to try to finish them today so they don't go bad. I've gottne pictures of all the ducks I've eaten so far, I think. Unfortunately, we can't upload pictures on the computers here.

So, my district keeps calling people fat. It's funny. One of the most common phrases I hear in Dutch is "U bent dik." (You are fat.) It'd probably be more appropriate to say "Jij bent dik," because U is the formal form. But my zone gets after me for correcting people's grammar.

We get to go to the temple today. I'm so excited. It's nice to not be surrounded by brick walls. It's kind of funny, because they told us to use the mountains to determine our directions, but everywhere you look, there's another building. One of my favorite pictures on my camera is of trees. It's ridiculous.

Last night I did the choir, and we sang Be Still My Soul. Clinton sat next to the Elder in front of me.

I think that this week I'm either better prepared for the half-hour limit, or I have less to say. I'm pretty much rambling, and I have three and a half minutes left.

I think I'll close here. I love you all, and I appreciate your support.

P.S. Mom, I don't know if you do this already, but it'd be nice if you could post a link to the blog posts on facebook through my account, so people can see it on my profile.