Elder.Connely.Packard

This week was very frustrating, but also rewarding. I suppose that is the normal thing to happen week to week as a missionary. The bane of our week was the stolen bike nuts. We spent a lot of time on p day last week looking for a place to buy those, and ran out of time. We didn't want to take time out of our week to look for them but having them seemed like a simple task and something that would ultimately save a lot of time. But the axle of my front tire is not metric, and we went to bike shop after bike shop and 3 hardware stores trying to find just the two nuts that would fit, but no luck. Apparently they do not know what anything but metric is and I am going to see if I can order some with fast shipping. We probably spent at least 7 hours in search of these parts. The worst part was that the first bike shop that I went to sole me a couple metric nuts that obviously did not fit. I did not realize it until we got home and tried to tighten them, and they charged me 4 euro for the...

This week was hard . We had transfers this week and Elder Debloois is gone, and now I have Elder Stevenson. He is awesome. He comes from St George. He is super funny, knows how to love everybody and is also a hard worker. We are determined to crack Emmen instead of letting Emmen crack us. This week we didn't see a whole lot of results, but we came home every night tired out and feeling happy. We worked hard and finished every night out.  The District On Tuesday, we had a lesson fall through, and I was super frustrated with every lesson of every week falling through, and I determined that the next person who opened the door was going to get a full force blast of restored gospel in their face. We knocked on a few doors with no answer, and finally a door opened that we have knocked on several times before. An older lady came out and we just started talking to her, sympathized with her interests and asked if we could come back and talk about he nature of God. She said that wa...

Sorry that I did not send an email last week. We were super pressed for time, and I got on for a few minutes I the morning, but later in the evening, after my comp was done, it was too late and we had to go home. But last week we had 1 lesson and that was pretty much it. This week we taught 8 lessons, 6 of them being on the door. But we said prayers with all of those people so they were legit. 2 of those people are now new investigators, but their return appointments fell through so we have to chase them down.  A dollar for the person who can explain this Dutch tradition of gulping down slimy herring. Gah! Transfers are this week, and Elder DeBloois is leaving Emmen. He is going to Rotterdam, and pretty excited about that too. He has already been there and he really liked it. My new comp is Elder Stevenson. He is also from Elder DeBloois and Elder Knaupp's MTC group so I will be rolling through that whole group. But there are 23 elders in that group so it is huge. E...

This week was slow because everybody is still on vacation, and the people that were not on vacation went on vacation this week so everybody is actually gone now. There is a mass migration from this country every summer I guess. It is already turning into fall. It is mostly cloudy, and rains every day again, and getting a bit cooler.  new haircut, new beat Pretty much the only thing we did this week was knock doors. We did not have any dinner appointments, and only 1 scheduled lesson so it was a good opportunity to really do a lot of lookups and finding. It can be annoying not having dinner appointments, but they can also take a lot of time up if your schedule doesnt have you working in a nearby area. We found a few cool potentials and got contact with a few others this week. You just have to find a lot little things to do to distract you from looking at your watch. But it was a good week. We met one guy who was vaguely familiar with our church and was initially complain...

This week it started raining a lot again. When it rains people have more sympathy for us and they let us in more. The blackberries are getting ripe and I am going to make some jam. They are everywhere and I don' t think the dutch people eat them.  Where's waldo... This week I also bought some left handed hair scissors and gave myself a haircut. I figured it would just save money because unless you can find a turkish place for 10 euro, all haircuts are at least 17 euro. This is not a cheap country to live in.  We went to Germany a couple times this week. The houses are bigger in Germany. Everything is not so neat and tidy, but it is a bit more spacious and it is nice to feel a little more open.  The father in law a potential that we found has come to church the past couple weeks. He is a kind of free range chicken with religion as he kind of just does things by himself. He went to the Philippines or something and baptized 50 or so people there. He doesn'...