Generations

Monday 16th of December, 2013


Sam received some of his Christmas Packages! He thought it was a great idea what his Mam did for him, each day he opens up a present and inside is a part of the nativity, a message and a gift to go with that part of the nativity. Now he really looks forward to opening a new part of the Nativity each day :) He also loved the union jack socks and signed pillow case, he tucked his suit pants into his socks and pulled them as far up as he could before cycling to the other side of our area (just to show off his was British)

Sam and Elder Calderwood have started practicing throwing playing cards and they're both getting pretty good at it, but now their arms and backs are killing them.

He has also started working out for the last few weeks, he always needs the loo at 6:30am each morning. He filled a gallon milk jug with water and put it in the bathroom, so for exercise time he can give his biceps and shoulders a pretty good workout each day.

Sam has been doing a lot of work on the familysearch.org website, he has found quite a lot of work which has already been done, and he has also pushed back a few generations using family census records. It's really fun for him, however he only gets 2 hours a month to do it. Elder Calderwood can trace his ancestry back to Adam and Eve, which Sam thought was really funny finding Jacob, Isaac and Abraham in his lineage.

Sam also printed out some Egyptian stuff from the Joseph Smith Papers website, he is trying to decipher the Anthon transcript, it's pretty interesting. He loved how you can see the original papyrus with the facsimiles, he wants to learn so much about the Egyptian language, but that can wait for a short while!

He can't believe that he is coming up to 9 months in the field, he still feels like a greenie! He is really looking forward to Skyping his family on Christmas day! The missionaries are having a Christmas party this Wednesday and they're going to watch Ephraim's Rescue, which Sam is really excited about as he heard a lot of good stuff about that movie!

Sam will be having Christmas dinner at the Jeffers, and probably Christmas Breakfast with the Van Buskirks. The Jeffers are preparing to serve a mission in Portugal at the beginning of January.

Sam found It funny that there is a really obvious pattern which pretty much proves the opposition is real. As soon as you set anyone with a date, or commit them to baptism, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. They set Leslie with a baptismal date, then no later than 1 week after, her boyfriends ex-girlfriend suddenly comes back on the scene, causes a huge commotion, Leslie says she wants to kill herself, and they gave her a blessing. She moved out back to her parents. This happens (nearly) every time someone commits to baptism, which is pretty funny for Sam to observe, but also a bit scary that Satan really does everything he can to stop the work from progressing.