Monday, July 23rd 2018

Hello all! This week has been an exciting one! 

Something I have learned this week is to make bread! My companion loves to make bread and take it to people he has been thinking about. I decided that I wanted to learn how to make it, so he has been teaching me, and we have been taking bread to members and investigators for the past week and letting them know we are thinking of them, and are happy we are working with them. I will include a picture of a loaf that I made myself.

We were dropping off bread to this one family, and we are like here is some bread for you, and they were like thanks, is it because you are not going to use it, and we were like no, its homemade, it is not bread that we bought from the store and decided we were not going to use it so we gave it to you. It was super funny and they were really impressed that we were such good bakers. 

We were knocking one evening, and we got let in by a great family. They were just about to start dinner and insisted that we stay and join them. We had not had dinner yet so we took them up on their offer. It was a fantastic dinner and we learned that they have a lot of close family that are LDS members, including parents and siblings. They have a lot of nieces and nephews that are on missions. They were the salt of the earth. 

The youth in our ward are going to stake youth conference this week to Kirtland Ohio, which is where a lot of church history took place. The ward had a Kirtland night for the youth to prepare for youth conference. The bishop asked if we would invite as many people we have been working with as possible to attend the Kirtland night. A lot of the people we have been working with showed up and really enjoyed learning about the history of the church in Kirtland, Ohio. 

On our way back from our interviews with the mission president this week, we got a flat tire. We pulled over, and a man named Jose saw that we were about to change our tire in our suits, and asked if he could change our tire for us so we would not get our nice clothes dirty. We said absolutely. He changed our tire for us in record timing. We thanked him and told him he was the modern-day good Samaritan. 

You would not believe it, but the next day while we were tracting, we ran into a couple that had a flat tire. We went up to them and asked if we could help. They said please do. We asked if we could put our copies of The Book of Mormon in their car while we changed the tire because it was raining super hard and we did not want to ruin them. They said yes. We changed the tire but not as fast as Jose did, and at the end, we left a copy of the Book Of Mormon in their car. 

Overall it was a pretty exciting week, and the work of the Lord continues 

Elder Dallin McKay Spurgeon 

Monday, July 16th 2018

Hello everyone, Last week was transfers and I found out that I am staying in Southern Maryland. Transfers are always a sad time because you see a lot of your friends leave for back home, but also exciting because a lot of new people enter into the field. It is always sad and exciting during this time of year because school just got out which means a lot of people are coming in and going. 

Whenever there is a missionary in our district who is leaving, we take a death picture at our last district meeting, which means the missionary that is going home will be dead, and the rest of the missionaries will be mourning their loss. It is a fun little tradition. 

We had a lesson this week with some investigators where we talked about how to obtain faith and why it is important to have faith and to grow it. We talked about Alma 32 which compares faith unto a seed and how it can grow if we plant it, so we all agreed that we would buy plants to remind us to have faith and to grow our faith, as we nourished it like our plants, well my companion is from Arizona so he persuaded all of us to get cactuses. Now we all have faith cactuses. Something else that is awesome, the lady's name we were buying the cactuses from was Faith. So we explained to her our faith cactuses.  

This last Sunday was "Why I Believe", an event at the visitor center at the D.C Temple. One of the recent converts we have been working with gave his testimony. A lot of the ward was there to support him and he did a wonderful job. The main speaker was a man that is an artist, and he showed us some of his paintings and the time-lapse videos of him painting them. It was incredible. He likened his paintings to an aspect of the gospel. His name is Johnathan Linton, and you should look up some of his work. 

Press forward saints! 

Elder Dallin McKay Spurgeon 

Monday, July 9th 2018

Hey there everybody. Here is an update on the people we have been working with lately. Tammy has agreed to be baptized. She wants to wait a while though. Her husband is in the military and is on a 2-year deployment, and they both agreed to wait until he gets back in DECEMBER! I know she can make it till then if the ward takes over and she is ministered to. 

Mary is doing great, she has agreed to be baptized later this month. One day when we were going to visit, we found a turtle in a bucket. She is keeping it as a pet, so we went to Walmart and bought some turtle food, and it is awesome because Tammy works at Walmart and she helped us find some turtle snacks. 

I hope everyone's 4th was awesome. I really enjoyed it. We went to a multi-ward pancake breakfast, and to a members house for a cookout. There were so many people we have been working with at the cookout, and it was nice to enjoy each others company and to have them fellowshipped by the ward. It was an extremely hot and humid day, and no matter how hard I begged my companion to jump in the pool, he would not let me... Just Kidding.

Today we will hear from the Mission President if we are getting transferred or not. I will let everyone know tonight what happens. Transfers! Always a time of excitement and anxiety. 

We had a district activity this week. We all went to Point Look Out which is the very southern tip of Maryland and our mission. We got up early to watch the sunrise at 5:50. We watched as the first grain of sunlight came over the bay horizon. It was a very spectacular event. 

Love you all more than Maryland blue crab.

P.S. (Which i have not had yet, but it seems to be a big deal here) 

Elder Dallin McKay Spurgeon 

Monday, July 2nd 2018

Sorry, this won't be much of an E-mail this week. Instead, I decided to add pictures from the trip I took up to Washington D.C. It was super awesome. I loved looking at all the monuments and buildings and going around in the museums. My favorite part was getting a picture in front of the Washington Monument for my little sister Emma, her last request for me before I left was to get a picture in front of the big pointy building. It was a lot of walking and got up to 95 degrees with an uncomfotable amount of humidity, but is was all worth it. If you ever wonder who is a member of the church in the city, be a missionary and walk around all day and members will come up to you and talk to you. It happened 10-12 times. The city is a great place.