May 26th

Hello Family, 

Don't have much time, we are going to do some fun stuff with the other companionship in our district. 

Except for the three days that Elder Allred was bed-ridden, we had a good week! Mine was better than his, I think. I read a lot, did a puzzle...One of the days we had exchanges with Bolivar and so I got to work, that was cool. A lot of sitting though, which is pretty much the worst thing ever as a missionary. (Let's see how many old Ensigns I can get through today!)

Matthew, Alma, and Hyrum and Jeri all had their interviews with Elder Corbridge this week, which was awesome. Alma's got some more work to do I guess, has to wait a little longer, but the rest of them are good to go! We just have to wait to hear back from President Shumway. The bad news is Matthew left for North Dakota on Saturday. He wasn't getting paid what he was supposed to out here, and so went back to the land of oil and cold. Go to college kids. And probably don't get married when you're 18. Crazy Fundies.

After Sacrament on Sunday we got asked to teach a primary class. So that's always cool having five minutes notice. Seems to be what the missionaries are for in some wards. So that was crazy. We taught the 5-6 year olds. There was one that insisted she was a cat the whole time and kept saying "eye eye eye eye eye eye" (I guess there's some zombie on Minecraft that does that..?) She also licked everything. And ate paper. At one point after Primary and during class I had to take her out so she could spit a giant wad of paper out of her mouth. I guess she decided it wasn't so good after all. 

We taught about the priesthood for about half an hour. We also tried making a boat out of chairs and pretending Jesus was calming the sea and stuff. Then we played tic-tac-toe and hangman. I learned that kindergartners are really bad at tic-tac-toe. Whoever goes first wins! It was pretty funny. Oh then we ate dinner at crazy cat girl's house. She was doing the same things and I was about ready to punch her. Luckily I didn't But I did get chocolate ice cream on my shirt, so that's cool. 

Those are the highlights from this week! Good times. Keeping the work going and all that jazz over here. Oh yeah, transfer calls are this weekend. Weird. 

Love you!

Elder Christopher Drake

Last time I went to church....

Had some interesting escapades this week. Funny stuff first? Okay. 

Oh, by the way, pictures of the tiger are attached. 

So we had all kinds of stuff happen this week. We were all over the place. Went to Springfield three times this week. Sheesh. 

Anyway, on Friday we went to ElDorado springs and our first appointment was with a less active lady that we've been working with for a while. While visiting with her when we first got there, she told us about how she and her son are going to Florida next weekend - a 30 hour car trip.  Then we had a really good lesson, the spirit was there, inspired and all that, and we were trying to get her to commit to coming to church. So I gave her the challenge, "Sister ____ will you come to church this week?"

Pointing outside to their car she responded, "That car out there can't go anywhere. The radiator is broken...." and talked about some other things that were wrong with it.

"What if we get you a ride?" I proposed. This is where things get scary. Almost in slow motion this poor sister's face started to strain, her brow furrowed, out came the waving arms of frustration and doom as she stood and stared us down, yelling at the top of her voice, 

WARNING: EDITED EXPLICIT LANGUAGE AHEAD 

"LAST TIME I WENT TO CHURCH I $&@! MYSELF! I HAD TO LEAN OVER TO MY FRIEND AND TELL HER 'WE NEED TO GO BECAUSE I JUST $&@! MYSELF AND THEN I HAD TO SIT IN MY $&@! THE WHOLE WAY HOME!"

EDITED EXPLICIT LANGUAGE ENDS HERE

Apparently she has some G.I. tract problem that prevents her from sitting through church. We didn't ask her how that works with driving thirty hours to Florida though. We just kind of apologized, tried to close the lesson in the best way possible and left. The good news is she doesn't hate us and Elder Allred and I have a new inside joke!

So that was good fun. 

Adventure 2:

On Sunday, Elder Allred and I had about 20 minutes downtime before dinner and saw a brand spanking new pretty Subaru BRZ parked in the grocery store parking lot, so of course we went and parked next to it to look at it- I mean, to review what we were going to share at our appointment. We parked, pulled through to the empty stall opposite us and admired...our plans for the appointment. When we pulled forward to leave, I did a quick glance to make sure nobody was coming up or down the parking lot lane and pulled forward. Looking left at the beautiful plans we had made for the lesson and not the car, I suddenly hit something! There was some guy in a truck that was flying through the parking lot, cutting through the lanes who passed right in front of me at a 45 degree angle and I tagged the back of his truck. Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, I want you all to know that this is the first accident I have been in that was notlegally my fault. Pretty sweet, huh? Anyway, the guy was cool and now I have more paperwork to do so that's cool. 

Okay enough with the adventures. 

Our wonderful Fundamentalist friends have interviews coming up! Woo!! That's about eight people if Alma's kids want to be baptized, which they did last time I checked. But they don't need a special interview anyway. So that's super awesome sauce. We'll keep you posted on that. We are very excited. We all thought this would take six months or something, but it didn't! Sweet Virginia Barbecue Sauce! 

Also we have another lady with a baptismal date for June 21!

So yeah, The Lord is awesome and blesses us with awesome stuff even though we don't deserve it. It's been quite the eventful week. 

I hope that all of you are doing swell as usual. I miss you and love you and am praying for you and all that stuff. Keep being awesome. 

Love, 

Elder Christopher Drake

May 12th

Okay so first things first:

Elder Allred forgot to grab the little USB thingy so no pictures this week :( I know you were all looking forward to seeing that horrible tiger but it seems that we'll all have to wait another week. It's kind of what they're doing to us with iPads. "End of 2013!...Early Spring!...Okay, maybe June!..."

It was awesome getting to see the fam for Mother's day. I miss you guys. It's always hard to say goodbye. I don't know how missionaries manage to stay within the time limit.

This week was good but a little slower than ususual, so that's kind of a bummer. We do have a couple new people to teach though, and that's awesome. One of them, Lacy, has come to church twice!

We had a Zone Outing today over in Springfield, which was a lot of fun. We had a barbecue, hung out in a park, and some people played sports and all that jazz. I opted to play cards with some missionaries because I'm not all sporty like that. Doesn't help with the whole chubby thing. 

It rained today. Actually it's raining right now. A lot. We got some good thunder and lightning and all that stuff. The weather out here is cool. But like everybody else says, "If it weren't for the bugs and the humidity..."

Speaking of bugs, the "Elder Drake Tick Count" is up to 2. Thanks to the twenty tick fiasco of 2013 I no longer have to get the Vaseline or a match and spend 20 minutes trying to get it to back out, I just pull them out WITH MY BARE HANDS. I'm so hardcore now. 

Oh Happy Mother's day to all of the wonderful women who have been a mother to me. A huge shout out to my real mother, because she's the best ma in the world and I know all y'alls are jealous. 

This week was kind of uneventful. Well, all except an awesome zone conference we had. I want to share one thing from it, actually. President Shumway pretty much spoke the whole time. He talked about how we need to work on pride, and a bunch of other stuff that we need to work on. At the end of the conference he told us about his experience in a Mission President's training he had recently. Elder Bednar was there, and he told us about this experience he had. The other authority that was there opened the floor for questions, and President Shumway told us about his question.

He told us,  "A while ago, I got a message on my phone from Tiwi (our driving monitoring system) that reported one of my missionaries was driving over 100 miles per hour. I called the missionary and asked him, 'How fast are you going?'  

"'Too fast.'  he replied. The worst part about all of this was that there were five other missionaries in the car. My question was, 'How should I have handled that situation differently if I could have?'

"Elder Bednar responded, 'You go back and tell that missionary, and tell all of your missionaries, that if they can't learn to make the right choices when they're in that sort of environment, surrounded by other missionaries, then they are not going to be able to make it in the real world when they get home because it is going to get a lot worse.'"

My paraphrasing probably doesn't do it justice, but it was powerful. Apostolic warning that we need to be clinging to the Iron Rod of which Lehi spoke. We can't get away with nonchalantly placing a hand on the way back to God, but we have to cling on with everything we have, otherwise we'll never make it. 

Cling to the rod people! 

Love you bunches. I promise I'll get you those pictures next week! 

Love,  

Elder Christopher Drake

Free Tigers and False Doctrine

Let us see how this week went. 

In order from Most awesome to not as awesome:

1) Margaret's baptism

2) Free Tiger

3) Awesome lessons with investigators 

4) Elder Allred being....assaulted by an investigator's wiener dog

5) Haircuts 

6) Eating "healthy" and exercising and stuff

Margaret is awesome. She was baptized. And then she made us cobbler on Sunday. She's sweet though, I'll send along a picture or two because I'm repenting and stuff. 

On Saturday, after the baptism, we drove down the main street and this tiger that has been sitting in front of someone's house forever has a sign on it saying "FREE RING DOORBELL" so of course we rang the doorbell. Turns out this tiger is made of concrete. Too late, we already committed so here we go. Now we have a huge concrete tiger in the back of our truck and everyone gives us weird looks. We're going to let an investigator family adopt him they just don't know about it yet. 

Our Fundie friends have been doing great, as always, just waiting, as always. We're working on getting one family in particular - Melvin and Nikita Williams and their kids. We love them. They're so much fun and just awesome and need to be baptized already, but it's hard for them. That's a big decision and they could get a lot of flack for it. Lucky for them the Church is true. We're hoping the tiger will help them along a little.

Speaking of Melvin and Nikita they got a wiener dog, which is weird, because farm people don't usually have inside dogs. His name is Jack and he's sweet. He got a little inappropriate with Elder Allred though. I tried to warm him, but apparently Elder Allred has never had to deal with such forward dogs and so didn't really get what was happening at first. It was a good laugh. Oh Jack! 

We got haircuts and I look fly. Working on that pompadour. 

Well I hope that you all are doing super duper awesome and stuff. Things are just plugging right along here. 

Oh! I almost forgot! Geeze, and it's even in my subject line, how embarrassing. Okay, so we went to High Priests quorum on Sunday because of reasons. Holy moly. We walk in late and immediately we can feel that somethings not quite right. We just figure it's old man awkwardness, but the brother who's giving the lesson is going off on craaaazy stuff like plural marriage and stuff. He even gave us a handout that told us to "refer to the revelations given to John Taylor that were not canonized in 18--" something or other. Everyone was just confused and finally, a brother said, "You're preaching false doctrine. There is a strange spirit in this room and you should stop." and then the rest of the lesson became kind of a struggle between the teacher and the high priests trying to convince him that he shouldn't be teaching from anything but the scriptures and the approved manuals for class. So that was fun. Moral of the story: If you're old and crazy don't teach your old and crazy ideas at church. 

 

Love you all, hope you're awesome as always, and hope you're enjoying the warmth as much as I am. If it's not warm where you are, I'm sorry and hope it warms up for you. 

Loves,. 

Elder Christopher Drake