Yeah, this has been a great week! Bri got baptized! And her family, who hasn’t been the biggest fans of the church came to her baptism and confirmation! Woo! List time!
10: I’m just going to make #10 the paragraph above.
9: Got to do exchanges Monday , and be a real missionary, riding a real bike! It has been a HOT MINUTE since I’ve ridden a bike so that was fun to get back into that. I had to borrow Elder kays bike, and he is a BIGG BOYE so I had to drop the seat so much!
8: Got to help out at the pear farm, and pick on the platform! It’s basically a big machine that lets us grab all the parts at the tops of the trees! It was really scary, but fun!
7: We met a former Nun! She’s down to chat, but not read the book of Mormon, so we’ll see what happens after our first meeting.
6: Zone conference was this week! It was a bundle of fun, and we got to see a bunch of the other missionaries! Because a lot of the missionaries are going home this transfer, we had a lot of great testimonies borne. Nobody cried that hard tho, so that was surprising.
5: Mí mama sent a bunch if music, and for some reason my phone just wouldn’t recognize any of them. So after a while of messing around with my phone trying to get them to work, with no real progress, I finally tried adding “.mp3” at the end of the name and viola! It worked! Thanks so much Mom!
4: in the morning I’ve been developing my artsy talents by working on a superhero collage. And I finally finished it! See if you can name all the characters!
3: On Friday, as I was getting out of the car, I saw a little dead bird! That was sad, and I’m glad I didn’t step on it.
2: Man, the gospel just blesses us so much! The peace that we get from simply following Christ is incredible. You can also get sooo many solutions from just listening to God and his prophets.
#1: Stefán Karl Stefánsson. RIP
I love you all. Remember that Christ loves you too.
10: Elder Willits got sick! It might have been a combination of my sick, and the nasty smoke that has been up here. So u got a whole Saturday to read the new testament, and do some other paper stuff.
9: Thank you for the letters! It was very fun to read them, and was a great spiritual boost.
8: I found a road kill skunk.
7: the smoke was very bad one day on one half of the sky, but really nice on the other half. This is a weird state.
6: We ha dinner with President Orton at this really good seafood place. It was great to talk with them about the work and stuff. Also I had a really good lobster roll.
4: not too much else happened this week, it has been really wack.
3: After stake conference Sunday we ran Into a couple ladies sitting on the grass talking, and so we went up to them, and talked for an hour. They weren’t interested, but at least they know that us latter day saints aren’t totally nuts.
1: gonna play glow in the dark volley ball now, love you all!
10: I got freaking sick on Friday, and was totally incapacitated on Saturday. Luckily I was feeling better on Sunday, good enough to go to church! I think it was the flu, and luckily am getting over it, just gotta take it easy for the next little bit.
9: while on exchanges with Elder Law, we saw a decapitated cow head in a less active members hard. That was cool, there dogs were eating at it the whole time we were talking.
8: Today for pday we are at a members of the mission presidency, and had a really cool object lesson about sifting wheat. We got to harvest some if the wheat with sickles, sift the chaff out, and make some great pancakes!
7: I lost all understanding of basic economics. (See pic below)
6: On Friday we went to the church pear farm, and we picked a whole basket faster than another group who had way more people than us! Hahaha! #missionarypower
5: I really want some chicken noodle soup, but we don’t have any.
4: We had exchanges back to back, one with the white city elders, and the other with our zone leaders. That was fun, but we didn’t get much done in the ways of teaching or finding. The most memorable thing that happened was we ran into this one inactive sister who was crazy! She was suggesting all these things we should do to get more baptisms.
3: Now that I think about it, this week hasn’t been very effective missionary wise. But that’s okay, stuff happens, we’ll just make sure next week is super missionary work!
2: I think I sprained my pinky. It’s kinda numb at the tip, but doesn’t hurt enough to interfere with anything.
1: The app that the church uses to make sure we’re using our phone properly went nuts and deleted a ton of apps from everybody’s phone/ tablet. Super helpful…
I love all of you, and make sure that you try to put more good into the world than you receive. Or, if not, find some other inspirational quote that would fit well on a t-shirt and follow that.
10: On Tuesday we helped a part member family dig up a ton of aluminum, and as we were pulling it out of the ground we saw that it was an old wrecked trailer. I Also found a pink Floyd cassette tape, but it was filled with earwigs, so…. Yeah. Can’t exactly try to pawn that off.
9: Today, we went bowling, and it was pretty lit. I keep forgetting how fun bowling is. Let’s go bowling when I get back.
8: We walked up to this one house, and the lady in her backyard saw us all the way through her back and front door, and just waved us in. So we were like “ummmmm… okay….” and walked into this lady’s house and talked to her about the book of Mormon. It was weird.
7: found a big spider named Eliot at the bishops house. Bishops son found out what it was, but i forgot the name.
6: Weather is getting better.
5: We kinda skipped weekly planning so that was great.
4: We were walking to our car, and the same truck that uncle Dave has drove by! I waved at him and said “hey that’s my uncle’s truck.” Then he backed up and asked if we were handing out free books, so we said yeah, and he told us that his grandson was dead. So it was a good thing that I had a plan of Salvation pamphlet on me.
3: We met this lady from Rhodesia. Her name was Diana, like wonder woman. She was’t interested at all.
2: We made some really cute notebooks! Pics included
1: I got a ton of jelly beans! Elder Willits bought them for me!
Yeah. Smokes back. We were doing so well, we had blue skies for almost a whole 3 days! But last night the air quality was 236. Anything under 100 is healthy. 236 is lung cancer levels. yaaaaaay
10: I got volunteered to sing “I need the every hour” in sacrament meeting. I’d be perfectly fine with that, but I haven’t sung in a hot minute, so I’m a little rusty.
9: I get to bully elder Willits about going home! He’s going home this transfer, and has to do a online “class” about re-adjusting to being a normal person. The thing is, he really doesn’t want to go home. So he has to get used to that, and so I make fun of him so he can accept that he’s leaving.
8: I found a Lego dude. He’s mine now.
7: My phone finally got a crack. It’s a little one in the corner, and I’m thankful for my screen protector. I’m not going to replace it just yet, I’m going to wait for another tragedy, then replace it.
6: When driving home last night, the smoke was so bad that we couldn’t see that far without turning our brights on. When we did, the road looked like the “upside down” from stranger things. So i got to explain what stranger things was to elder Willits.
5: We went it to visit some new members in our ward, who aren’t new members, but the daughter wants to get baptized, but her dad who lives in Arkansas said no, but she’s living with her mom and grandparents, I don’t know it’s weird. Anyways we visited them, and they live out in the freaking boonies. But that gave us a great chance to take these sweet photos. (See below)
4: Moving bales of hay in proselyting clothes is fun. We got hay everywhere, in every pocket and wrinkle on our clothes. That’s what’s expected when we ask “is there any service that we can do for you?”
3: Another photo shoot that we did was at a place that reflected the majority of what we walk and drive down here in Gold Hill.
2: We have got some new friends with transfers, and some NEW NEW friends. I’m finally not the newest kid on the block!
1: I really don’t like Weekly planning.
I love all of you, and more importantly Jesus Loves you. Keep going strong, and remember, doubts aren’t the end. After all, a doubt of a young farm boy brought about the restoration of the gospel on earth.
Cruisn on down main street, your relaxed and feeling good, next thing that you know you’re saying “an octopus in our neighborhood?” I’m not entirely sure why I wrote that, but okay, let’s talk about the Lord’s work!
10: After a couple weeks of horrible weather, due to the fire nation, (smoke) we finally got a blue sky! It was so nice! We didn’t have to wear any masks that day!
9: I do not like Weekly planning. It never goes how we want it to. Oh, our plans? Nah, they go down pretty well, but it just takes forever to do them. This week we didn’t get out of the apartment until 5! And that was for dinner! Uggghhh.
8: Always, always, always follow promptings. We had just an hour left one day, and were trying to decide what to do with that time. Elder Willits got the prompting to visit this one ‘investigator’ who has mainly just been using us for service, and not much else, so we headed over. She wasn’t there. So we went over to a trailer park with a couple investigators in it. We knocked on one door, nothing. So we headed over to another trailer. Nothing. So we started heading back to the car. As we were walking, we saw a lady on her porch, drinking and listening to her phone. She had her ear buds in so we kinda had to walk up to her, and had the most spiritual message ever. This woman, Sarah has gone through some crazy stuff. All she wants is to come back to the strait and narrow. But she didn’t know how to so that because her entire life has been away from God. Moral of the story? ALWAYS FOLLOW PROMPTINGS.
7: We brought an inactive member who hadn’t been to church in forever back to church after one meeting. We stopped by their home, and only the father was home, so he invited us in and we talked for a while, then the wife came home with a ton of ice cream. She offered us some and after a chat we talked about how important the sacrament is. I guess that was something that the wife really needed to hear, cause she was in church Sunday!
6: After months of not driving, I am driving now. It’s kinda weird, mainly because I’m so used to the crown Victoria, and I have a regulation box that’ll yell at me if I speed or take a corner to hard. Oh well. I’ll get used to it.
5: I got to read a bit out of a Jehovah’s witness ‘pamphlet’ and those guys are wack.
4: We met this nice preachers daughter who must be worked as an auctioneer. She freaking would talk so fast! She was nice, and listened to our message and promised to read some passages out of the BoM.
3: I stitched up a couple pairs of slacks that had ripped down the edge of the pocket. They look alright! I did one on the inside so you can’t tell that it was ripped.
2: Normally at church I like to just relax and go ‘okay, you teach ME for a change’ but not this Sunday. I gave a talk, and taught gospel principals. But it all went well, so yeah.
1: Jesus Loves us all so much. He gave his life simply so that we could find solace and comfort. And to come back to our father. Never forget that. No matter how bad you think you are, no matter how far off the path you are, Christ will come get you and bring you back.
So I know that i used that joke in my first letter home, but it just worked for this week. In case you don’t know, there have been a ton of fires up here. All over the valley where I’m in, and because of the weather patterns all the smoke just gets trapped in.I’m gonna get lung cancer.Well, life changing diseases aside, let’s talk about top 10s!
10: I have had a bit of experience with bible bashing, but we met this one investigator who wanted to TORAH bash. He has self taught Hebrew, and doesn’t accept anything else besides the original Hebrew texts. Why was he investigating the Book of Mormon? Probably to prove it is fake. Interesting guy. His brother is the same way too, but he had printed out this power point presentation with all sorts of wack stuff about the Mormons. Somehow Donald Trump had something to do with it. Weird.
9: We are helping this one family move, but the house they were going to move into had some major water damage going on. So we’ve been helping them to take down sheet rock, and set up trusses and everything. It kinda makes me feel like I’m home, doing some crazy project because someone didn’t look deep enough into it. It’s great tho, the couple are older so they can’t do everything and helping out is fun.
8: The smoke here is so bad, you can look at the sun directly. If it’s a good day, you can’t look at it very long, but on a bad day the smoke obstructs the sun so much it won’t even hurt your eyes. Been wearing a painters mask when going tracting so we can stay out for longer than an hour.
7: there is a missionary who came back this week from Tempe AZ! We were at his homecoming dinner/party, and it went well! He said that “it still hasn’t set in yet.” It probably will when he’s sitting alone, and do a double take cause he can be alone now.
6: We visited the famous “Crater Lake” (see pics below) and tho it was a bit Smokey, it was nice! Didn’t have much time to do much bc we still have stuff to do on our p-day. We got a nice less active couple to drive us up and spend the day.
5: We had zone conference on Thursday, and it was great! All the missionaries in the central point zone gather up and get some lessons and ‘classes’ on how to be better missionaries. We were told to focus primarily on preach my gospel. So I’ll be doing that some more in my personal studies.
4: Bree is a champ! When we were teaching a lesson on plan of Salvation, she just kinda asked “what do I need to do too get baptized?” She wanted us to drop everything on her so she could get baptized as soon as she can! So we dropped everything that you gotta do to get baptized on her. Legit the only thing that she had a problem with is coffee and modesty, which she’s down with, she just needs a new wardrobe.
3: We found a pot farm! Elder Willits and I were heading out to contact a less active couple, and Google maps told us to head down this very long driveway. Google maps is a liar. It wasn’t a driveway, but a giant pot farm. We stopped and asked some guys working there about where the members were and they pointed us in the right direction. But yeah. Big pot farm.
2: We taught someone about the book of Mormon while at a pizza place! He was standing next to us in line, and asked us why we were dressed nice. We explained that we were Mormon missionaries, and after we got our pizzas we asked if we could sit with him. He was cool. We gave him a BoM, and told him about it. Super cool experience.
1: How much the Lord loves us. And how much he wants us to learn and find. All we have to do is go out and find it. Read the scriptures, tell someone about the gospel. Pray every time you run into something that you don’t think you can deal with. Pray in the morning and at night.
Wow. Another week gone by. It has been so busy that I have no clue what to even say! Well, um. How about just starting into the list!
10: After having a great dinner at this nice Mexican place. (the one with the “gringos” menu) The sister who brought us there had plenty of life stories and we just talked about a lot. I also got to try a chalupa! Afterwards we asked if there was anything that we could do, and she asked for a priesthood blessing! So we left the loud Mexican restaurant, headed over to her house, and gave her a wonderful blessing. It was really great, and we could feel the spirit very strongly.
9: IT FINALLY RAINED HERE! After a whole month of perfectly blue skies, we finally got a bit of rain right before church! Sunday was a good day because of that.
8: it has been HOT here. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around, because whenever I would think about Oregon, I always thought that it was really cold and rainy all the time. But no! Its constantly been over 100° up here! Which is another reason I was super excited for the rain.
7: I met another crack head. On Sunday as we were walking over to our ward mission leader’s office, there was this older guy in a leather jacket asking us about the “Mark of the beast” somehow it was Nazis. It’s always the Nazis. He was nice, his name was Tim.
6: Exchanges were this week! We met up with Elders Law and Ross, who are in the city just south of us. It was great, Elder Law and I went out tracting and met; an atheist who doesn’t believe in the word of man, a kid who’s cat had just died, a lady who wasn’t super interested but still wanted a BoM, and a girl who was uncomfortable with talking about her Faith, but had a ton of Crucifixes all over. Then Elder Law and I went to dinner with our investigator Bree, and that dinner went 2 hours too long. Oops.
5: The next day I got to hang out with Elder Ross, we went out to try and contact some former investigators. Nothing really interesting happened then. But it was good to talk with someone else for a while. They’re both great Men. Hope we can go on exchanges with them sometime soon.
4: We had interviews with the Mission President. That day was weird, because we didn’t know when we were going to be heading into interviews, so we didn’t schedule anything for that day. But it was a great chance to read the scriptures some more that day. Then all the other missionaries showed up at the church. And we just talked for a long time. It was nice.
3: The majority of our lessons this week have been just reading the Book of Mormon. We had a lesson with Bree where she said that she didn’t have any time to read, so Elder Willits and I said “well, let’s read it then!” It was great, she had plenty of questions and we elaborates on some of the odd wording and structure of the Book of Mormon. We then did the exact same thing with another guy named Dominic! They both came to church yesterday, so I guess we’re doing something right!
2: On Saturday we were at this little food truck (that’s been cemented into the ground) and as we were waiting for our food, we started talking with another couple about the book of Mormon, and handed one to them, but right after that the wife of the owner told us that “we can share the word of God, but not the book of Mormon.” I wanted to respond with ‘what if it was?’ But we didn’t want to start something, because we don’t want them to mess with our food. It’s good food.
1: The only food that seems to be around here is either Mexican food, or pizza. Every time members take us out for dinner it’s always Mexican food or pizza. I love Mexican food, but please let’s go get Chinese or something! Oh well, we’re getting fed, so we shouldn’t complain too much. This is the first week that I’ve felt like a real missionary! I’m looking forward to teaching people about the gospel, and am not just trying to get through another day. All of a sudden 2 years commitment isn’t that big a deal. I love you all so much!! But more importantly Jesus Loves you!
Ya boi
Elder Berky
My first dinner from scratch Hard day of tracting in waaaayyy too hot weather A cool fish bowl Elder Henley is a sleepy little fellow Not as funny as the “gringos” menu, but this one is still funny too.
Hello! It is a Monday! Which means I’ve got to come up with a dumb title for my weekly! If you can figure out what it’s making fun of…. Good for you.
10: Murica day was Wack. We can’t shoot off fireworks, so that was weird, and Elder Willits said that holidays are the best days to go find people. Well, they kinda are. We met a lot of people but no one wanted to talk. I don’t really blame them tho. After we were kinda done for the day, we had a zone activity where we all hung out at a members house and just played some sports and had a fire, with a spiritual message about sacrifice. That kinda made up for no explosions. Kinda.
9: I met my first weird Oregonian! We were tracting around our house, and this lady told us that we shouldn’t be handing out the book of Mormon, and the church wasn’t true. We were thinking “oh, is it because Joeseph Smith wrote the BoM, or are we brainwashed into following the devil, or something like that?” But she said that we shouldn’t be handing out the book of Mormon because it’s bad for the environment. Wat. Apparently the church isn’t true because you can’t totally recycle the BoM. That was weird. Even Elder Willits said that was a new one, and he’s been working with these people for 2 years!
8: After we found out that we didn’t have a dinner for Thursday, we decided to make one of the frozen pizzas that the relief society President gave us. We looked around for a baking sheet and found that we didn’t have one! (It was okay, the pizza turned out fine) But while we were at a members house for dinner, they asked if there’s anything we need. And we said “a baking sheet would be good, but if you don’t that’s fine” and the member had just bought a new set of baking sheets! So she gave us one of her old ones! #theLordprovides
7: We were going out to talk to someone who hadn’t been contacted in a while, but as we were heading over to her trailer, we met a family sitting on their porch who had some questions about the weird Mormons walking around. She was nice, and chatted for an hour about religion. We gave her a book of Mormon and she said that she’d read it, and have lots of questions for us! Looking forward to that.
6: I am learning the book of Mormon really well! When we were talking with someone, I knew the right scripture that they needed! Who knew that reading every morning and listening to the spirit would actually work?
5: it is going to be way too hot later. Upwards of 105° I am going to make sure that all we do is visit members and go straight from car to house. Yaaaay.
4: I got the cool protein breakfast shakes, and am feeling great! You feel kinda hungry for the first couple days, but now I’m used to it! Gonna be HAWT pretty soon. That’s how ill bring people to the gospel.
3: We met our first tweaker today, he was talking about how the mayor and the sheriff were going to burn everything he’s worked for down, and pointed at a port-a-potty. Then he tried to hand us a broken phone, and some other stuff. We told him where he could go to call a good sheriff. It was weird.
2: Sunday is great. I love being able to take the morning to read and focus more on the Lord. Or accidentally fall asleep. But I didn’t fall asleep in sacrament. Elder Willits did tho. Even though he says he didn’t. Church is so nice, because I don’t have to focus on teaching. Carlos and crystal came, along with another guy that we had taught the previous night!
1: Carlos and Crystal have committed to baptism and marriage! Wooo! They were do excited about it, and are going to start keeping up on commitments. Nice. I’m pumped!
Top 15 most overpowered anime characters. If you can think of an anime character that is more overpowered than the ones listed here, be sure to comment down below! While your at it, don’t forget to like and subscribe so you don’t miss another EPIC anime list again! Let’s get riiiiiight into the [list]
1: Brother Vitus is the MAN! He’s our ward mission leader, and on Saturday he took us out for lunch to a local pizza place, and got the deluxe version of everything. We have so many leftovers. Then he took us out for dinner to this very nice Mexican restaurant. Of which we also got so many leftovers! He easily dropped $100 on us. This man is going to be a sooo blessed.
2: We went on splits with the zone leaders (which means we switched companions) and Elder Clem and I went out tracting. We met this nice man who was working on a ’73 chevelle. Very nice man, and car. Talked with an older lady who spent the whole conversation telling us what we believe. Then we got a couple Gatorades from a nice Catholic couple who wished us luck in the area cause everyone was either Catholic, Jehovah’s witness, or seventh day Adventist. It was a good time.
3: Elder Willits and I were going out to talk to this one investigator, who didnt happen to be home at the time, but right as we were starting to leave, a car pulled up, and we started talking with this young mother named Bree. She was very interested in our message, and scheduled a lesson later. We had the lesson at a members house, which was a Victoria era looking house. Very nice. Bree was very touched by the restoration, and said the first vision story was beaitiful. That lesson went for 2 hours, but no one minded. I am so thankful for the Brown’s for letting us in their home!
4: In the desk that i use, I found some Pokemon cards from mcdonalds!
5: The ward had a fantastic bbq at which we got to see some members that have been less active, and got to talk with them and hopefully get a lesson set up.
6: I got to talk to elder Clem all about comics and the story of Jawbreakers. He thought the characters are cool and the production story was interesting too!
7: On Sunday we had dinner with a less active couple, and it wasn’t Mexican food for once! The lesson we talked about was baptism and the sacrament, they were really touched by it, and commited to coming to church next week. Nice.
8: I’m going to start a protein breakfast and lunch shake thing so i can be stroncc and not thicc.
9: It’s the 4th of July this week and I’m kinda bummed because I can’t shoot off fireworks, and we can’t go tracting to watch them go off. 🙁 That’s fine, I’ll just stay up late and sit on our little balcony and watch them.
10: Speaking of fireworks, we met this lady on our last door of the night, and she has been in the fireworks business and told us some super neat tips with fireworks. You’ll have to wait till I get back home to tell you. Or take me someplace with nice fireworks and I’ll tell you. Anyways, we chatted about religion for a while and she said she would read over the book of Mormon that her friend gave her, and set up a return appointments.
11: That’s another thing I’ve noticed, everyone knows a Mormon. And everyone seems to have been handed a book of Mormon at one point or another. Which is good when the Mormon they know is good but we’ve run into one or two people who know some not-very-faithful-members let’s say. But that’s kinda rare.
12: We found our P.O. box! If you want to send us the good stuff, ;)Don’t bother, this is Oregon, and it’s already legal. But if you want to send some printed memes or framed pictures of Guy Fieri go for it! (Its P.O #48, 375 2nd ave, Gold Hill, Oregon, 97525)
13: We had a lesson with a good guy named Dominic, who is a seventh day Adventist, but likes to keep an open mind. We talked to him about the restoration, and he really liked it and thought it made sense. We extended a baptismal invite when he comes to know that these things are true, and he said yes! As we were wrapping up his dad came in and we found out that he had been talking with the missionaries before they moved up here! He said that he might sit in on a lesson next time! Nice.
14: I am so grateful for personal study and prayer. It’s a great time to just sit down with the Lord in mind and read his word, or just talk with him. The book of Mormon really brings a peace into the day that you never can get anywhere else. I just don’t understand why I didn’t take some time in the morning before I came out to read even a few verses. It’s not that hard, or even much of a commitment. Please do it. Even 5 minutes is fine.
15: Burger king foot lettuce. The last thing you’d want in your burger king burger is someone’s foot fungus, but as it turns out, that might be exactly what you get…
I love you all, and appreciate you tolerating my stupid humor just to read this. Going on a mission has been The best choice i could have possibly made.
Ya boi,
Elder Berky
Just a nice day for a selfie. Being a real cowboy (service for an investigator) Getting homesick (same service) That really nice Mexican place will make fun of you for being basic.
