The Heart of Boston

Well I'm being transferred! As far as I can tell I'm actually going to be in the heart of Boston, not just one of the neighboring suburbs. I'm very excited and I'm certainly going to miss Elder Stevens and my District and the Zone but I know that there are big things in store for me.  In fact the ward I'm going to has three sets of missionaries so it looks like things are really happening there. It might pose some problems with the dinner calender though. I don't know my new address yet so hold off on sending me anything until next Monday. I also don't know who my new companion will be. I'll let that be a surprise but I am excited. 

I kinda figured I was gonna get transferred. I was really starting to feel really comfortable in the Pittsfield ward, I felt like I had enough knowledge and experience to really help get things going. I had really gown to love the people there as well. Especially with the new Bishop it seemed like we really could have worked well together and I was very excited to be able to serve with him but it wasn't to be & Boston will certainly be great. My companion & I along with a ward member, Jose Lu sang in church Sunday. We sang 'Let the lower lights be burning. '

I got to go on exchanges again with Elder Morgan on Tuesday which is always a good time. He is such a good missionary at balancing work with fun and hopefully I'll be able to pick up on some of that too. I stayed in the Pittsfield area with him because we wanted to see how I would do if I were theoretically introducing a new elder into an area. It wasn't hard at all and I thank God for that because every single one of our scheduled appointments fell through but it was still one of the busiest days we'd had. 

We also tried a hot wings challenge thing at the pizza place across the street from our apartment. It was so hard! The first wing actually tasted good but with each wing we could taste less & less and it only burned more. We had 10 minutes to eat 10 of them and he only ate 6. I on the other hand only had a wing and a half left so I felt semi accomplished. Our mouths were hurting for the rest of the night but it was worth it. We had some really good contacts in that restaurant. 

This is Elder Morgan that I went on splits with. He's our zone leader & he goes home in 2 days. The guy behind us is Elder Slade & he's from Heber, AZ & he is related to Mason. 

After that we went to try and teach one of our investigators and he lives in an assisted living facility which isn't a big deal but we normally try to meet in this semi-quiet room and say it's semi-quiet because it has a bird cage with a few parakeets. Unforunately it was apparently a field trip night and we had so many people stop in to see the birds so with each batch of people we had to stop and kinda change gears from teaching Steve to contacting with all these people so we really didn't get to teach him a lot but we had a lot of good potential investigators so all in all it was a good visit.

On Thursday we had an impromptu Zone Conference about where we wanted the mission to go since apparently not all the mission was on board for our goal of averaging 70 baptisms a month. So President got up and talked about consecration and miracles and faith and then we had a little bit of a Q and A adressing specific concerns. It was fantastic! So many people were bearing testimony about how great this mission is and what we can accomplish when we work together. My favorite part was when one of the new sisters who had only been here for like 3 weeks got up and said "I didn't know what Zion looked like until I got here". It really made me want to do my part to be a part of this wonderful movement. 

I've really been trying to figure out what I can do to be a more consecrated missionary. It's been a struggle for me because there are honestly so many things I know that I can do to be better but I also know myself and if I try to make all the changes at once I could very easily become overwhelmed and just give up. So I'm only working on one thing at a time in a sense. Of course I'm always trying to be better but I'm really focusing on one specific aspect of the work.

Thank you for all you prayers and encouragement. It's always a strengthening experience to get to read letters from home so thank you. Tell Jaron to write me because he has no excuse while he's laying around recouping from knee surgery. I'll be sure to start taking more pictures mow that I'll be in the thick of Boston. Don't forget to read up on those "knot Chapters" my personal favorite is 2 Nephi 2. It is so packed with doctrine and meaning. Go study it. 

Love,

Elder Trevon Turley

So I was able to take some pictures of this really cool historical mormon memorabilia that this really neat guy we do service for collects. So this is the first edition of the Doctine and Covenants which is not really the book we have today. Today all we have are the "covenants" from the doctrine portion. The rest was actually lectures by Joseph Smith on certain gospel topics. For example Joseph Smith's lectures on Faith which has actually been published as it's own book was originally included in this book.

This was orson Pratt's personal Book of Mormon although when he went on a mission with Hyrumn Smith, Hyrumn took the book and gave it Emma Smiths sisters husband if that makes sense. You can kinda tell by reading it but I thought that was pretty cool.

So this is perhaps the most historically important Book of Mormon known to exist today. This is Martin Harris' personal Book of Mormon. Some of the things that are significant about is that he signed it twice out of the six known Martin Harris signatures two are in this book. The other two were not by him. The book also has the only known writing of Martin Harris besides his signature and that is the word 'sealed" he wrote that on the page that supposedly talks about him which is pretty cool that he figured that out.