South Carolina Columbia

  1/27 Hi everyone,   This week was crazy! It snowed which I was not expecting because it has been 8 years since the last time it snowed.  I talked to some people down in Georgia and it is snowing there too.  Everything was shut down. No one has salt so our roads were straight ice until the sun melted them. The really nice family that came to church with us last week moved to Florida.  We will miss them but It will be a good move for them.   Her mom lives there and one of her kids has a medical condition that they can get better treatment there.  During one of our lessons, we were talking about the Plan of Salvation.  The oldest boy said, "What if heaven is actually divided into three different levels?"  It was fun to teach him about the three degrees of glory.  Hopefully they will keep meeting with the missionaries.     Also Cierra was baptized!  I found her while tracting a couple areas ago.  I was glad I was able t...

  1/20 Hi everyone,   This week was a pretty normal week.  I went on exchanges with an Elder in my district named Elder Bollar.   We were in the town of "North". The area is called North and its funny telling people that I was in North South Carolina. But it was a good time.   Sunday we had a great turn out to church! We were blessed to have 8 people we are teaching attend. What a blessing!  The service and speakers were great.  They all really enjoyed being there.  One is a family of six - a single mom with five kids.  We have really enjoyed meeting with them.  Sadly, they are moving to Florida in the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully they can continue meeting with missionaries there.     Love Elder Gurney

1/13 Hi Everyone,   The highlight of the week was we had a member of the Seventy come visit our mission.  His name is  Jörg Klebingat  and is originally from Germany.  We had an all day zone conference with him.  He was a really fun speaker and gave a lot of great insights.  One thing that I really liked was the  importance of having meaningful prayers and meaningful scripture study.  He encouraged us to not have goals to read a "chapter a day" or goals like that because we should simply study until we felt spiritually filled.  He also spoke at our stake conference.  He invited an eight year old boy and a woman that is 104 years old to share their testimonies.     This area receives a lot of media referrals similar to my first area.  It has led to meeting with several people.  We are hoping that they can attend church and progress.     The rest of the week was crazy because we had an ice storm.  Th...

Jan 6 Hi Everyone,   It is crazy it is now 2025. We had a fun new years where we went to a big BBQ where we played football with some kids and we all watched the last quarter of the South Carolina bowl game. The Bishop was there and told us to watch it lol. Football is basically life here. It was a lot of fun and wore us out.    But other than that it was a pretty typical week. Something I had been missing from my first area was the dirt roads and this week we found a perfect dirt road on the way to someone we are teaching so it was fun off roading on that road.     We spent most of our week meeting new people and are excited to see if they will progress.     This week a member of the Seventy is coming to speak to us which will be awesome.