Mission Conference Week!

Hey again!

This last week was the mission president conference/seminar week! So, for five days we shoved all of our missionaries into half the cafeteria space as normal, blocked off almost the entire administration building, and got to get glimpses of apostles as they drove in and out of the MTC! It was really cool, and 2 of our elders got to do security for President Uchtdorf to keep people out of the way of his car. It was really cool and fun to have apostles here all week.

We got to meet President and Sister Hill on Friday, which was a great experience. They both seem super nice and funny. Cool random fact: President Hill has seen 2700 of the 10000 species of birds. That's insane. He was joking that he was happy he wasn't going to a rainforest because he would be out in the wilderness looking for birds instead of on the streets meeting people for the next 3 years. They both seemed like really nice people and yes, mom and dad, they do remember you from the Marriott School and other stuff. I'm really excited to have such an awesome mission president and wife :).

Elder Bednar spoke to us on Friday as well in a special devotional. He's a very good speaker and I loved his talk. It was super spiritual and good. He talked about how we can be better missionaries and gave us his 5 points of a good missionary: Understand that we serve and represent Christ, be worthy, treasure up the words of eternal life, understand that the Holy Ghost is the ultimate and true teacher, and know that teaching is more than speaking and telling. He expounded on all of the points and it was a very, very good devotional. Also interesting and cool about the devotional was that there were 7 apostles present at that one meeting. Elders David A. Bednar, Russell M. Nelson, Dallin H. Oaks, Neil L. Anderson, Jeffrey R. Holland, M. Russell Ballard, and Richard G. Scott all showed up and it was really cool to see over half of the Quorum of the Twelve in one place!

Romanian is coming very well (I think). We've learned how to use prepositions and stuff in the last week and we also learned how to say "which". Seriously. How to say "which" is a whole lesson (it took 30 minutes to learn). As in "the person which I love" or "the person which will go to the store". It's more complicated than English in Romanian to say the least. Our whole district's Romanian is coming along great, except for a few mess-ups here and there. There's one that's really funny, though, so I want to mention that specifically. So, remember how my companion and I were at TRC and accidentally had our investigators read about sons of perdition instead of the blessings of prayer in families? Well, now I can say it could've been worse. On Monday at TRC we had a mock-buying-things-at-the-store thing before our lesson where we were supposed to buy some clothes and then set up an appointment with the clerk to teach our lesson. Our zone leader, Elder Groberg, went into the "store" and asked to buy a belt. Unfortunately, however, he added a letter into the middle of the word "belt" and instead asked to buy a prostitute. The clerk got really confused and it was really funny :).

Another exciting thing that's happening is that we get a new Romanian district today! One of them already showed up as I am writing this! There are 7 Elders and 3 Sisters, and I'm sure it'll be fun to have little siblings (can I call them that?).

Anyway, great week, great stuff, but I need to go now! I love you all!

Elder Michael Abbott

P.S. to mom: yes, a voice recorder would be cool if you want to send it and it definitely wouldn't take up too much time. Also, about the calling card, I'll send you my plans when I get them and we can talk about it :)