jakemcgrathmission: I'm almost Native Now (week Тридцять п'ять)

Wowzers, another great week in the wonder country of Ukraine has come to a close, super quick if I may add. This week was like none other, super busy and ended up doing some more service. Let's get started with mission conference. On Thursday, all the missionaries in the Ukraine, L'viv Mission gathered together in L'viv for another great mission conference led by President Rizley. President Rizley is amazing and taught me so much about the gospel and how I can become not only a better missionary, but a better person in general. One of the main focuses of this past mission conference was the temple and the ceremonies performed inside of it. One thing that many people will say to bag on the church is that the endowment ceremony has changed over time, and what I learned is that they're right. Honestly, over time the ceremony has, but you have to realize the difference between the endowment ceremony and the endowment. We still make the same covenants and do the same ordinances that Moses and everyone else has when they received their endowment, but the way that we do that for sure has changed over time, due to factors like advancements in technology. When the endowment was revealed to Joseph Smith, they acted out this ceremony, now we watch a video. Honestly, I'll leave it at that, but I invite you to study that a little bit more because there are some great verses that back this up and I don't want to blab on about this and put you all to sleep, so we'll talk about other things. All in all though, the conference was a blessing and it was really nice to see all the other missionaries as well.

Now let's get to the reason of the title of this email. This past week, we had the chance to go out and do some service for two members of the branch here in Rivne. The first member, we traveled out by bus for around an hour to this little farming village and we helped them plant some potatoes. Now we didn't plant around 30 potatoes like last time in just a small garden, we went out to their field for potatoes and we ended up planting around 700 pounds of potatoes. They had their horses coming back and forth creating the divots for us to plant the cut potatoes and it was such a party. My back hurt pretty bad afterwards, but it was some super fun service. Now, to even add to my argument that I'm almost Ukrainian, is the fact that we ate some delicious food there afterwards, and I had the chance to try one of their native cultural dishes that they prepared for us. This dish is called holadetz. It's basically salted, unflavored jello, with meat fat in the inside. haha to be quite honest, not my favorite, but I ate it without making a sour face which is very very good, had such a weird texture. Well, that was a fun saturday full of service and planted a toooon of potatoes!

Finally, we had exchanges with K-town this past week and it went pretty great. I had the chance to serve with Elder Shuley who is from Kentucky, and has been serving for a year and a half. He's a really great Elder and we set some pretty steep goals, but luckily, we were able to reach them!! Really good day and week! have a great week and talk to you soon

Старійшина McGrath

2 Nephi 32:3 Read and ponder these words. Always FEAST on the words on christ. What does that mean?