Elder McKinley's Stint Across the Pond

Howdy everybody! This week has been absolutely fantastic. The reason? Two words: Elder. Brown. Elder Brown is from the beautiful San Diego/Japan/Germany/northern California/Delaware area! His dad was in the Air Force haha. He is "awesome" (this is in quotations because I forgot how much Americans say this word and being from southern California, it's Elder Brown's go to). I picked him up Tuesday at Hyde Park and he looked excited but also kind of dead. He had woken up at 4 am and we didn't get back to the island and to our flat until 10 pm so it was understandable. Nevertheless, he has been working hard and we are having a blast. We have a mutual love for Phineas and Ferb and a similar sense of humour so things have been *snaps* Okay. They've actually been brilliant but that was just a joke and I know it's losing it's humour now that I have said it was a reference to the show, but hey, when you are emailing a massive group of people, you have to explai...

o, in full disclosure, I have gone through my inbox and have been deleting things to make space for photos in Google photos and may have accidentally deleted old emails that I meant to respond to. So if you responded to my group email last week and I have not responded to you yet, that is probably what happened. It's hard to keep track   Also, I think I am on week  61 , but if not, please correct me haha. Anyways, welcome! This email might be just a bit shorter because we have a lot we need to do today. We are needed in london tonight because, drumroll please...ELDER BREWSTER IS GOING TO LONDON! I am so excited for him. He will be serving where the Westminster abbey, buckingham palace and big ben are so I am only a little bit jealous. I am sad to see him go. In homage to him, here is a poem: the power of friendship though underrated  is truly built on the foundation of people like warren brewster okay sappy stuff aside, I know you are all dying to...

Good afternoon/morning/Tuesday everybody! Sorry I did not email yesterday for I was otherwise engaged with interviews in Crawley. So today is our preparation day and we basically have just done shopping things today. It has been really nice to take it slow considering we have been running around like crazy these past few days. We have dinner with the Bishop tonight so that should be really nice.  Not too much has happened this past week if I am being honest. I went to this small little city called Winchester and it was charming. I was with Elder Andrade on exchange. He is from Portugal and really likes to work hard. We had a blast. We had the opportunity to teach this girl who is attending uni there. She is amazing. She has studied the gospel so deeply and she really knows this is true. However, her mom is avidly against her having anything to do with religion, especially our church. So she is a bit stuck at the moment. Just for privacy sake, I will not say her name, but still,...

Salutations friends and family. Welcome once again. The title of my email comes from the fact that I have now closed down three flats on my mission and have been involved in the relocation of three flats worth of furniture in the course of my mission. I sincerely hope that it does not happen again, but it is nothing compared to Elder McLennan's record because he basically closes one every week. But still, three is a lot. It has taught me much about my interior design skills and desires for the future. I'll include some pics to show what we have now. We have literally spent the whole day cleaning and we are still not done but hey that is life for you. Again, as a public service announcement, take some time once a month to purge your belongings and really determine what you do and don't need and then get rid of the excess. It will save you a ton of space and just make you a happier person.  So most of this week involved closing that old flat down because we learned on Mon...

On Mon, 1 Oct 2018, 11:18 am Finnegan Alexander Clemmer McKinley, < finnegan.mckinley@myldsmail. net > wrote: Okay so here we are once more and I am sitting here in disbelief that it is october and that I was being trained as a brand new missionary by the brilliant Ethan Lopiano (look out BYU-I here he comes, or rather he's already there but still look out) and now I am here, with no more septembers left on my mission and soon to watch my third general conference in England. Weird stuff. Anyways, let's get into the week a bit. I apologise if this is a bit incoherent but I am moving with lightning speed today because we are trying to get down to portsmouth for some volleyball with the district asap. So the highlight of this past week was definitely zone conference. We got to go up to London again and each time I go my desire to explore there grows and grows. Hopefully that desire will be satiated one day :-) moving on, we had to go across the solent to stay the n...

Hello once more to all those still tuning in these 57 weeks later. Thank you for your loyal following and know that you reading this is extremely appreciated by me. So yeah.  This week was a pretty good one. It was interesting because we had some really cool opportunities and did some really interesting things, but it also feels like it went by so fast so I am struggling to remember the things of substance   anyways, let us get into it: Tuesday did not amount to much in terms of success or major events but we did have a really fantastic meeting with the leadership of the ward (ward council) and we have a really great mission plan in place that we are excited to introduce to everyone to help them in their missionary efforts. We also get the pleasure of introducing to all 80 of the ward members this Sunday by ourselves. You better believe that diagrams will be made and videos will be shared and the spirit will be felt and we are going to have an amazing time. ...

Here we are once again, reading this weekly update from your favourite (2nd favourite, still acceptable in my eyes) missionary. So, let's get to it.  We received tranfer news and Elder Brewster and I are staying together on the island! We're pumped. It's been a blast and we are going to keep working hard and having all the right kind of fun on this beautiful island. Fun story. Last moves, our mission president called every companionship nad told them what was going to be happening for the next transfer. Naturally we expected the same to occur this go round. We spent all morning waiting for a phone call and we expected to hear before church but nothing came. We went to church and went through all of church and we did not hear anything. We were shocked because it did not take our misison president this long to do it last time. Then after some calls, we learned that it was sent out in an email *face palms with both hands*. Anyways, we are both excited.  We had inter...