Christian is serving in the Stratford area in London.

He will arrive home in Salt Lake City on June 4 about 5:15 p.m. and will speak in church on June 8 @ 12:30.


The address of the mission office is:

England London Mission
64/68 Exhibition Road
South Kensington
London SW7 2PA
England, United Kingdom

Monday, December 31, 2012

The End ... of 2012

Elders Purdy, Hansen, Smith, McCormack
Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England

Monday, December 24, 2012

Merry Christmas One and All!


H
ere is a picture of me on High Street by a Christmas tree.


For Christmas we are going to some members’ house...and church.   
It’s a really English thing to go to church on Christmas so we are doing that for an hour.

            I love you all . . . have a Merry Christmas.


Merry Chris-mice


             I am certainly feeling the Christmas spirit.   The ward here has been super nice and have given us presents and fed us a lot.  I love the holidays.

            On a much more sober note . . . we have no investigators.  We have people we are teaching . . . but they aren’t really going anywhere.

            And on a much more solemn note, we have mice in our flat!!!! I am so angry about it.  We found one on Thursday night and we bought traps, but they just aren’t working! So my brilliant companion decided to buy an airgun to get rid of them.  So we have a pretty strong air pistol to get rid of these vermin.  I hope we can get rid of them soon.




In his Christmas phone call Christian told us that his Christmas miracle was catching two mice -- in one trap.

Foxes

Christian finally put some pictures up on the photo-sharing site we set up.  We were so excited to see that he had uploaded 35 pictures . . . until we realized that 32 of them were of foxes.

Christian wrote:

"One night we were just walking home and some fox was digging a hole in a park and then it started running circles around us.  Then its friend joined in.  We were playing with [them] and it was way fun.  They got super close....it was cool.  I wanted to pet one but it would have probably bit me.  They have really sharp teeth."












Monday, December 17, 2012

Baby Blessing


Ahoy friends and family,

            One thing that happened this week was with a part-member family.  They have a little two-year-old named Evelyn and they had never given her a baby blessing like all member families do. Well they both decided that they wanted me to do it! So I did that yesterday.  It was really cool to do it for a kid that wasn’t my own.  I felt very honored to do it for them.

            I guess the biggest news is the Book of Mormon musical is coming to London, which should be interesting.  Elder McCormack and I were on a bus and everybody had their newspapers and were reading them.  On EVERY single front page there was the phrase in big gold letters "the Mormons are coming."   Needless to say we got some strange looks on that bus ride.

            Everything is good.  We are just preaching the gospel in Southend . . . it is as simple as that. 

            Read your scriptures.

Elder Purdy

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Snow, a Shank, the Spirit of Christmas and Safety for the Soul


Hey there friends and familia,

I had a fantastic week.

Transfers came and Elder McCormack and I are [staying together as companions here in Southend.]

It snowed!! which is nice, but it is nothing like the snow in Utah.  It’s really wet and it has mostly turned into ice now which is no fun.

Oh yeah, and we almost got mugged on Tuesday! We were walking down the street, when out of nowhere I got hit with a snowball.  I turned around and some Irish kid was running toward us and yelling at us to give him our stuff.  We just kind of kept walking and then he came up and said he "had a shank."  He was a kind of a puny kid.  We turned around and my companion got rather upset and yelled [at him].  Then the guy got kind of nervous and ran off.  I don’t know what that kid was trying to pull! It was like two in the afternoon on a really busy street. Fun stuff.

I am getting really excited for Christmas.  Lots of people want us around their houses which is good.  I guess that means they like us haha. But I am definitely feeling the spirit of Christmas here.  It’s fun.  The market street here is all decorated and they have a big tree.  It makes talking to people more fun in that environment.

The Book of Mormon musical is coming out soon..that will be interesting.

Oh, and the population of our mission is going from 130 to 210...that is crazy!!!!

A guy in the ward here named Ross is going on his mission to Manchester this Thursday so I talked at his farewell on Sunday.

I started the Book of Mormon AGAIN......

I read a really good talk this week by Elder Holland called "Safety for the Soul" I think it is the best talk I have heard about The Book of Mormon.  I think you all should read it.

Love you guys,
Elder Purdy


Safety for the Soul

Jeffrey R. Holland
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles




Jeffrey R. HollandI want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgment bar of God that I declared to the world … that the Book of Mormon is true.

Prophecies regarding the last days often refer to large-scale calamities such as earthquakes or famines or floods. These in turn may be linked to widespread economic or political upheavals of one kind or another.

But there is one kind of latter-day destruction that has always sounded to me more personal than public, more individual than collective—a warning, perhaps more applicable inside the Church than outside it. The Savior warned that in the last days even those of the covenant, the very elect, could be deceived by the enemy of truth.1 If we think of this as a form of spiritual destruction, it may cast light on another latter-day prophecy. Think of the heart as the figurative center of our faith, the poetic location of our loyalties and our values; then consider Jesus’s declaration that in the last days “men’s hearts [shall fail] them.”2

The encouraging thing, of course, is that our Father in Heaven knows all of these latter-day dangers, these troubles of the heart and soul, and has given counsel and protections regarding them.

In light of that, it has always been significant to me that the Book of Mormon, one of the Lord’s powerful keystones3 in this counteroffensive against latter-day ills, begins with a great parable of life, an extended allegory of hope versus fear, of light versus darkness, of salvation versus destruction—an allegory of which Sister Ann M. Dibb spoke so movingly this morning.

In Lehi’s dream an already difficult journey gets more difficult when a mist of darkness arises, obscuring any view of the safe but narrow path his family and others are to follow. It is imperative to note that this mist of darkness descends on all the travelers—the faithful and the determined ones (the elect, we might even say) as well as the weaker and ungrounded ones. The principal point of the story is that the successful travelers resist all distractions, including the lure of forbidden paths and jeering taunts from the vain and proud who have taken those paths. The record says that the protected “did press their way forward, continually [and, I might add, tenaciously] holding fast” to a rod of iron that runs unfailingly along the course of the true path.4 However dark the night or the day, the rod marks the way of that solitary, redeeming trail.

“I beheld,” Nephi says later, “that the rod of iron … was the word of God, [leading] … to the tree of life; … a representation of the love of God.” Viewing this manifestation of God’s love, Nephi goes on to say:
“I looked and beheld the Redeemer of the world, … [who] went forth ministering unto the people. …
“… And I beheld multitudes of people who were sick, and who were afflicted with all manner of diseases, and with devils and unclean spirits; … and they were healed by the power of the Lamb of God; and the devils and the unclean spirits were cast out.”5

Love. Healing. Help. Hope. The power of Christ to counter all troubles in all times—including the end of times. That is the safe harbor God wants for us in personal or public days of despair. That is the message with which the Book of Mormon begins, and that is the message with which it ends, calling all to “come unto Christ, and be perfected in him.”6 That phrase—taken from Moroni’s final lines of testimony, written 1,000 years after Lehi’s vision—is a dying man’s testimony of the only true way.

May I refer to a modern “last days” testimony? When Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum started for Carthage to face what they knew would be an imminent martyrdom, Hyrum read these words to comfort the heart of his brother:

“Thou hast been faithful; wherefore … thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father.

“And now I, Moroni, bid farewell … until we shall meet before the judgment-seat of Christ.”7
A few short verses from the 12th chapter of Ether in the Book of Mormon. Before closing the book, Hyrum turned down the corner of the page from which he had read, marking it as part of the everlasting testimony for which these two brothers were about to die. I hold in my hand that book, the very copy from which Hyrum read, the same corner of the page turned down, still visible. Later, when actually incarcerated in the jail, Joseph the Prophet turned to the guards who held him captive and bore a powerful testimony of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon.8 Shortly thereafter pistol and ball would take the lives of these two testators.

As one of a thousand elements of my own testimony of the divinity of the Book of Mormon, I submit this as yet one more evidence of its truthfulness. In this their greatest—and last—hour of need, I ask you: would these men blaspheme before God by continuing to fix their lives, their honor, and their own search for eternal salvation on a book (and by implication a church and a ministry) they had fictitiously created out of whole cloth?

Never mind that their wives are about to be widows and their children fatherless. Never mind that their little band of followers will yet be “houseless, friendless and homeless” and that their children will leave footprints of blood across frozen rivers and an untamed prairie floor.9 Never mind that legions will die and other legions live declaring in the four quarters of this earth that they know the Book of Mormon and the Church which espouses it to be true. Disregard all of that, and tell me whether in this hour of death these two men would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as imposters and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.

For 179 years this book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history—perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands. Failed theories about its origins have been born and parroted and have died—from Ethan Smith to Solomon Spaulding to deranged paranoid to cunning genius. None of these frankly pathetic answers for this book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator. In this I stand with my own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, “No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”10

I testify that one cannot come to full faith in this latter-day work—and thereby find the fullest measure of peace and comfort in these, our times—until he or she embraces the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom it testifies. If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a heretofore unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages—especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers—if that is the case, then such a person, elect or otherwise, has been deceived; and if he or she leaves this Church, it must be done by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon to make that exit. In that sense the book is what Christ Himself was said to be: “a stone of stumbling, … a rock of offence,”11 a barrier in the path of one who wishes not to believe in this work. Witnesses, even witnesses who were for a time hostile to Joseph, testified to their death that they had seen an angel and had handled the plates. “They have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man,” they declared. “Wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true.”12

Now, I did not sail with the brother of Jared in crossing an ocean, settling in a new world. I did not hear King Benjamin speak his angelically delivered sermon. I did not proselyte with Alma and Amulek nor witness the fiery death of innocent believers. I was not among the Nephite crowd who touched the wounds of the resurrected Lord, nor did I weep with Mormon and Moroni over the destruction of an entire civilization. But my testimony of this record and the peace it brings to the human heart is as binding and unequivocal as was theirs. Like them, “[I] give [my name] unto the world, to witness unto the world that which [I] have seen.” And like them, “[I] lie not, God bearing witness of it.”13

I ask that my testimony of the Book of Mormon and all that it implies, given today under my own oath and office, be recorded by men on earth and angels in heaven. I hope I have a few years left in my “last days,” but whether I do or do not, I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgment bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true, that it came forth the way Joseph said it came forth and was given to bring happiness and hope to the faithful in the travail of the latter days.

My witness echoes that of Nephi, who wrote part of the book in his “last days”:

“Hearken unto these words and believe in Christ; and if ye believe not in these words believe in Christ. And if ye shall believe in Christ ye will believe in these words, for they are the words of Christ, … and they teach all men that they should do good.

“And if they are not the words of Christ, judge ye—for Christ will show unto you, with power and great glory, that they are his words, at the last day.14

Brothers and sisters, God always provides safety for the soul, and with the Book of Mormon, He has again done that in our time. Remember this declaration by Jesus Himself: “Whoso treasureth up my word, shall not be deceived”15—and in the last days neither your heart nor your faith will fail you. Of this I earnestly testify in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.


Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Bleach, Travel, and Cold Weather


By the way, I think I bleached my baptismal trousers :(

Michael:  So now they are white?  Haha. I crack myself up!

Nahhh they are kind of orange.

____________________

Travel is KILLER here because in Southend you are the farthest away from London that you can be but you have all of your meetings in London.   There are farther areas but they don’t have their meetings in London. 

____________________

Things here are good, but it is SOO cold.  Not in London but in Southend; there is always a wind and whatnot.



P.S.


P.S. The cannabis finally flushed down.


Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Cannabis, Cool Museums, and Christmas Spirit


Hey there family and friends,

            Hope all of you are doing well.

            Well I had a pretty good week last week.  Elder McCormack and I are still helping J get off the cannabis and the cigarettes. He is struggling a bit, but he is getting there.

            So last week, J bought a lot of cannabis. But then he felt guilty so he gave it all to us.  I was rather in shock.  Elder McCormack and I both really didn’t know what to do with the stuff so we called our president right when we left J’s flat and he said to go home and flush it down the toilet, so that’s what we did.  But when we tried to flush the marijuana down the toilet it didn’t go down...so it’s just kinda sitting there still.

            That was about the most exciting thing that happened this week.

            I went into London and saw some of the cool museums. I really liked the Victoria and Albert Museum.  It had some pretty cool renaissance art sculptures. I liked it a lot.  We went to the Natural History Museum as well. Nobody but me really likes museums for some reason, so everybody I went with was pretty sick of them after that and we didn’t see anymore.

            I am getting really excited for Christmas.  I am really feeling that good ol' Christmas spirit here.  All of the members have been so kind and we get fed so much I have gained a bit of weight, but not too much thank goodness.  

            Love you all and I hope you are doing well.