4/24/2008

Hey family!

So as you know I got my flight plans, and no I don't think I need anything beyond maybe a couple pairs of nylons. Other than that I'm good.

So, not a whole lot has happened this week... does anything ever? I got my flight plans which made me incredibly happy! Saturday was Fratele McKeeth's last day teaching us, he's moving to Chicago for the summer for work or something. So, we've had a jumble of random teachers this week, but its been fun. They are just teaching us random things like how to call people names... productive missionary things like that :) but yeah.

Elder Gerald N. Lund (the work and the glory guy) came and talked to us this past Tuesday about all the ways the Book of Mormon HAS to be true as proven by worldly methods... weird but good. (who knew that a general authority would be super concerned about telling us facts rather than going over the typical testimony... but whatever). Some of the facts were interesting. Did you know that it takes a trained translator with computers and libraries of help and teams of professionals to turn out 1 and a half pages of traslated documents a day? Joseph Smith averaged 9 pages a day, with no education or help. Did you know that the word "and" in English is typically only used once a sentence MAYBE twice. In Hebrew their word for and is typically used 3-5 times a sentence, in the Book of Mormon the word "and" is used an average of 3 times a sentence, proving that it was originally written in a different language than English.

Writing-typing, a new technology that is used to identify a writer by their writing pattern analyzed the BOM and discovered that over 30 different writers of various education levels wrote it. Then when compared to letters and discourses written in the early days of the church, none of the 30 people who wrote the BOM matched the writing styles of Jospeh Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, or Martin Harris.

There was a bunch of other cool facts about how the Book of Mormon is legit that came from attempts to scientifically disprove it. Gotta love how no matter what people do, the Book of Mormon is still true.

Anyway, life here is same old same old... and I am so so so happy to leave on Monday and finally get to doin' what I cam to do!

Sorry the e-mail is so lame,

Love ya all!
Nicole