New Companion 01/25/16

Hello!  Just kidding, Elder Rivadeneira has transfers!  We found out on the day of changes.  President kept it on the down low for some reason, so Elder Rivadeneira is leaving the office and training the new secretary this week.  My new companion is Elder Johnson. He is from Utah.  Now just within the office (including the assistants) we have Elder Duncan, Elder Bingham, and Elder Johnson who ALL went to the same high school and were friends before the mission.  So that is kind of crazy.  Who knew that this would happen on your mission? haha.

This week was kind of a rush, I am trying to remember all what happened.  We got through transfers pretty good.  It was interesting not having a transfers meeting.  In fact, we seemed not to be so busy.  Wednesday we had like three trips to the airport to drop off the missionaries that were returning home.  Then one more on Thursday morning.  It is not the funnest thing to have to take people to the airport to catch their 6:20 am flights.  That means we have to get up early...But that is the nice thing about having four secretaries, we don´t all have to go. So I ended up getting to sleep in until 6:30 on Wednesday morning. 

Thursday morning is a different story.  I must have had some kind of food poisoning because I was in the bathroom at 3:00 am throwing up.  I still didn't go to the airport but I was awake while everyone else was getting ready to go.  I am pretty much back to normal. I think it was just some stomach bug.  Pepto-bismol came in handy. haha.  

On Thursday night we met with Gina and her boys.  She is one of those people who loves to talk so she is speaking like 80% of the time during the lessons.  Which is fine because she is always talking about spiritual experiences.  She has been able to notice so many blessings in her life recently which has been so amazing to hear about. She has been reading the Book of Mormon and wanted to share with us some verses that she was reading and how she was able to apply what she learned to her current situation. We decided to invite her to be baptized and she said yes before Elder Rivadeneira even finished his sentence.  She then went on about how she was going to make her own white dress for the baptism. Why can´t there be more investigators like her? haha  She and her three sons are amazing and I hope to see them continue to progress.

Last Wednesday, we had the missionary conference broadcast.  We got to hear from some general authorities.  They seemed to be really focused on teaching repentance and teaching with members. They had a chart that showed the higher percentages of success that the missionaries have when working with members rather than finding people to teach with their own efforts. 

Today, tomorrow and Thursday we have multi-zone meetings, so yesterday we were scrambling around to get everything ready for that.  We have our meeting on Thursday, so that should be good.  I was already able to see a sneak peak of what the assistants are going talk about. haha.

- Elder Burnham