Moves Week

Dear Family,

How are you? I am doing well. We had an up and down week. First thing though is that as part of moves, I am staying here and Elder Burgess is moving. My new companion is Elder Ihalmo (e-hal-mo) from Finland. He is coming from Londonderry which isn't too far away. Next moves, I will be district leader. Elder Burgess is going with his new companion fresh into Antrim which is north of Belfast to a small branch. So I am excited to be serving with my new companion. He'll be my 2nd non-native English speaking companion, but i have met him a zone conference and his English is fine. So this will all take place on Wednesday.

You may have heard, but we have to stay in our flat the next two days because of a national holiday on the 12th. It celebrates when Prince William of Orange (King Billy, the protestant king) defeated King James (catholic king) at the battle of boyne in 1690. So to celebrate they have marches all around Northern Ireland especially in Belfast. They also make enormous bomb fires in the predominate protestant areas and light those off tonight. So to be safe and out of trouble, we are staying in, except for the time now that we have been given to email. So I believe after all of this is over, things will return back to normal and the work can go forward.

As far as things that occurred, we started struggling this week. Jimmy was fine up until Friday when we lost contact, but we just barely received a text from him so we shall see how that goes. He wants to prepare himself to be baptized, but he gets a lot of temptations from his friends who want him to drink and gamble. He wants to stop and is trying to stay strong, but things just keep popping up. It is really time that we made some serious preparations so that this won't happen again.

Also during this week we went by a former investigator, but come to find out, he moved and the lady that lives there now was a bit depressed so we taught her and she seemed interested, but she wasn't there for her return appointment. We dropped Alan since he was too hard to teach and not accepting key doctrines. So that's really been our week.

So funny story time. We went to the YSA centre in south Belfast to teach our recent convert, Steven. Our appointment was for 7, right before institute. So we got there fine and we taught him and everything was good. We went to the bus stop, but as we were waiting, no buses were showing up so we went to a different one-nothing either. By this time, we decided to go back to the YSA centre and see if we could get a lift since institute was over by this time. We did and someone took us home. It turns out that there was some pre-12th march in city centre that altered the bus routes. Simply we just weren't at the right place at the right time.

 

i love you all and hope that your adventures are grand in Portland and that you arrive home safely. That's interesting that there are so many bishop changes there and finally Brother Ireland is bishop after serving so many years on bishoprics. Many of the wards here have changed bishops as well. Some say that it's brought new life to the wards, hopefully it will for you as well. Happy Birthday to Mom. I sent you something in the mail last week and hopefully it arrives in time.

 

Love,

Elder Buxton