Shurtz Start Two Finnish: MTC week

We entered the MTC on Monday July 3. There was a large group of senior missionaries who also entered that day.

We had our picture taken pointing to the map.

This is one of the first couples that we met. The Barneys had hoped to go to Finland, but they were called to Manchester. We also found out that they lived for many years in the Chicago area and they knew Jeff Duncan. Also, Elder Barney was an attorney and we figured that he and Elder Shurtz had been to several LDS law society meetings together. We felt bad that they were not able to go to Finland, but we know that the Lord gets the missionaries to the place where they need to serve.

We were so excited to find two of my cousins at the MTC. Heidi and her husband were there because he is a member of the Senior branch presidency at the MTC. Daryl and Jeff were there for their second week. They were doing vehicle training before heading to their mission in the Alabama Birmingham mission. Daryl's sister Ruth Ann and her husband are already serving there. How fun would that be to serve together with your sister!

Another couple who are also serving in the Senior branch presidency were the Thomas. When we heard that they were from St. Louis and had served in the temple there, we had to go and meet them to see if they knew the Ereksons who we knew from our Las Vegas mission. Of course they knew them.

We were excited to meet the group of young missionaries who are at the MTC and are headed to Finland. We will be welcoming them to the mission next month.

Tuesday evening the MTC had icecream and watermelon for the missionaries to celebrate the 4th of July. That made it convenient for us to be able to get a picture with this wonderful group.

We were paired with a wonderful couple for teaching opportunities. We enjoyed getting to know the Bitners. They were heading to Australia to serve as medical advisors. What a wonderful couple. They were planning to begin their mission next Jan. but had to scramble to be able to begin their service in July instead.

For one of our activities, we were told to go outside and find some young missionaries and tell them that we were going to help them in a teaching opportunity. We found these cute sisters. They were fabulous! We were excited to find out that one of them was headed to the Nevada, Las Vegas

We loved the other missionaries in our district. There were 4 couples in our district, Tanner, Shurtz, Bailey and Talbot. We were heading to New Zealand, Finland, Salt Lake City headquarters and Germany. We especially enjoyed doing a meditative type study of one of the murals in the T4 building. Elder Bailey had a nice camera and he took pictures of the group and of the individual couples.