South Carolina Columbia

Aug 26 Hi Everyone, This week was a fun and exciting one!  It started off with a temple trip which was a lot of fun.   I was able to see a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a while.  It was really nice running through everything again because it's been 9 months since I have been.  Afterwards, we went and got food together.  Overall it was really good to be back at the temple.    The next day I went on exchanges with Elder Anderson who is a cool guy from Montana.  We stayed in Simpsonville together and had a lot of fun!      We are really starting to develop strong relationships with the members.  We had a meal with a nice family.  They have a little boy  and I was able to talk about Pokemon with him.  He loved it and asked if he could take a picture with us the next Sunday.  It was really sweet and he has a pretty good Pokemon Go account.   We also got to help out my boy John with his yard and ...

  Aug 19 Hi Everyone,   This week was transfers and I was safe.  Neither myself nor my companion moved.  We are running it back and it should be fun.    Sunday we went to the people from last week's church.  They hold church in a building that looks like a coffee shop.  There were around 30 people there.  We did get called out by the pastor a couple times.  He would say things like there are "deceivers among us" and stare at us.  In general though they were all really nice.  I went up and talked to the pastor afterwards.  I tried to talk to everyone there and no one said anything but nice things.  One guy told us that he used to play basketball with "the Mormons".   I think last week they must have had a service against the church which is why two of them came handing out pamphlets at our church.   So we pulled up, were really nice, and they all switched their tones.  It was cool but...

  Aug 12 Hi Everyone, This week was a fun one! There was a tropical storm that went through the rest of South Carolina but didn't really hit us. I thought we'd just have a normal week since we are so inland but Tuesday night our mission president called us.  He asked if he could attend either a lesson or a district meeting. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any lessons scheduled, but we did have our weekly district meeting the following morning. So President joined our meeting. I was leading the meeting and also guiding a discussion. I was nervous, but I think everything went really well.    We are still teaching the people from NY and they just got a 10 week old puppy. We had a great lesson with them.   It was an interesting Sunday.  When we arrived at church, there were a couple people outside the chapel with pamphlets trying to talk to people.  They came from a Baptist church and were "concerned" for us.   My companion and I talked t...

  Aug 5 Hi Everyone,   This week was a lot more interesting than last week.  We first had a zone conference at the beginning of the week and we had two zones combined so I got to see a bunch of people I know.  It was cool and it had some great testimonies.  We learned how to check the oil in our cars and I was surprised that some people weren't sure about how to do that.  But then my companion got sick and we were stuck inside for the whole day while my companion tried to not die.     Later in the week one of the companionships  in the district had a talent show.  They are both Samoan and so they had us do the Haka with them.  It was really fun.   Elder Vaivaka led it out while I struggled to keep up in the back.   Yesterday, the two people from New York that we have been teaching came to church.  They  really enjoyed the first and second hour.  It's fun talking to them because it reminds...