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[S2E1] The smoke strikes back

Yeah. Smokes back. We were doing so well, we had blue skies for almost a whole 3 days! But last night the air quality was 236. Anything under 100 is healthy. 236 is lung cancer levels. yaaaaaay

10: I got volunteered to sing “I need the every hour” in sacrament meeting. I’d be perfectly fine with that, but I haven’t sung in a hot minute, so I’m a little rusty.

9: I get to bully elder Willits about going home! He’s going home this transfer, and has to do a online “class” about re-adjusting to being a normal person. The thing is, he really doesn’t want to go home. So he has to get used to that, and so I make fun of him so he can accept that he’s leaving.

8: I found a Lego dude. He’s mine now.

7: My phone finally got a crack. It’s a little one in the corner, and I’m thankful for my screen protector. I’m not going to replace it just yet, I’m going to wait for another tragedy, then replace it.

6: When driving home last night, the smoke was so bad that we couldn’t see that far without turning our brights on. When we did, the road looked like the “upside down” from stranger things. So i got to explain what stranger things was to elder Willits.

5: We went it to visit some new members in our ward, who aren’t new members, but the daughter wants to get baptized, but her dad who lives in Arkansas said no, but she’s living with her mom and grandparents, I don’t know it’s weird. Anyways we visited them, and they live out in the freaking boonies. But that gave us a great chance to take these sweet photos. (See below)

4: Moving bales of hay in proselyting clothes is fun. We got hay everywhere, in every pocket and wrinkle on our clothes. That’s what’s expected when we ask “is there any service that we can do for you?”

3: Another photo shoot that we did was at a place that reflected the majority of what we walk and drive down here in Gold Hill.

2: We have got some new friends with transfers, and some NEW NEW friends. I’m finally not the newest kid on the block!

1: I really don’t like Weekly planning.

I love all of you, and more importantly Jesus Loves you. Keep going strong, and remember, doubts aren’t the end. After all, a doubt of a young farm boy brought about the restoration of the gospel on earth.

Elder Berky

Fishing at the reservoir

Fishing with the Webelos scouts at the Spanish Fork reservoir.

S1E6 Please let this be a normal field trip…

With the Frizz? NO WAY! OooHh…

Cruisn on down main street, your relaxed and feeling good, next thing that you know you’re saying “an octopus in our neighborhood?”
I’m not entirely sure why I wrote that, but okay, let’s talk about the Lord’s work!

10: After a couple weeks of horrible weather, due to the fire nation, (smoke) we finally got a blue sky! It was so nice! We didn’t have to wear any masks that day!

9: I do not like Weekly planning. It never goes how we want it to. Oh, our plans? Nah, they go down pretty well, but it just takes forever to do them. This week we didn’t get out of the apartment until 5! And that was for dinner! Uggghhh.

8: Always, always, always follow promptings. We had just an hour left one day, and were trying to decide what to do with that time. Elder Willits got the prompting to visit this one ‘investigator’ who has mainly just been using us for service, and not much else, so we headed over. She wasn’t there. So we went over to a trailer park with a couple investigators in it. We knocked on one door, nothing. So we headed over to another trailer. Nothing. So we started heading back to the car. As we were walking, we saw a lady on her porch, drinking and listening to her phone. She had her ear buds in so we kinda had to walk up to her, and had the most spiritual message ever. This woman, Sarah has gone through some crazy stuff. All she wants is to come back to the strait and narrow. But she didn’t know how to so that because her entire life has been away from God. Moral of the story? ALWAYS FOLLOW PROMPTINGS.

7: We brought an inactive member who hadn’t been to church in forever back to church after one meeting. We stopped by their home, and only the father was home, so he invited us in and we talked for a while, then the wife came home with a ton of ice cream. She offered us some and after a chat we talked about how important the sacrament is. I guess that was something that the wife really needed to hear, cause she was in church Sunday!

6: After months of not driving, I am driving now. It’s kinda weird, mainly because I’m so used to the crown Victoria, and I have a regulation box that’ll yell at me if I speed or take a corner to hard. Oh well. I’ll get used to it.

5: I got to read a bit out of a Jehovah’s witness ‘pamphlet’ and those guys are wack.

4: We met this nice preachers daughter who must be worked as an auctioneer. She freaking would talk so fast! She was nice, and listened to our message and promised to read some passages out of the BoM.

3: I stitched up a couple pairs of slacks that had ripped down the edge of the pocket. They look alright! I did one on the inside so you can’t tell that it was ripped.

2: Normally at church I like to just relax and go ‘okay, you teach ME for a change’ but not this Sunday. I gave a talk, and taught gospel principals. But it all went well, so yeah.

1: Jesus Loves us all so much. He gave his life simply so that we could find solace and comfort. And to come back to our father. Never forget that. No matter how bad you think you are, no matter how far off the path you are, Christ will come get you and bring you back.

0: I ate an Australian.

Elder Berky

Mom’s medicine

Jacob at Cub Scout Day Camp

Grandpa gears up

Grandpa Roger Berky tries on Benjamin’s new football helmet. Ben started playing 9th grade football this year.

SF Fiesta Days

Jacob, Sam and Grandpa Berky at the annual flag retirement ceremony

Videos of Ammon dancing

S1E5 The fire nation attacks.

So I know that i used that joke in my first letter home, but it just worked for this week. In case you don’t know, there have been a ton of fires up here. All over the valley where I’m in, and because of the weather patterns all the smoke just gets trapped in.I’m gonna get lung cancer.Well, life changing diseases aside, let’s talk about top 10s!

10: I have had a bit of experience with bible bashing, but we met this one investigator who wanted to TORAH bash. He has self taught Hebrew, and doesn’t accept anything else besides the original Hebrew texts. Why was he investigating the Book of Mormon? Probably to prove it is fake. Interesting guy. His brother is the same way too, but he had printed out this power point presentation with all sorts of wack stuff about the Mormons. Somehow Donald Trump had something to do with it. Weird.

9: We are helping this one family move, but the house they were going to move into had some major water damage going on. So we’ve been helping them to take down sheet rock, and set up trusses and everything. It kinda makes me feel like I’m home, doing some crazy project because someone didn’t look deep enough into it. It’s great tho, the couple are older so they can’t do everything and helping out is fun.

8: The smoke here is so bad, you can look at the sun directly. If it’s a good day, you can’t look at it very long, but on a bad day the smoke obstructs the sun so much it won’t even hurt your eyes. Been wearing a painters mask when going tracting so we can stay out for longer than an hour.

7: there is a missionary who came back this week from Tempe AZ! We were at his homecoming dinner/party, and it went well! He said that “it still hasn’t set in yet.” It probably will when he’s sitting alone, and do a double take cause he can be alone now.

6: We visited the famous “Crater Lake” (see pics below) and tho it was a bit Smokey, it was nice! Didn’t have much time to do much bc we still have stuff to do on our p-day. We got a nice less active couple to drive us up and spend the day.

5: We had zone conference on Thursday, and it was great! All the missionaries in the central point zone gather up and get some lessons and ‘classes’ on how to be better missionaries. We were told to focus primarily on preach my gospel. So I’ll be doing that some more in my personal studies.

4: Bree is a champ! When we were teaching a lesson on plan of Salvation, she just kinda asked “what do I need to do too get baptized?” She wanted us to drop everything on her so she could get baptized as soon as she can! So we dropped everything that you gotta do to get baptized on her. Legit the only thing that she had a problem with is coffee and modesty, which she’s down with, she just needs a new wardrobe.

3: We found a pot farm! Elder Willits and I were heading out to contact a less active couple, and Google maps told us to head down this very long driveway. Google maps is a liar. It wasn’t a driveway, but a giant pot farm. We stopped and asked some guys working there about where the members were and they pointed us in the right direction. But yeah. Big pot farm.

2: We taught someone about the book of Mormon while at a pizza place! He was standing next to us in line, and asked us why we were dressed nice. We explained that we were Mormon missionaries, and after we got our pizzas we asked if we could sit with him. He was cool. We gave him a BoM, and told him about it. Super cool experience.

1: How much the Lord loves us. And how much he wants us to learn and find. All we have to do is go out and find it. Read the scriptures, tell someone about the gospel. Pray every time you run into something that you don’t think you can deal with. Pray in the morning and at night.

I love all of you.

SF Fish Rodeo

[S1E4] 10 funniest Fortnite plays! (Not clickbait)

Wow. Another week gone by. It has been so busy that I have no clue what to even say! Well, um. How about just starting into the list!

10: After having a great dinner at this nice Mexican place. (the one with the “gringos” menu) The sister who brought us there had plenty of life stories and we just talked about a lot. I also got to try a chalupa! Afterwards we asked if there was anything that we could do, and she asked for a priesthood blessing! So we left the loud Mexican restaurant, headed over to her house, and gave her a wonderful blessing. It was really great, and we could feel the spirit very strongly.

9: IT FINALLY RAINED HERE! After a whole month of perfectly blue skies, we finally got a bit of rain right before church! Sunday was a good day because of that.

8: it has been HOT here. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around, because whenever I would think about Oregon, I always thought that it was really cold and rainy all the time. But no! Its constantly been over 100° up here! Which is another reason I was super excited for the rain.

7: I met another crack head. On Sunday as we were walking over to our ward mission leader’s office, there was this older guy in a leather jacket asking us about the “Mark of the beast” somehow it was Nazis. It’s always the Nazis. He was nice, his name was Tim.

6: Exchanges were this week! We met up with Elders Law and Ross, who are in the city just south of us. It was great, Elder Law and I went out tracting and met; an atheist who doesn’t believe in the word of man, a kid who’s cat had just died, a lady who wasn’t super interested but still wanted a BoM, and a girl who was uncomfortable with talking about her Faith, but had a ton of Crucifixes all over. Then Elder Law and I went to dinner with our investigator Bree, and that dinner went 2 hours too long. Oops.

5: The next day I got to hang out with Elder Ross, we went out to try and contact some former investigators. Nothing really interesting happened then. But it was good to talk with someone else for a while. They’re both great Men. Hope we can go on exchanges with them sometime soon.

4: We had interviews with the Mission President. That day was weird, because we didn’t know when we were going to be heading into interviews, so we didn’t schedule anything for that day. But it was a great chance to read the scriptures some more that day. Then all the other missionaries showed up at the church. And we just talked for a long time. It was nice.

3: The majority of our lessons this week have been just reading the Book of Mormon. We had a lesson with Bree where she said that she didn’t have any time to read, so Elder Willits and I said “well, let’s read it then!” It was great, she had plenty of questions and we elaborates on some of the odd wording and structure of the Book of Mormon. We then did the exact same thing with another guy named Dominic! They both came to church yesterday, so I guess we’re doing something right!

2: On Saturday we were at this little food truck (that’s been cemented into the ground) and as we were waiting for our food, we started talking with another couple about the book of Mormon, and handed one to them, but right after that the wife of the owner told us that “we can share the word of God, but not the book of Mormon.” I wanted to respond with ‘what if it was?’ But we didn’t want to start something, because we don’t want them to mess with our food. It’s good food.

1: The only food that seems to be around here is either Mexican food, or pizza. Every time members take us out for dinner it’s always Mexican food or pizza. I love Mexican food, but please let’s go get Chinese or something! Oh well, we’re getting fed, so we shouldn’t complain too much.
This is the first week that I’ve felt like a real missionary! I’m looking forward to teaching people about the gospel, and am not just trying to get through another day. All of a sudden 2 years commitment isn’t that big a deal. I love you all so much!! But more importantly Jesus Loves you!

Ya boi

Elder Berky