Elder.Connely.Packard

Muiderslot   Some people hate Mormons. Most just hate religion in general too much to bother to know what a Mormon is. But then most of them are really good people. The dutch people are very simple and down to earth. They live in small houses, have few possessions and are fully satisfied. It is remarkable with how happy they make themselves with so little. They just need a bed, a piece of bread with cheese on it, and 20 square feet with flowers on it and they get the most they want out of life. That is super impressive, but unfortunately it also makes it really hard to make them comfortable enough to let you invade their 20 square feet and preach the gospel.  This week I am getting transferred to Den Haag. Zaandam was a short stay, only 2 transfers, compared to 4, then 3, then 4 in my other cities. It will probably be my last city.  Miracles are that the less active member and his girlfriend that we started teaching that both fell off the face of the planet got ba

July 10 In the true spirit of the holiday, 7/4/2017 2017 2016 On the fourth of July we did a little BBQ for our district meeting lunch. We got some watermelon, braadworsts, bread, soda, and some banana bread, and we ate it all. It was fun. We had couple little disposable bbq things and we grilled the sausages. I dressed up in all American stuff again.  We went bowling as a zone last p day it was fun. The bowling alleys here have strings at the top of the pins, so the pins get pulled upwards when they are reset. I don't think they get knocked over as easy though.  We found a couple new investigators this week. The first guy was someone that we knocked into about a month ago, but he never answered the door. We looked him up again and he said he was sitting in his living room watching TV and thought, I know someone is at the door, but i can just ignore them and keep watching TV and relax. But then he had a thought that maybe God had sent someone to his door,

July 17 Transfers with be next week Wednesday and either my greenie will go somewhere else or I will leave and probably head into my last area. I am trying to ditch some of my stuff so that I have room to look for things that you would like. It is summer sales here so everything is about 60 to 70 percent off. We went to Volendam, a very Dutch place in our area with the rest of the district for P day and took a picture in traditional dutch clothing. fun. This week was pretty slow. Tuesday was good. We had interviews, and a dinner appointment which is rare. We live outside of Amsterdam but all the members live in Amsterdam so the other 6 missionaries in Amsterdam get all the dinner appointments because it takes so long for us to get to a dinner appointment. Everybody we have met has seemed to turn on us and yell at us or disrespect us as much as possible from behind their front door or become a new investigator and then try to convert us to their own religion or bel

July 3 We had a crazy week. We did not get contact with the people that we planned to get in contact with. Our syrian family has been in Rotterdam the past couple weeks, so we have been unable to meet. We did find a 3 new investigators though, so that was really cool.  We had zone conference this week. It was good. I got to see a couple friends on the mission I have not seen in a while. We have a lot of good missionaries here. We had a dinner appointment with the lady that had the birthday party afterwards, and got to have more lekker food from Suriname. It rained a lot this week. I think we might get a couple days of sun soon though. There is a recent convert lady that we have been working with who has been making a ton of progress. She is awesome, but kind of the quiet kind of awesome. She got her patriarchal blessing last week, does family history and baptisms for the dead when she gets the chance, and she is only a convert of 6 months. It make