Thomas played a practical joke on us this week.....he didn't catch me in it, but he fooled his Dad! He made us think he was being transferred and then as we scrolled down, he said "just kidding". Unfortunately, his Dad didn't scroll down enough and thought he sent us a cliffhanger of an e-mail!
We had a couple of birthdays in our family and it thrilled me to pieces that he remembered mine, even with being so busy with all he has to do. Our poor son is wanting some beef jerky, mainly to share with a British Elder who had some once and loved it, but it's apparently illegal to import beef products, so he will just have to do without. Our 12th Article of Faith says: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law." I didn't read anything in there about "sneaking and getting around the law".
We had many, many things we learned to do without while we lived in Israel, and we learned to do it without complaint. It was a wonderful trade off for such a great adventure!
Now to Thomas' words this week:
Dear Family,
First of all, happy birthday Conner! I'm sorry I missed saying it before, time flies so fast over here and we missionaries barely ever look at the actual date, only when we need to fill out forms, and even then it's just numbers. But that's no excuse. It's weird to think you'll be almost 16 when I get back.
And happy birthday Mom. I know you probably don't want to be reminded of your birthday, but I think it's something I should keep track of better. How is it the middle of April already? It doesn't even make sense.
Thanks for looking for those pens! I'm sure those other ones will be great, as long as I have plenty of them :) oh and I found out something weird - It's illegal to import any beef products into England. I'm not sure why, but it's a law. That includes beef jerky.... And any packages that customs discovers to contain beef products will be confiscated and all I will get is a notice of seizure. I couldn't believe that when I read it in the small print of the mission packaging guidelines. I'm not quite sure what to do about that.
I wouldn't send any music over yet. I want to wait until the new mission president comes in and see what happens to the music rule, if it changes or anything, and then I'll know what to do for music for the rest of my mission. I had no idea that Jeff Buckley wrote 'Hallelujah', that is so interesting.
This ash storm over the UK is starting to go away. I didn't know anything about it until 2 days ago when we were at a member's house and they told us about it. You're just so disconnected with the world when you're a missionary. I wish I had known about it earlier because my asthma has been bugging me even more for the last little while, but it's been under control, at least.
I hate to say it, but it's been a bit of a disappointing week here, as most of our investigators dropped us in various ways. Just a lot of finding, and looking for more people to teach. I wouldn't say it was all bad though. There were a few highlights here and there and I'll try to focus on those.
The guy I was talking about earlier named David, we haven't been able to get ahold of yet. He's been working a lot of extra shifts, trying to save up money so he can move out of his parent's house, I imagine. However, we've still been stopping by trying to see if he's there, and we've been talking to his dad quite a bit. He keeps saying he's not interested in our church, yet he's actually been reading David's Book of Mormon and has questions about it whenever we go over there. What's funny is he won't let us in or come to church, yet he still keeps reading it, as far as I know. I don't even know if David has had a chance to read it himself. I might have to leave another copy the next time we go over there.
Remember the Elder I was telling you about from South Africa, Elder Caine? Well we went on exchange last Wednesday, because his companion Elder Gentry is the district leader and he still needed to go on exchange with Elder Johnson during the transfer period. They live a ways away in South Shields, so when Elder Caine and I finally got to go finding and teaching, we had an amazing time. In the spare hour and a half we had to actually go knocking/finding, we found FOUR new investigators and taught four lessons. We just made sure we prayed to know where to go, and we actually skipped around town quite a bit, wherever we felt like we needed to go, and in every place we went it seemed like there was someone waiting for us to teach them. And right after we found each new investigator it felt like we should leave and go somewhere else so we did. I've never been more inspired as to know where to go on my entire mission, and both of us had only been out for 8 weeks. It was definitely something I'll never forget.
And guess what? Transfer calls were last night. You'll never guess where I'm going now....
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Just kidding. I'm staying in Gateshead. But my companion is heading down to Sheffield, and my new companion's name is something like Elder Juemos. It sounds like a Spanish name so I'm going to spell it like that until I know how it's actually spelled. I don't know anything about him yet, but I'll be meeting him tomorrow night and we'll be companions for at least six weeks. I hope he speaks Spanish because I've been studying out of El Libro de Mormon for 1/2 hour every morning for the past 2 weeks and I'm getting the hang of a lot of Spanish already. There's a man from South America in our ward (I think he's from Argentina) and I've been practicing speaking with him and I can hold a good conversation with him already. Studying Spanish is something I need to do while I'm over here, I can't really explain why I feel I need to study it... it's just a feeling I have, like it will be important on my mission at a later time. I guess we'll see, won't we?
I think that sending emails is just fine, you don't need to send written letters too. I'll try and send letters as often as possible home, it's just actually remembering to send them is the hardest part. I haven't sent Amber's letter yet because somehow I lost her letter, and so I didn't have her address. But just today when we were cleaning up the flat for transfers, I found the letter under the shelves right next to table I use for studying. So just let her know that I'll be sending 2 letters in 1 to make up for not sending it before.
And I'm out of time for now. Let James know he's headed on the right track to something he'll never regret. Just keep going and don't worry about family or anything because there's nothing more important for you to be doing than this.
Alrighty, toodle-oo till next week. I'll tell you about my new companion and everything that's happened since.
Love,
Elder Alsop
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