Elder Coleman Thompson: Summer is almost over!

Hi guys!

Okay, but anyways this week was really good! Lot's of things have been going on in the last week. A little bit about my situation right now: My companion is Elder Ma'a and he is such a good guy, we've been working really hard at teaching together in unity, we practice and practice all the time to be able to teach better, and it's working! We live with the Huddersfield zone leaders (which funny enough about a year ago was Elder Jaeger, who is now home in California btw) who right now are Elder Larson, who was my district leader when I was in Wharfe Valley, and Elder Rasmussen, who I've met before a few times when he was in my zone in Leeds and Sunderland. And they are great!

Every night I have to follow up with the teams in my district, so I make a few phone calls around 9:35 - 9:50 ish and then I follow up with the zone leaders, either in person if they're home, or over the phone if they're busy somewhere. So that usually takes me right close to 10:30, so then I do a few things and then go to bed. My nights are a lot busier than they used to be...

Also every Wednesday I have to do a District Meeting, which lasts between an hour and an hour and a half, where I have to instruct the teams in the district and teach them areas to improve on and practice things with them, and it's fun, but now a lot of my study time is devoted to preparing that meeting each week.

Also I'm giving a talk this next Sunday! Funny story though, the bishopric member gave me a slip last week with the info for my talk and all it said was that my talk is on ''lift us - May'' and that was it, and there is no talk in any May Ensign called Lift us..... and when I asked him he didn't know what I was talking about. So I'm just going to talk about service and missionary work. I'm thinking of sharing the story about Vida from earlier in my mission.

But yes also this week we had a zone conference where one of the Seventy came and spoke to us. HIs name is Elder Moreira, and he used to be a mission President in the highest Baptising mission in the world in Brazil! He is from Portugal though. He was presenting and he asked if anybody wanted to input some missionary stories from the book of acts and I volunteered and shared one story, but he made me come up to the front and stand at the mic with him and it was really fun and really funny.

But yes the ward here in Huddersfield is really nice! There are tons of nice families and there are actually quite a few people who have lived in/have family in Calgary! There's a family here in the ward, and the wife's name is Emma Bland, but her maiden name is Forsyth and she is related to Bill Steward! There's also a guy here who name is Miller, who served his mission in Calgary in like 2008 ish time I think, right around the time they rearranged the wards, and he served in the Woodbine Ward and lived in the Ockey's basement! He was telling me about how one of the kids would be in the other room playing Call of Duty while they were trying to study!

There's lots of nice families here and they feed us pretty much every day, so life is good!

Quick story as well - this week it rained a ton, and yesterday Elder Ma'a and I went knocking after church, and it was super humid and hot and sunny, so we just wore suits, no rain coats. Biggest mistake ever. Like two hours after we left it all of a sudden got really dark and then the heavens were opened. I've seen it rain pretty hard in England, having been here a year - but the rain yesterday was the most I'd ever seen. I even had an umbrella - but that didn't help one bit, like we even stopped and ran over to a bus shelter to get out of it, but we got absolutely drenched. Like it was as if we had just jumped in a pool of water - and the non top of that we just kept working the rest of the day. When I got back my feet were so soggy - good experience!

Love you guys!

Elder Thompson