Adam Serving in Portland

Hey everyone! So this week was actually pretty uneventful. I'm very scatterbrained today so sorry if this is hard to read.   We did have exchanges again which was pretty fun! This time I went with my district leader and got to ride a bike all day. We had a bunch of lessons with mostly members but had a couple with some friends who are interested in learning more! Those all went pretty well. Biking around was definitely a bit of an adjustment from normally sitting in the car. An exciting missionary moment from the week is that we were able to get in contact with a referral from a few weeks ago finally! His name is Ricky. We've been texting him a bunch and he's been good about responding to texts, but super noncommittal to setting up a lesson with us. But a small miracle actually happened this Saturday! We decided to give Ricky a call to see if we could set up a lesson with us, he said he was busy and driving to work in Boring at the moment. We just happened to be in Boring t...

Hey y'all! I'm just finishing up week 2 here in my mission. Since my last email we have had zone conference, exchanges with the zone leaders, a few member meals, and now p-day again. Zone conference was super cool actually. It was actually a whole mission conference but they just called it zone conference for whatever reason. Here in Portland they always put a theme on the zone conferences and the theme for this one was King Benjamin's tower! They built a tower out of building scaffolding and covered it in a bunch of burlap cloth. The end result was about 20 feet tall I think. They actually gave about half of the conference talks from up on top of it, so that was super cool to have that be the majority of what we were looking at all day. The next day I went on exchanges with one of the zone leaders, Elder Silver. We were covering the YSA branch that day and had a pretty big area that covered two whole stakes. So we ended up driving around quite a bit. It was a really good d...

 A few weeks ago Emma invited over the missionaries serving in the YSA ward she was attending at the time.  We used to have the missionaries over all the time when we lived out East and we've missed that since moving here to Utah.   One of the missionaries that came over was Sister M, who was excited to hear that Adam would be serving his mission in her home area.   She told Adam to look out for her family and that was that.  We haven't seen Sister M since then.   Then, on Sunday, I get this text... Adam found Sister M's family in his very first area... It's definitely a small world in the church!  

Hey everyone! I'm in Portland now!!!  Well technically not Portland, but in Boring.  So yeah it's a pretty exciting place. It's a bit outside the main city of Portland, so it's super pretty out here and everything is kinda spread out. On our first day here we got to go to the Portland Temple, which is absolutely gorgeous!!!      Then we met our trainers for the next few weeks! My trainer is from the Chicago area so we have two people from big cities serving out in the middle of nowhere. Fun times all around. A couple days after we got there were some serious wildfires a ways away from us. Thankfully they were able to get them under control within about 2 days, but the smoke still turned the sky some fun colors. The food we have been eating is mostly not great, unless it's food from the members. But we did get to go shopping today so hopefully it'll be a bit better now.   The members are mostly pretty nice and happy to see us but there have been a few that ...

We received a message on the evening of September 7th that Adam had safely arrived to Portland.   Yesterday we saw that his city on Facebook had been updated... We did a little research on Boring, Oregon and it looks like a cute and quirky little suburb of Portland with great views of Mount Hood.   P-Days are still on Tuesdays.   Can't wait to hear more about it over the coming weeks!   

9/6/22 Hey everyone! Today is my last day at the MTC. It has seriously flown by so fast! Since my email last week we finished up our classes on Saturday, a bunch of my district has already left for their missions, and I have packed everything to head into the field tomorrow. On our second to last day of class, all the elders in our district got matching ties and wore them the whole day, so that was kinda fun. On the last day we all tried to wear sandals and flip-flops of some sort or another, but we had to go back and change them because it was unfortunately against missionary standards. Oh well. It was a good last week of classes though and I'm looking forward to being in the field now! This Sunday I got to attend branch council again; we also had church and the "Go and Do" experience again. "Go and Do" is basically just in-depth study of a certain area of the gospel for about 2-3 hours on Sunday. It was super cool to have that much time set aside just for stu...