Florida or Bust!

As a family, we have decided to walk the distance from Bennington to Orlando, Florida before Elder Burdick completes his mission. Together we hope to have walked 2298 miles before October 2009. And maybe be a size or two smaller!! Thank you Lara for up-dating our count down. Start Walking!!!

Monday, December 29, 2008

Email from 12/29/08

Things are going really good here, we are getting ready to wrap up the month and the year in the zone and mission so we are super busy with paper work and getting goals ready for the 2009 year, our mission has changed soo much in just one year, it is really neat everything that is happening, i am excited for our zone leader council this weekend in orlando, as we review our goals and outcome from 2008, i am excited for what 2009 is going to hold!
I love the Christmas season, i just get frustrated with the work during it! The week of Christmas is soo hard to set return appts to teach people, because all of them say "after the holidays", so this week should be really really good for all of the appointments we set! Last night we taught a big group of spanish guys and we set two baptismal dates for january! We have alot more dates to set for this coming month, so things are looking really good for this next transfer! Speaking of next transfer, we got transfer calls this last saturday and Elder OBrien is leaving, he is being released as a zone leader and is going to southern orlando, it was crazy how fast this transfer went by, when i look back to this transfer it is going to be like a blink! I found out that my new companion is Elder Green :-) this will be his first transfer as a zone leader, so it will be fun going through the ropes with him, i have never met him or even seen him before, so tomorrow i get to meet him! But President told me that he is a solid missionary and that he is on fire right now! So things are going to be awesome this transfer!

Merry Christmas!


Tuesday, December 16, 2008

email from 12/15/08

Things are going great here, there was a spanish family that showed up last week at the spanish branch, so i set up an appointment to go back and teach them this week, and when we went there, we started talking about the restoration and the book of mormon, and he pulled out his own copy that missionaries had given him a long time ago and told me that he had read all of first and second Nephi, and he knows that it is true! Then he asked me what he has to do to be baptized! It was amazing! Ivan has been soo prepared by the lord! He wants to be baptized on Christmas Eve but we dont know yet, hopefully it will follow through, if not then, it will be short after, I love the power of the Book of Mormon! I recently started over again and it amazes me how much new things you learn everytime! I love it, if people would just humble themselves and pray about it they would know!
We have some awesome christmas activities going on in the ward, last saturday we had the ward christmas party and we had about 5 investigators show up! It was awesome, they asked us to be shepherds, and they made us sing a duet:-( oh well, this ward has alot of extremely talented musicians, so they made up for it!

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

bits and pieces from 12/01/08

We had a good week, we ended up eating three thanksgiving dinners, and i thought that i was going to die, but we still worked really hard, we didnt want missionaries just turning thanksgiving into a lolligag day so we challenged the entire zone to see who could talk to the most people on thanksgiving day, and we ended up with 88 contacts, it was pretty fun getting soo excited over everyone in sight! The zone is doing really really good, we are looking at reaching numbers for the month of December with soo many dates than cocoa has had in such a long time at least a couple of years! It is going to be exciting! We have two baptisms this saturday with a part member family that we have been working with since before i got here, but they are finally ready, and they are sooo excited, there names are Jonathan and Daniel Hayasaka! They are a great family, it is going to be really good! This week we had the Turkey Trot Run for the JDRF foundation that a bunch a church members put on, and there were about 470 runners, it was intense, some ran like it was the olympics, we just helped out wherever we could, it wasnt sooo much that they needed our help as much as it was a good opportunity for missionary work and people recoginizing us from such a good cause!This week Pres and Sis Darrington came and spoke in our ward, and everytime they speak in a ward they get members even more excited about missionary work, and they generated about 50 referrals, so that was really exciting! It is really nice in this ward, the members really trust us with their nonmember friends and family, and that is soo helpful!

Monday, November 10, 2008

Email from 11/03/08

We recently met with our stake president here to go over our zone/stake goals and concerns, and his name is President Humphreys, his mom still lives in Montpelier IDAHO, and he said that he grew up working in a podunk middle of nowhere place called GENEVA, and he couldnt believe it when i told him that i know where that is and that i have friends from there:-) It was neat, he knew alot of the older people from the valley.

This week i recieved a phone call from my last area that one of the investigators that wanted to be baptized but couldnt because he was on probation, was going to be baptized on last saturday, he was way cool, when we first found him he was in the pits, he was smoking, drinking, and sitting around all day long, he has since got his hair cut, cleaned up, broke all of his addictions, and basically changed his life around, it was sad that he couldnt get baptized, but he had a special interview with President Darrington, and was found ready and worthy to be baptized, and he had prayed about it and decided that he wanted me to baptize him, it is almost a two hour drive, but president gave me permission if i could find a ride from here with a priesthood holder, so i was able to go back to apopka this week and baptize him, it was a sweet reunion! I am really happy for him!


Tuesday, October 21, 2008

We received this 10/20/08

It was another amazing week here! First off, on Wednesday night we had an investigator fireside in Orlando as part of Elder Johnson, of the seventy) (the british one), as part of his mission tour, we were able to go out there with a member and take beth ryan to it, it was amazing, it was one straight hour of spiritual power, it was crazy i was actually exhausted afterward, he just laid it all out on the line! Then on friday we had our zone conference down in Palm Bay, for all of the south missionaries, It was amazing, General authorities are definently different when they arent behing the general conference pulpit, Elder Johnson has such a great personality! It was such and spitiual and fun zone conference, he kept calling people at random to do things, and he called me up and said Elder Burdick, bear us your testimony, my heart started to beat, and so i said a little prayer in my heart, and all of a sudden everything was sooo calm, like i was on the beach or something! Words were put in my mouth! After zone conference he met with the zone leaders, there were only four of us for the south, so it was just us and Elder Johnson and President Darrington in a room, that was awesome as well, i got to have a great conversation with him and being a missionary and he gave me some great advice, i got a picture with him to, that i will try to send asap.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Bits and Pieces from his email on 10/14/08

Well here i am in Viera, and still alive, it is definently different from my last area! But i love it already, i have met alot of the members here and they are awesome, there is WAY too much money here on the coast, but the members remain soo humble and kind! Alot of members work out on beach side at NASA or other really big industries. This ward is exactly like a Utah ward, it is very functional and well led, the bishop like i said is from idaho falls, he is awesome! I already love all of the members here. We live in Melbourne, which is actually like 5 miles south of our southern border, we live with the two melbourne elders, Viera is a very new area, only like 4 years old, and the ward here was formed last year when they built the brand new building! My new apartment is considerably worse, i got too spoiled with the nicest apartment in the mission last transfer, oh well, i feel like i am "roughin" it a little more now:-)

Although i really miss the families and investigators from my last area, i know that this is where i need to be and what i need to be doing! My companions name is elder Johnson, he only has like 4 months left in the mission, but it looks like we will be together for those four months, he is a great Elder and we work really good together, i am really excited to be serving with him in this area! It turns out that there is a spanish branch near here that hasnt had missionaries in like 6 months, and president and the aps didnt realize that when they called me here, and so we got clearence to work with them to, two nights ago we went and visited the branch president and his wife, and told them that i would be working with them in the spanish work, and she said, that that day in testimony meeting she told the small group that if they had faith that the lord would bring missionaries to help them, It is amazing how the lord works, i KNOW that this is his work!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

The email from 9/22/08

This is a really neat story Sam shared in his email this week! (Every week he tells us about a memeber in Apopka. He has met A LOT of really neat members there!)

The apopka member real quick is brother Shaw, but anyways he served his mission in Alabama when he was 26 and he is the absolute funniest coolest returned missionary ever, just the other day he finally told me why he waited soo long to go, he started smoking when he was 12, he went straight down hill from there, he ended up traveling the united states for 10 years living on the streets and doing drugs, he said you name it and i did it, i hit rock bottom, and then one day when i was laying down on someones coach in the middle of nowhere on the east coast early in the morning and i finally gave up, i rolled over and i kneeled down and prayed for god to take me, but he wouldnt, then an overwhelming feeling came over him and he then said that he would do absolutley anything to make things right with God and Change his life around, to make a long story short he cleaned up completely, had a really good job, his own home, two trucks, and a really good girlfriend at age 26, he went to a fireside at UofU with a friend in Utah, and Afterward they were behind the building trying to see if they could meet any of the general authorities and Boyd K. Packer and his wife walked to their car right by them, his wife got in the car and he was about to get in the car when he stoped half way, turned around and reached out for brother shaws hand, he gripped it firmly and looked him in the eyes and said 'you need to serve a mission', so at age 26 he broke up with his girlfriend, sold everything he had, and got special permision to serve from the first presidency! he served for two years and now he has two nice homes, his own business, the girl of his dreams, a couple of good cars, and a beautiful little girl, he is amazing, i love hearing him bear his testimony! Man, The church is soo true!

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

9/15/08 clips from Sam's email we received

Monday night, i went to the spanish get together for mi cumpleano, and my comp somehow ordered a pinata that looks like a missionary with a name tag on it, it was really fun! I took pictures to send!Real quick funny story, on one of our bike days, we had some referrals quite a ways away, so we rode the bus out to the spot with our bikes, and my comp saw a little bright green building that looked like a very authentic mexican restaraunt, and it was, VERY authentic MExican, it was about lunch time and we felt a little adventerous, so we ordered some food, (really scary looking stuff) and we were about to take our first bites, and a cockroach the size of a cell phone flew done from the ceiling and landed on elder Adams Ear, my eyes got really big and he swatted at it and it landed on his chest, and he started yelling, and almost knocked the table over as he jumped out of his chair, he knocked it off and then jumped on it with both feet, and it crunched soo loud that everyone heard it, all the migration workers stopped eating, the spanish music stopped, everything just felll completely silent, it was a pretty funny scene, my city boy comp doesnt do well with bugs, he ended up paying for everything and told the waitress to keep the change

Brother Ramer is one of the members in our ward! His whole life he has been cooking food, he is the bar bq, and everything else guy at Disneyworld, he makes up all of his own stuff! He is bald, probably about 6 foot tall, about 300 and some odd pounds, and a neck the size of a big tree trunk, anyways he is less active because the communist disney wont let him off on sundays even though he has been there for 30 years, but he loves to feed the missionaries, he feeds us once a month, and it is bigger than thanksgiving dinners everytime, he lets us choose a country or a theme everytime, and he goes all out, gets dressed up and everything. I have had island food, germany food, southern wings food, brazil food, taiwan food, and next month we are getting Italy food! He is a way cool guy!

Everything else is going really good, yesterday we had 4 of our investigators at church and two of them brought friends we are going to start teaching as well! hopefully we will set dates with them this week!

Monday, September 8, 2008

These pics and email came today!














I had a good birthday, Chuqui, sounds like chookie, drove all the way from my last area to surprise me on my birthday, he cooked a really good equadorian dish for me, but he also bought a disney cake that said happy Birthday Samuel Paul, it was sooo funny, i dont know how he found out my full name, he is way cool, he is one of those friends for a lifetime, he doesnt know any english, he is learning, it reminds me soo much of when i first got to florida trying to speak spanish! i took lots of pictures to send! Some how ( i think my companion) alot of the ward found out about my bday, so we got alot of food and cake yesterday, one family, the Ortons, ivited me over and made me a pudding cake, then the mom announced that they were going to sing happy bday orton style, and all the kids got embarrased, but she forced them too, and to my complete surprise they did an amazing burdick happy bday style song, it sounded like abunch of cows mooing happy bday, i loved it, it was perfect! Bishops wife made me a chocolate cake, and tonight the spanish branch organized a bday dinner, and since there will be alot of food, the whole branch is probably coming, they bought like 15 pounds of pork! So i got treated way too good for my bday here, but between dinners and appointments, we tracted alot of hours yesterday, and it was one of the best tracting experiences i have had one my mission, we found sooo many people, a couple of them looked at us as soon as they opened their doors and said, come in and have a seat, it was really cool, it doesnt happen that often! Everything else is going good, we got alot of really good investigators right now that take up soo much of our week, and so the weeks are going by way to fast!

Sunday, September 7, 2008

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELDER BURDICK!!!

If any of you get a free minute you should send a card or something to Sam for his 20th birthday! His birthday is today!!!!!

Elder Burdick
10502 Satellite Blvd. Suite E
Orlando, FL 32837-8426

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Elder Burdick in the mission field

HERE IS A START OF THE PICTURES AND BITS AND PIECES OF EMAILS WE HAVE RECEIVED FROM HIM. THE PICTURES ARE IN RANDOM ORDER. ENJOY!













3/31/08
Last friday we had zone conference, it went really well, something crazy about it though is we had our red cross training as well, because the church is actually partnered with red cross, so as missionaries we are certified volunteers, that are allowed more access than regular volunteers. So we had to have a three hour training on what we are to do when a hurricane, tornado, flood, or any other disaster hits. Each companionship kinda takes over there chapel in there area and opens it up for refugees and gets everything going, until priesthood leaders can assist. It was good knowledge to have, i am hoping we dont have to put it to work though!Saturday all of the language missionaries within the orlando area were assigned to go to a "step-up florida" event where they had a 5k run and events, we had to go to translate for anyone that needed it, there were about 15 spanish companionships there, and it was funny because there was not one spanish person there, i dont know who thought that any of the spanish people would have a day off work and if they had a day off work, would want to go and run a 5k?!?!?! It was basically a BUNCH of African Americans, oh well it was fun and it was a change!














2/25/08
Hola mi familia!
I was soo surprised to get soo many emails this morning, it was really neat! Thank you sooo much! Everything is going good here, we had a pretty good week, some hard days of tractin in the rain and getting doors slammed in our faces, but there were blessings as well. We were able to take one of our main investigators to a baptism on saturday and afterwards we did a church tour with him, he is a solid investigator, i know the lord has been preparing him, afterward we were riding back to poinciana when his car died at a red light, so elder avila and i pushed him to a gas station where we had to wait two hours for a ride, while we were waiting i was able to do some preaching to alot of bums that were chilling in a big group, i went over there with alot of pamphlets and asked if i could share a message with them, they said sure, so i shared the first lesson with them, and after ward one of them insisted that we have a prayer circle, so it was actually pretty cool, me and about ten bums in a prayer circle holding hands, and in the prayer the one that said it said, "thank you soo dearly Lord for sending this Angel to us to share a message from you and to provide us with hope" I was truly touched , it was a neat experience from a crappy situation.



The burning of the tie!
2/11/08
if i had to describe this week, i would have to use the lyrics, "the spirit of god like a fire is burning" It seems like soo many times this week the spirit has literally pushed or pulled me in certain directions. The other day we were riding bikes past a group of thug gangster lookin guys and so we just kept to ourselves trying to stay out of trouble when about 10 yards later it felt like the spirit was pulling me back, i was a lil scared about them so i ignored it, then another 10 yards i got the same impression, trying to save my hide i blew it off again, then after another few yards it felt like the spirit yelled in my ear to go back and give them the restoration pamphlet, so i told elder avila that we have to go back and he looked at me like i was nuts, but he came anyways, when he got back to the group i knew exactly which one i needed to talk to, he was a scruffy looking guy with big old dred locks but i knew that he was who was ready for this message, after i spoke to him and gave him the pamphlet he told me that he belonged to the seventh day adventists but for the past few years he had heard more and more about mormons and he always wanted to know more about them and what there differences are from other religions but he didnt know how to find any mormons, he sincerely thanked me and said he was going to read the pamphlet that night, all his thug friends were looking at him like he was crazy, it was kinda funny, but it taught me a good lesson, Just do it, and do it when the spirit prompts you the first time.This has been an incredible week for missionary work here in poinciana, our branch members are getting more and more excited about missionary work, we actually taught 11 lessons to investigators with a member present this week which is a really cool, especially for poinciana, and i can testify that when a member is present and can testify to the investigator it adds something that missionaries couldnt do alone.














2/04/08
Our message is simple and perfect, it makes soo much sense, it is most definently the fullness of the gospel of jesus christ that our heavenly father intended us to have. I know that this is the only true church.Yesterday at church during sacrament meeting they made an anouncement that they are building a new church in POINCIANA! I couldnt believe it! what a blessing for my people here, everyone here has to travel about 45 minutes to get to the church in kissimmee, and so it is really hard for them to get there when they are in hard times, and it is really hard for us to get investigators at church, this will be such a blessing for members and non members here alike. The church bought 20 acres of gorgeous land here on which to build it on, it will be a beautiful building! although i will be long gone before it gets comepleted or anything, i am still soo happy





a TRUE Florida rainstorm






1/28/08
our baptism was really really good on saturday, elder avila baptised him and i gave a talk on the holy ghost in spanish, it was fun though. He was sooo happy when he came up out of the water. A really good thing about it too, is that his mom and lil bro and sis really want to learn more about it now, and we are teaching them tonight. I am really excited i really think that they will embrace the gospel. Our other families are doing pretty good too, they are still progressing just really slowly, include them in your prayers.











1/14/08
The other day i had the opportunity to go on exchanges with the assistants to the president, that was a really good change, i loved it, we did some sweet contacting and we ran into lou esperance, he is a haitian in his late 50s, he has a family of five, and he has been studying with the jehovas witnesses for 13 years and he said he never felt good about it so he was never baptised but he said his new years resolution was to find the true religion of god so he has been praying for it, and me and elder Holloway showed up on his door, and before we could say much he had us in his living room sitting on the couch and teaching him the first lesson, he is progressing sooooo good, he is keeping all of his commitments to, we will have to probably pass him on to the haitian speaking elders though, it kinda stinks but what really matters is that he knows the truth through the spirit, it doesnt matter who teaches him. our other families are doing good, slowly progressing, but hopefully they keep doing there commitments and that they feel the spirit

Monday, August 18, 2008

THIS IS STILL IN THE MAKING!

So I have seen a few missionary blogs and I thought it was neat way to keep family and friends updated on how they're doing! I have only just begun. I am in the process of gathering pic and emails we have received from him to post. So until then, enjoy what's here.