KA-POW. Shotgunned

Monday-Wednesday:

Pack. Try to see a few people. Pack, pack. Clean. Eat dinner at beloved members' homes. Pack. Pack. Sleep. Clean. Pack. Cry. Pack. Pack. 

The good news is I got to see all the people I love. Here's the Broadbent/Williams Family. It was good seeing them. Especially since they started going to church and everything. 

Me, Mevin, Nikita, Janet, Tim, Elder Allred, Tavier, Francesca, and Sawyer. Love those guys. Hopefully they get baptized before I go home. If not, then I'm going to have to come out for their baptism anyway. 

Thursday: Finish packing, lose church keys, (some character traits never die no matter what) drive to Mt. Vernon. Get caught in rainstorm. Arrive at transfer point, in probably the most torrential downpour I've ever seen. Probably not hurricane or Vietnam typhoon status, but I've never seen sideways rain before. I've seen slanty rain, but not sideways rain. It was very similar to getting sprayed with the hose when your sister has her thumb partially blocking the end, except it was like you had 30 sisters instead of two and they all had hoses.

We all hopped on the bus and drove for an hour and a half soaked to the bone. It was actually pretty gross because the air vents started to collect condensation. At one point I got rained on inside the car. Gross. 

We arrive at our destination and get out of the van. Elder Dickson and I try to find Elder Stearman so he can tell us who to look for to take us home. We find Brother Mason and pile our stuff in his van. He tells us all sorts of depressing stories about his life on the way home. I'm not sure how many times I can say "Wow, I'm sorry" without sounding insincere. But then again, it seems like he isn't too sad when he tells us about all of the tragedies in his life. So we just go with it. 

A few minutes later, we arrive at our apartment. Time to unpack and shower and change into dry clothes. Luckily this ward is awesome and our ward mission leader is the man. We don't have a dinner that night, but we do have an exchange. So we go out and try to meet some peeps. We meet a few peeps, but still have no idea what we're doing. 

To be honest, we still have no idea what we're doing, and it's about the most awesome thing in the whole world. Guess what happens when you have no idea what you're doing but you're determined to work? Miracles happen. 

On Saturday we walked all day because our bikes both had flat tires. We wanted to visit an investigator we haven't met yet and walked and walked. When we got there, we couldn't find his apartment so we sat down and took a rest. A few minutes after we sat down, a lady came up to us and told us that she was a member, and wanted to come to church. She is from the Marshall Islands and apparently hasn't had her records transferred over from wherever she was last. She's not on the roles at least. So that was cool. Found a lost member. 

About an hour later, after a very short conversation with a lady we soon learned is less-active, a man stopped his car and backed up in the middle of the street. My first thought was, "Yes! A member who will give us a ride!" Then he rolled down his window and said, "Are you with the LDS?" 

"Yes we are!" We responded, although a little bummed that we probably weren't going to get a ride. We then had a 20 minute conversation with this guy about thi history of the Catholic church and how we should really be Catholic. I love that! I love when people know enough about their religion and love their religion enough to say, "You know what? You need to be a part of my church because you're soul is at stake and if you don't join my church you're going to miss out on a lot of blessings and possibly even go to hell." After all, if you don't believe that about your church, why are you going to your church anyway? So that was fun. We'll see where that goes. He actually e-mailed us this week and gave us some reading material from early church leaders I guess. Pretty neat guy. Totally gonna get baptized. 

This weeks been fun and interesting. Loving it here already. Elder Dickson is great, and we have a family of pet raccoons who come up to our slider every night. We can feed them by hand and it's basically the best thing ever. Probably not the safest thing ever, but the best things rarely are. 

Love you! 

Oh yeah, this is Elder Allred pulling me along in Melvin and Nikita's pony cart. (Don't worry, he got a ride too.)

New Address

2801 Wellington Cir Apt. A5

Roger, AR 72758

Sorry guys! I didn't get my new address until late Monday night, and I didn't want to say where my new area is because I want to surprise some of the people that I love here and just show up. That's why I'm sending another e-mail here because some of those people are in my email list. So here you go, send me lots of love notes, and I'll be better about sending notes as well. 

My new ward, Little Flock, is about 5 minutes from Bentonville. It's an awesome ward and I love it already despite having no idea what is going on. I got to meet the less-active parents of Siter Erickson on Friday, which was awesome. I can't wait to tell them haha. 

Love you! Weekly is on its way. With pictures!

Elder Christopher Drake

On the Road

Hello wonderful family and friends. My time in Stockton is at an end! 

I'm sad to leave the people here...not so much the town though. I'm excited to have a Walmarts again. Having to drive 30 minutes for reasonably priced groceries is stupid and annoying on a missionary budget. But I will miss the sweet trailer....

Anyhow, we had a pretty eventful week! Let me walk you through it:

Monday: Trip to Springfield with Bolivar Elders. Went to Bass Pro and looked at all the cool stuff. Like the firearms museum. Elder Aubry would've loved it. Also saw an 8 foot long Alligator Gar there. Guess I'm never swimming in a lake again. Then we went to the mall and felt like we were in Babylon or something. Don't understand why some people dress the way they do...Awkward. 

Tuesday: Worked in town. Saw Eddie, a guy in a nursing home. He doesn't hear very well, and only has one eye, and the one eye needs super duper help. His glasses are about half an inch thick, but only on the left eye because the right one is fake. He is extremely nice, but doesn't hear well. I asked him, "Eddie, do you know how long you're going to be here for?" (His wife moved to Kansas City and this is supposed to be a temporary thing) Pausing for a minute, he responded, "Yeah." and that was the end of that!

Later that day we saw a wonderful awesome Less-active lady, Sister Budd. We pulled up to her house and saw her sitting in the backyard with her back to us. This was a little strange at first until we saw a distinctive haze of smoke wafting up to the air. Elder Allred turned to me and said, "She's smoking!! Oh my gosh, get out of here! So awkward, get out of here before she sees us!" So we turned around and sped off and then were sad about that for the rest of the day. 

Wednesday: Got out of the house early and went to go do service for Brian, an investigator. He is 84. When we knocked on his door he welcomed us in, saying, "I was just about to lay down and take a nap. I'm pretty tired, it's good to see you boys though!" and then he put us to work. About 10 minutes later, he was out on his lawn tractor mowing the lawn. Old people have such an awesome work ethic. "Yeah, I was about to take a nap, but since you young boys are working, I guess I can get out and work a little too." What a champ. 

Later, as we were working, Brian's friend Rick came over and helped us. After working for a while he stopped us and said, "What do you do when you don't feel like the church you're a part of is right? I joined the Catholic church for my wife, but I just don't feel right about it. What's your church like? I need to find a church." So that was cool. 

Thursday: Went to Willard on exchanges. Guess they've been having trouble getting new people to teach and stuff, so we kinda drove around and did a bunch of drop bys. Had a sweet awesome dinner though, so that was cool. But it was also lame because Elder Allred had a sweet day here. Apparently he was calling out cray Brother Lamb for trying to preach his false doctrine and things got pretty heated, then later they invited Melvin and Nikita to be baptized and they said yes! So yeah, that was super duper awesome. 

Friday: Went to Eldorado (by the way, that's pronounced El-do-ray-do out here.) That kinda stunk. It was really slow and we had a hard time catching people at home. The good news is we went to a Chinese Buffet for lunch and an eight year old Asian boy sat us. Then he was playing with his six year old sister the whole time. It was funny. Pretty sure it was illegal, but I loved it. We saw a less-active guy and called him to repentance. You know, the usual. 

Saturday: Gave a blessing to an investigator first thing, and then went to work on the Ranch and do a bunch of servive. We moved an air conditioner and then wrassled some pigs. Then it started pouring. Then we had to fill the font for a baptism. Active kid's baptism, but it was the Pulsiphers and we love them so we did them a solid. Plus we're pros at it. We were supposed to have a dinner but they never called us back, so we went to this little cafe. Literally about 2 minutes after they gave us our food our dinner called. And we got burgers and fries, so you can't exactly take that to go and heat it up later. So that was awesome. Two dinners. The good news is, when we went to the members house, we spent about 20 minutes visiting, with the mother and her son, and then the father came in. He was wearing cut off jean shorts that went about halfway down his thighs and his mesh garment top. So he ate dinner like that and then rushed us out so he could go fishing in his pond. Good stuff. Transfer calls came, and it was bittersweet. 

Sunday: Went to Ward Council, then church, then got to say bye to people and go to the Brigances for dinner which is always a hoot. I'll be really sad to leave these people, but boy am I ready to leave this town behind haha. 

That was the week! Keep being awesome peeps. Thanks for the e-mails and letters! I'm going to be better about writing back! Love you!

Elder Christopher Drake

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