July 27, 2009

This week went by really, really fast. I don't have alot to report, but this week we gave our interview training. It was a lot of work and it was really tiring trying to keep everybody happy and having fun and at the same time get them to learn things. It was about seven hours long, but we pulled it off and it turned out really well. 22 missionaries is alot of missionaries!
Monday we picked up Alim to take him to the Vels to eat dinner and he got into the car and said that he's done smoking weed and he'd thrown all his weed smoking stuff away and that he wants to get baptized on August 1, so pray for him that he can fight the temptation of smoking weed so that his life won't be controlled by this addiction. The Vels were awesome, they invited him to come for dinner with them on Sunday and they gave him their telephone number so if he needs someone to help him or he just needs something to do, he can call them and they'll come pick him up. Alim said afterwards that they felt like parents to him because he doesn't have any.
Alim is from Sierra Leon and he came here when he was seven and how he is nineteen. He almost died in Sierra Leon...he was a child soldier and a ton of bad things happened to him there, then he came here with nothing and was in a foster family that treated him terribly...when he was sixteen he started to live on his own. He's been through alot and he has no one, he has no family and is all alone in this crazy society. My heart breaks everytime I hear more of his story. That really goes for almost every African I meet. They all have very sad stories of the wars and the struggles in Africa. It is heart wrenching. It sure makes me grateful for the life that I have been given when I realize just how good my life has been. I've got no complaints.
We are headed for Utrecht tomorrow for Zone Conference and then the next transfer Elder Russel M. Nelson is coming and Elder Kopiska from the Area Presidency. I get to go to really personal meetings with both of them!!! Cool, eh?

July 20, 2009

We had an awesome baptism on Saturday. Jeremy is from China and he's incredible. He said that after he received the gift of the Holy Ghost that it felt like fire burning in his chest and he liked it. His English isn't very good, so when he describes how he is feeling it is always with fun words and actions. But his English keeps getting better and better, especially since he read the English Book of Mormon every day. He is really cool.
Sister Aalderink, who got baptized three weeks ago, is getting her patriarchal blessing this week and she's on fire! She has read 'Our Heritage' and 'Our Search for Happiness' since she was baptized, not to mention the scriptures.
The ward is really reaching out to Jeanine and bringing her into the ward family, and also Jimmy, Robert, and Lorenzo. They're all doing really, really well. And Bram, Ronsina, Nelson and Rozita are all starting to come to church regularly. It is all just going really, really well here and I'm loving it.
Tell Addi that I'm anything but trucky...the only reason I make comments in my emails is because ya'll started complaining that I wasn't missing home and didn't want to come home, so I throw those in there to comfort you. Elder Shumway isn't trunky either, because the work would slow down a ton and it would bite trying to get his boing, but he's working hard to the end!
Neither of us have a problem focusing on the task at hand and we're just loving it. I feel so good now, I've never felt so free of burden or concern or worry. The only thing I worry about is the choices that the people make that we're working with, but I know the the Lord will take care of them, so it's not a big deal. I do my thing and do everything I can to get as much done as I can and do it His way and it just all seams to work out really well. Everything just flows smoothly and I love it.
Our whole zone is just moving along, we've got a lot of missionaries that are struggling and that we've been working with, but overall everyone is doing well, even though one of the missionaries ran away and got on an airplane and went home...still don't understand why he just didn't tell us he was done and we could have sent him home instead of having to search all over the country for him...but whatever.
Monday we had our District Leaders Council and we brought all the district leaders and mentors to our house and cooked steak, chicken, mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, and apple and pumpkin pies...it was really good...that as good as the zone leaders council, but still good. And we had a good discussion on how to lead and reach out to other people to lift them up and inspire them to be their best self.

July 13, 2009

Well, another week has gone and I've been all over the place. I was in Amsterdam for a meeting with the new mission president and then I was in Brussels for another meeting with him and then this morning I was in Arnhem looking for a run-away missionary who ran away last night.
We have been soooo busy, plus we have a baptism on Saturday!! It is all going by so fast and I've never felt better. I'm loving it.
I love our new mission president and his wife. They are really cool. I was in the kitchen for a long time cooking with Sister Brubaker and now we're good friends and I've had a ton of conversations with President Brubaker. They are wonderful people and it is going to be a good 4-1/2 months.
I am excited for these next few months. I've never been happier or more focused on what is important in my whole life. I continue to have huge moments of realization where I change immensely. I've a very different person now, I'm still the same Sean, but now I'm version 3.0 because I have figured out how to improve myself and get rid of the bad habits.
I love this work and I love this gospel

July 6, 2009

So, the computers were messed up last week and I couldn't email...sorry.
BUT, the last two weeks have gone by really, really fast and yesterday was my five month left mark. It goes by so fast.
Yesterday at church I had a ten year-old girl ask me if I would kiss her...it was really funny. Elder Shumway and I have all the girls in the ward to choose from...they're also all under the age of 16 except one. They listen to us...it's really good and then their parents like us more and then we get more dinner appointments and then everybody is happy.
We baptized the Aalderinks last week. I baptized Gerard and Elder Shumway baptized Hilda. I confirmed Jeanine in sacrament meeting. I've now had 17 baptisms on my mission...who would have thought 19 months ago that I would have had more than one! I still have five more months to go! I got a phone yesterday that a man I found and taught in Den Haag just got baptized. It is going really good. We have another baptism scheduled for the 18th with a young man from China named Jeremy Zheng.
I have talked to the new mission president a few times and we are going to Amsterdam to meet him and his wife tomorrow and then on Thursday we're headed for Brussels for Zone Leader council...it is going to be a crazy week.
Well, I'm excited for the next five months and I'll not be coming home sooner or later than that. I've been advised to start thinking and making plans for what I'm going to do when I get home. So, I need to know when school starts at BYU in January.

June 22, 2009

It is transfer day, but I am staying in Apeldoorn with Elder Shumway, which means I will be here for the next two transfers because this is Elder Shumway's last transfer, so I will have at least one more transfer period after that in Apeldoorn.
Sunny and Jeanine got baptized this past weekend. It was so awesome! The spirit was so strong and way awesome. And we've got the family Aalderink getting baptized on Friday which will be really awesome too. They love the church, they feel so at home in the church.
A couple of days ago we went out to our bishop's house to work in his yard. He lives in a little tiny town about a 45 minute bike ride from Apeldoorn (the car was in the shop) and it is in a pine forest. It was really cool. I cut and chopped about a cord of wood. I was sooooo sore afterward, I am not in as good of shape as I used to be.
Zone conference was really, really cool. President Woodland pretty much told us how to live our lives and then we said goodbye to him. It was sad to see President and Sister Woodland leave. It was really good to be in Den Haag again. We stayed the night there and I got to see Huub and Shijam. They both just received the M. Priesthood (I can't spell that).

June 15, 2009

This past week went by really, really fast! We had another baptism on Sunday, Sister Linschooten, she was sooo happy and beaming with joy.
The ward here is so awesome. I love the members. All the kids from 1-9 years of age love to play with us. The girls from 10-21 years old are in love with us and we use that as an advantage to give them advice for their lives because they listen to every word we say. The boys from 10-21 years old think we're really cool and also listen to us. Then the rest just love us because we actually talk to the members here and try to help them with their problems.
I am teaching an English class every Thursday and it's really fun. We are trying to get a Family Home Evening going in the church for investigators, less-actives and new converts that will be alot of fun too.
Everything here is going fine and dandy. Today we are heading for Den Haag for Zone Conference and I'll get to see Folly and hopefully Huub.
I made an apple pie from scratch on Friday...it was really good, but now I'm out of shortening and they don't have that here.

June 8, 2009

Wow, the past two weeks have been incredible! Yesterday we had three baptisms which puts me up to 13 now in total and we've got baptisms planned for the next three Sundays and hopefully more after that. We baptized Robert Hirwa, Jimmy Mutesa, and Lorenso Put. We are working with Sister Linschooten, Jeanine, Fam, Aalderink, Alim, Yaya, Yana, Nelson, Marisca, Jeremy, Tom, Kevin, Sarah, Gwen and more that are also getting close.
We also had eleven investigators in church on Sunday...it was awesome. The work is going really, really well here. I love the members here, they are so awesome. I hope that I stay the rest of my mission here. It's just going really, really well here and I'm loving it.
We are also in the ward choir and we go around singing the Prince of Egypt songs.
The members here love us and it's just a ton of fun to be around them. We have about three dinner appointments a week all with different members and some of the members we get every two to three weeks. It's awesome. I just love Apeldoorn.
So far we've been to Amsterdam and Apeldoorn and on Saturday we are going to Rotterdam and the next week to Groningen...it's fun.

June 1, 2009

I had an awesome week. I got to go to The Hague Temple with Brother de Jong this week, cool, eh? I also had my last interview with President Woodland before he and his wife return to the States. It was good.
Today we had a sport day with the ward and it was really good, I'll tell you more next week.

May 25, 2009

This week went by really fast. We were in Brussels for two days at a conference and it was really, really cool!!!! Sister Woodland made whole chickens for us and mashed potatoes and all sorts of good stuff. I love Zone Leaders Councils, the food is always so good.
Yesterday we had a total of ten investigators who came to church as well as a bunch of inactive members....it was really cool.
Then we also had the ward choir performance (we're part of the ward choir, even though we are terrible singers) and that was cool. Afterwards I went outside with five little kids and they decided to gang up on me and tackle me to the ground, so I spent an hour running/breaking tackles with all these little kids...it was fun and I'm a little bit out of shape, or at least compared to how I used to be...compared to all of you, however...well, let's just say that I get a very good workout every morning and I still have no fat and I'm in better shape that ya'll...but hey, not everyone can be as good as me. Ha, ha, ha.
It was a good week though, even though we had no food, but hey, we were taken care of.

May 18, 2009

Sorry this is going to be so short. We spent a ton of time today further cleaning our apartment and de-junking it. I found a dryer in a closet that was broken and I fixed it and now we have a clothes dryer!
It's been a good week and it's great to be back to a normal companionship (third elder got transferred). We will be going to Brussels on Tuesday for Zone Leader thingy, so that will be pretty cool.
Frans Philips was baptized on Saturday and that was awesome!!

May 11, 2009

I did not get transferred, so I'm in Apeldoorn for at least another six weeks. Talking to you all for Mother's Day was great! Love you all.

May 4, 2009

Boy, do I have a story to tell you. I witnessed an assassination attempt on the royal family of Nederland!!! It was crazy. It was Queen's Day and the Queen came to Apeldoorn and so did 200,000 people to see her. It started out with the parade, celebrating the life of the Queen. The royal family was shaking hands with some people and then they got into this convertible bus and it was driving through the parade route and the royal family was just waving to everyone when all of a sudden a car burst through the barricades and ran 14 people over and just barely missed the royal bus and then ran into a cement monument. Now seven people are dead, including the driver of the car and eight are still in pretty rough condition.
Evidently the driver had lost his job and was kicked out of his house so he decided that killing the Queen and the princes/princesses would solve his problems and as a result seven people are now dead, eight physically wounded and thousands have the mental scars of seeing it happen, and I'll tell you what, it was not a good sight or sound.
The aftermath is pretty bad too. Luckily, we did not go where we were planning to stand because then we would have been right where the car came through the crowd. This little girl that saw the whole thing was just crying and it was so sad to see all of these people in such a state...it was pretty rough. The whole city is just in shock and horror and now in a state of mourning.
On the lighter side of things, my zone is doing better than it has ever done and is just exploding right now. It's awesome! The other night we were at this inactive member's house and her husband wanted nothing to do with the church or the missionaries, but he started a water fight with one of the little kids and somehow it spread and then everyone got involved and we were all soaking wet by the end and now we have a good relationship with the husband and all the family...it was cool.

April 27, 2009

So of the three people that were supposed to get baptized on Saturday, only one of them did, one will have to wait a couple of weeks and the other one went crazy. Levert's baptism was really good and way spiritual. He showed up an hour and half early and was all dressed in white and just prayed for that entire time. It was really cool and his testimony at the end was way solid.
Life is going pretty good here. I don't think that I'm going to be staying in Apeldoorn next transfer, but we'll see, I've got two weeks left.
We went to the hospital to visit a member who broke her pelvic bone. It was weird to be back in a medical care place. It felt good to wheel her around the hospital on her wheelchair. I love hospitals.
One of my friends is getting married on Thursday, it's weird to get wedding invitations, especially when you can't go.

April 20, 2009

This coming Saturday I will be having three baptisms, Alim, Sunny and Levert. It should be really cool. We are still driving a ton and having fun. The members here are pretty cool. We also sing in the choir...that's really funny!
Today on P-day we went to this place called Apenheul and we had monkeys climb all over us. It was pretty cool. It is getting really hot here and I am starting to get tan.

April 13, 2009

I am doing 'good'. I spent alot of time in a car this week. We went to Brussels, twice to Zwolle, twice to Leeuwarden, once to Heerenveen, and then all over in Deventer and Apeldoorn. PLUS, I got to drive a big van to move things around so that we could have a table and some beds in our apartment. We didn't get to do much work in our city, but it was still fun.
The Zone Leader Council was really, really good.
The country has two Easter days, so everything is closed today(P-day), we can't go shopping and we are at a member's house right not emailing our families.

April 6, 2009

So, one of the positive things about Apeldoorn is the fact that we have a car all the times now and I don't even ride a bike at all. That and we have a really big apartment, well actually we live in a house but it's not what you are thinking of as a house. It has one room downstairs that consists of the kitchen, dining room, and living room and the upstairs has three rooms in the same amount of space and they are our bedrooms and study rooms. It's big compared to other missionary/normal person living places, but compared to America, it is a tiny, tiny place to live.
Apeldoorn is really small, I've already memorized how to get to alot of places, it's pretty easy. We drove to Leeuwarden the other day and took a ton of stuff from the missionary apartment there because they are closing it, of which we got kitchen supplies, a blender, a waffle iron and a sandwich toaster, and other things for our apartment...it was cool.
We are headed for Brussels tomorrow for our Zone Leader Council. It will be alot of fun and then we have interviews and a few other things this week.

March 30, 2009

WOW! I'm getting transferred to Apeldoorn as a zone leader. My new companion is Elder Shumway from Oklahoma City, he has only three more transfers before going home, so I'll either be in Apeldoorn a very short time or a very long time.
I'm really sad to leave Den Haag, everything was starting to go really, really well and now I'm going to the problem zone where nothing is happening. Plus I'm in a threesome apartment because Pres. Woodland sent a problem missionary with the two of us to try and change him around so he won't crash and burn. I'm going to be missing so many baptisms and a ton of good things that we were just getting started here in Den Haag. Maybe I'll be able to come back after a few transfers or so. I hpe so. I love Den Haag, it's the best place in the mission to be. Oh well, whatever.
My new address is:
Elder Sean Burton
Wolwevershorst 62
7328-NV Apeldoorn
Nederland

But last week was incredible!!!

March 23, 2009

This week was pretty crazy. I went to Brussels, Amsterdam and Utrecht. It was a ton of driving and NO sleep! But it was a really awesome week.
I got to talk to President Oaks one-on-one for about a half hour and the zone leaders got to talk to him for a couple of hours and then we had zone conference as well. It was really good. President Oaks is a really nice guy. He loves to tell stories. I sat and talk to him during lunch at zone conference and he just told story after story. It was great. The zone leader council in Brussels was also amazing and I took tons of notes.
It was really a spiritually uplifting week and it was fun, although we did have some problems with some of the missionaries in our zone. Our ward took some huge steps towards helping us some more this week, so that was also something good.
The baptism of Folly and Shijam was really awesome. The Mule family from Fiji sung a really cool song and played the ukelale. It was really cool and spiritual. Both Folly and Shijam were glowing afterwards and they just loved it. The confirmation was really cool as well.
We have a whole bunch of baptisms coming up and and a bunch of other investigators too. We are seeing so many miracles every day. It is incredible.
There are a couple ducks that live in the canal by our apartment and we watch them out of the window. This morning four drakes flew up in front of me at about 20 yards. These ducks fly around and no one can shoot them! But it's ok...eight months and I'll be making up for it.

March 16, 2009

This week went by really fast. We had interviews in Amsterdam and we gave another training and it went really well. As Zone leaders we give trainings and take numbers for the whole zone and we are called to inspire and uplift the missionaries in our zone. There are four zones in the Dutch side of the mission.
I'm also going to Brussels tomorrow to meet with President Oaks of the Seventy and Pres. Woodland (mission president), it should be really good also. We drive a ton and I'm loving it, but don't worry Mom, I'm driving safely. We are getting a new car!
We have a baptism with Folly and Shijam on Wednesday. It should be really, really good. We have baptismal dates of:
March 28--Natalie
April 11--Ama, Isatu, Kate, Affiana
April 25--Ravin, Lyde, Kastelein, Ben, Philip,
Bentura family, Teras family, Anthony family
If you would pray for these people that would be wonderful!
Elder Carter, my companion, is from Ogden and he's a duck hunter too. We get along really well and it's alot of fun to work with him. We live in a 4-man apartment with Elder De Mass (from Murray) and Elder Christensen (from Kearns). It's alot of fun and we all get along really well.
Things are going really well here and it's starting to get warm and it's getting lighter and lighter, later and later. When it starts getting darker again, then I'll be heading home really, really soon. That's weird.

March 9, 2009

It's going great here and I'm loving it. In the past four days we have set eight baptismal dates. We were doing really good and then we reviewed a talk that we've read before called "The Challenging and Testifying Missionary" and now we've gone nuts. We invite people to be baptized on the streets, on their doorsteps, and every other place we can think of and we are finding people that are truly ready for the gospel. We're not just finding people who will say yes and then not follow through, but these people truly want to change their lives. It's awesome. Contacting in English is also really fun.
In regards to driving here, they don't drive on the other side of the road. Our car is a stick shift and if you have ever driven in Brussels, you know what it's like to drive offensively. You have to in Brussels, it's crazy, it's just a free-for-all. They have round-abouts that are five lanes wide and the closer to the middle you are, the more right of way you have. Everyone drives offensively defensive and it's awesome. It's like bumper cars without the bumping...most of the time. We saw some guy make use of his bumpers getting out of a parallel parking job with only three inches in front and back of him. I was impressed.
Next Ghanian food story....fish heads made into soup mixed with peppers and then a big ol' slab of FuFu to go with it...awesome, huh?
We had a Fijian farewell yesterday. I guess the people over here in Europe didn't get the memo about no farewells. But this farewell was soooo cool. They had a whole bund of Fijians and Samoans there and they sang and then after the meeting they did some Pacific Islander traditional ceremonies for departing people and then they had a huge feast with really, really good Pacific foods. It was soooo good. I ate soooo much and they just kept bringing more and more food out. It was awesome, I loved it.