RUNNING A 5K WITH WHITE SHIRTS, TIES, NAME TAGS AND GYM SHORTS

Mon 7/12/10 9:43 AM
Still no baby?! Dang, well I will be anxiously awaiting my next week's emails. That is so sad to hear about Porter Dixon and Sister Miller. Those families will definitely be in my prayers.
I'm glad to hear that Jordan did well on his talk and that last week's story fit right in! I think the maggot detail makes it more interesting too. Well I didn't have anything new like that to talk about this week. But this past week has been really crazy. On Friday, we had zone leader council with our new mission president, and we learned a lot about the new things he will be implementing. There will definitely be a lot of change. Instead of having zone conferences and interviews with President every transfer, it will now only be 4 times a year. But now, we will have 3 zone leader councils each transfer instead of 1. So, it seems like a lot more responsibility falls on our shoulders for the success of the missionaries in our zones. President Jones also told us that he is planning to hold a 4 day mission leadership training in August to teach the leaders and trainers about our new way of doing things. So that's going to be pretty crazy.

Something cool that we did this week was on Thursday evening, we ran a 5k race with one of our investigators and a member. It started right at dusk, and we ran in downtown Milwaukee. It was awesome! The city blocked off the streets that our route was on, and we ran with a couple thousand people. We went in our white shirts, ties, and name tags and then our gym shorts and running shoes so that people could recognize us as missionaries, and many people did. I can't tell you how many people cheered for us as we ran by saying, "Yay, go tie guys!" and stuff like that. It was funny too, going along with Milwaukee tradition, next to the water stands sitting there for us while we were running, there were also beer stands. So, some the runners would run right past the waters and buy a beer to drink while they kept running. It was pretty funny to us. And right at the end of the race, by the finish line, the streets were filled with all the people that ran, and also tons of people who didn't run, and there was a party in the streets. We didn't stay too long, but it was cool having members from different wards around Milwaukee stop us and say hi to us. And our investigator, Patti, and the member, Sister Tyson, thought it was way cool that we came. We hope to keep doing stuff like that.

Well, that's all the interesting news for this week. I will look forward to seeing pictures of little Charli next week!

Love,
Elder Vogan