Monday, August 29, 2011

Welcome to Atlanta-North!


Daniel finally made it to the Georgia Atlanta-North Mission!! He's emailed home twice and each email gives us a hint of what he's doing. Trust is a big deal with the members. Members want to trust the missionaries with their friends before the elders begin teaching. Daniel is also biking his little fanny off as he bikes around Woodstock, Georgia. He loves being a missionary. He loves his companion. And he even loved being "rebuked by an apostle". Here's what he wrote as he met Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve at stake conference:

"...we went up after the meeting and we shook his hand and he kinda rebuked us for not teaching enough haha. He said we need to be teaching 20 lessons a week. I told him we had 1 lesson lined up and he said good, now go call your ward mission leader and tell him you need 19 more. Rebuked by an apostle! how often do you get that??? hahaha. Immediately after that, the stake president asked how many investigators we had... none was our reply. He said. 'talk to your bishop and get 5 names'. We were drilled hardcore in like 5 minutes! Its weird when you shake an apostle's hand. You make eye contact, but he's not looking at you. He's looking into your soul! If that makes sense, they can just see right into you and know everything, and that is exactly what he did. It was totally weird and yet totally cool!"

Saturday, August 6, 2011


After one week in the MTC Daniel is loving it! After picking up David at the airport we drove right to the MTC so the boys could see each other. Okay, okay, we admit it - we tried to sneak into the MTC to sneak a photo - it didn't work. They're pretty good at keeping "civilians" out of that place :) But really, that's the way it ought to be. In fact, when Daniel saw all of us coming through the door he said, "I didn't want to see you guys!" Saying goodbye the first time was hard enough, the second time would have been worse!

We got a letter from Daniel this week. He's a District Leader and loves the challenge. He loves his companion, Elder Beebe, and loves learning the gospel. He did have a request though. He's always hungry because they only feed missionaries THREE TIMES A DAY! Can you believe it? He's asked for any snacks, in any quantity and the only requirement is that the snacks aren't healthy!

The attached photo, while very, very blurry, was our sneaky attempt to get into the MTC...;)