Christmas Zone Conference

My gingerbread house

Waco, Texas

Not a whole lot happened this week, in fact the past few days have been kind of rough for us but I'm sure things will look up eventually. Also, transfers are on Wednesday and last night we got a call from President Whitney and Elder Rowley will be leaving Mexia to be a Zone Leader in Colleyville! It's sad to see him go because we just started getting along... that's life though. 

Christmas Zone Conference:

We had Christmas Zone Conference this week which was really nice because it was super laid back. We were supposed to have a talent show during the conference and since the end of November the Zone Leaders have been pestering us to come up with an act and I'd always tell them the same thing: "I don't think President Whitney would enjoy my dancing." That always got a good laugh.

The next day we got up at like 5:00 so we could meet our Zone Leaders in Waco where they'd give us and the Spanish Elders a lift to Killeen. Once we got on the freeway Elder Stokes broke the news to us that no one from our Zone had signed up for an act and so we had to come up with something fast so we didn't look like an untalented bunch of losers. 

We quickly put our heads together and we started whistling 'Silent Night' which sounded pretty good except for the part where we found out Elder Rowley couldn't whistle and the fact that we were all on different parts of the song the entire time. In our Egos we thought it sounded amazing though. 

Then, Elder Atkinson suggested we hum the second verse and by "hum" he actually meant "moan" and so the second verse sounded less like Silent Night and more like the Halo main menu theme. We still thought we sounded fantastic.   

Finally, since we thought we were all musically gifted we decided we'd sing a verse too. We thought we sounded like a choir of angels... how little did we know.

We made it to Killeen and when it was time for the talent show we had recruited another 3 Elders to join us. We luckily walked up on stage and tried to make the Killen zone wish they could be us. We lined up and Elder Stokes counted us off, "a-one, a-two, a-skiddly-diddly-doo."

We probably whistled one note when Elder Atkinson and Hyde just burst out laughing, which caused the rest of us to laugh which caused the audience to laugh. I closed my eyes and laughed and reflected on how bad we sounded. After about a good 20 seconds of laughing I looked around to see what everyone else was doing. Elder Allred had his face bowed trying to regain composure. Elder Atkinson had somehow gotten tangled in the curtains on the stage. Elder Hyde was sitting on the floor. Eldet Rowley kept hiding his face in his arm and then he'd peek to see what was going on only to immediately hide again. There were only 2 people actually trying to whistle: Elder Stokes who was laughing so hard he could only blow air out of his mouth with no noise. And Elder Parsons who didn't know what was so funny and was whistling very seriously. 

We decided to forego the rhythmic moaning and we just sang the first verse of 'Silent Night' all the while the Sisters from the Waco Zone and all of the Killeen Zone were slapping their knees. Finallymwe finished singing and awkwardly walked off the stage.  

Later, President Whitney gave a talk about Luke 2 and said something along the lines of, "We may have been part of that Heavenly Host singing and praising God with perfect angelic voices... except for the Elders in the Waco Zone. You Elders all sound awful."

Love y'all and have a Merry Christmas 

--Elder Murdoch