Dear Family,
So I was a real genius last week. I gave you my address without remembering to put my apartment number. So neglect that address I sent last week. Here’s the real one:
Elder Adam R Droge
1099 Lago Vista Blvd #116
Eastland, TX 76448
If any letters get sent back to you due to my ignorance, then send them right back to that one.
Last email I forgot to wish everybody a Happy Columbus Day!!! Yay!! That’s why I emailed Tuesday afternoon. The place where we do emails here was closed last Monday due to that silly little holiday. It’s annoying. I hate holidays as missionaries. But if you checked your email on Monday only and didn’t for the rest of the week, just know that I did write and next time I don’t write on Monday, make sure you check your email again on Tuesday evening, because I will write on Tuesday afternoon.
Letters for transfers are mildly bothersome. I will get them, but for some reason they come a week late. Why do I mention that? I just received Dad’s letter telling me that he tried to chop his hand off. Now Dad, I know that at times you may think your left hand is useless, I think that all the time, but it’s no reason to cut it off. …. In all seriousness, though, I’m sorry to hear that happened. Get better soon!
So Mom writes me and tells me that she wants her letters back. Hmm… I have every single that has ever been sent to me saved in a little collection. I was intending to save them my whole mission and constantly sit in awe at my collection, but I guess that if Mom wants to ruin my collection, I can send them back. I won’t cry too hard… . Anyone else want to destroy my collection?
So in a letter last week, Greg gave an incredible response to my past month’s trivia. I wanted to share it with everyone, because it hits it right on the nail.
“I just wanted to comment really quickly on polygamy. I had a professor of religion who is actually in the general sunday school presidency. He doesn't think that polygamy is a celestial law, it will only be for a select few just like on earth. He addressed the issue on the fact that there are a lot of righteous women with two things. First, he said that there are a lot more male infants that die so that helps and the members of the church are a very small percentage of the Lord's children so there will be a lot of gospel preaching to men in the afterlife. Also, the idea that it is 100% the guys fault has no scriptural backing and is totally bogus. One thing that I learned on my mission is that apostasy seems to creep in through speculation over doctrines that we don't know about. The best answer too many of those silly questions is "I don't know." It didn't seem to bother the prophets in the book of Mormon to admit that they didn't know something so why should we be slow to say so. Most of those things are not important to our salvation and if something isn't important to our salvation, the lord doesn't speak a lot about it. My mission president used to quote president Hinkley when things like that came up. The then Elder Hinkley was at a meeting of missionaries and someone asked a question and Elder Hinkley responded saying something to the effect that ‘I don't care which way the doors of heaven open, I just care that they open.’ ”
So next trivia question. This has nothing to do with any doctrinal point. What does everyone think about Barak Obama? The people here in Texas are scared to death of him. They think that he being Muslim and president are a bad combination. They think that he will just destroy America and what it stands for. There is even an email going around that a member showed us that talks about Revelations 13: 1-8 and how it is a prophesy about Obama being elected president and what he will do when he gets to office. There are many people that sincerely think that when he gets elected that he will get assassinated just because he is black. I’ve even seen several people raising the old civil war confederate rebel flag because of it. All this kind of scares me. I wanted to know what the election atmosphere is back in Utah. Obama or McCain? Opinions would be great.
Nothing really new here. The area is bone dry here in Eastland. We are slowly building it up. We only have two good investigators, one of whom is slowly falling off the deep end. She almost got baptized, but then I get here and suddenly her ex-boyfriend stops paying child support. She doesn’t have job, so that hits her hard. Then her Dad just died. That hit her even harder. Now because of her Dad dying, she will inherit $10,000 and right now that’s all she can think of, that money. The other investigator that we have just moved here from another part of the mission. We still have yet to meet them because they live out of town. So that’s that. Outside that, nothing interesting on my side.
By the way, I’m still waiting to hear who the new bishopric back in Bountiful 9th Ward is.
I want to end with an amazing quote. Somehow, last night, we got on to the subject of death, people getting old and dying or dying suddenly. The member we were with knew that we weren’t supposed to watch movies, but he wanted to show us just one small 5 minute clip that was amazing and he wasn’t going to change his mind no matter what we said. You can shoot me later, but we let him, just for those few moments. It was from the movie “Mr. Magoruim Wonder Imporium.” Apparently it is a show about an old guy who has lived a long time and a young girl who thought of him as a father figure. He has decided that he is going to die and she is extremely sad. After a whole day of trying to convince him, her efforts were in vain. That night, they have a touching conversation and this is the quote that was shown us:
“I don’t ask you not to be sad, I just ask you to turn the page and keep reading… Life is an occasion, rise to it.”
I found that so amazingly on target. It literally applies to almost any situation, whether it’s an uncle dying suddenly of a stroke, getting fired from your job, almost chopping your hand off, having a great progressing investigator get anti-ed and start hating the church, getting transferred from your favorite area, having the whole city jump on your back for getting in a minor accident, or having your favorite college football team get thundered by a conference opponent and drop from undefeated at number 9 to number 21 and in third place in the conference in 1 week. It’s ok to be sad. It’s ok to cry. However, we need to move on. We need go forward with our lives. We need to turn the page and keep reading. Why? Because life is an occasion and we need rise to it!
I’ll leave on that note. Have a great week everyone!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
Monday, October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Letter 10-14-08
Dear Family,
1099 Lago Vista Blvd Apt. #116
Eastland, TX 76448
That is my new address for the next while. Hopefully it will be that one for a while. I don’t plan on leaving Eastland for a while, but we’ll see what happens.So, yeah, just like I said. I am in Eastland. Last Monday night, I was all packed up and we drove to San Angelo to stay with the Zone Leaders for the night. The bus got there at 7:10 AM and all of us getting transferred threw our stuff on the bus and left. We in San Angelo were the start of the journey. The last stop is up in Amarillo 12 hours later. I was tired and I was looking forward to having a nice long bus trip all day. That would’ve been fun. However, it was kind of anti-climatic when we stopped at Abilene, the first stop on the trip, an hour and 40 minutes later at 8:50 and I was told to get off because I was to serve in Eastland. That disappointed me for a bit, but it was all cool after that.Eastland is a small town of 4,000 people. So I just jumped from small town to small town. The environment here is also a lot like Brady. Green and Pretty. Brady is greener and hillier, so it beats Eastland that way, but it’s all cool. It is the farthest east the mission goes. Its only 90 miles away from Forth Worth. It is another small town, but that’s ok because, one, I got used to being in a small town in Brady and, two, we are only 60 miles away from Abilene which is about as big as Midland, just over 100,000 and we go over there every week for District Meeting, then go to lunch with all the Abilene missionaries, so I still get a little taste of the big town part of the mission. I am not quite as exiled like I was in Brady. My companion is also way awesome. He is pretty much a legend here in the mission. Everyone loves him. His name is Elder Sosi and he is Samoan. He will hit his year mark the same day that I hit my 8 month mark, the 20th of October, next Monday. We’ll have a party on P-day! He is the friendliest, most loving missionary I’ve met. He also loves talking with people. He gets really sad and depressed when he finds out he offended someone or annoyed them. It’ll be a fun transfer.I echo President Monson’s words when he talked about the fact that things never get easier. That is so true. While I am rid of all the stress and distraction of Brady, things in Eastland surely won’t be easier. Eastland has only been open for 6 months. I am the 5th missionary here. 2 of the last 4 only stayed one transfer. Because of that, the teaching pool isn’t exactly too big. Hopefully that’ll change when I’m through here. That’s not the crazy thing though. In the branch there are around 30 active members, but guess how much of them are active Melchizedek Priesthood holders? 2 or 3. No joke. Most of the ward consists of old widowed ladies. There are a few younger families, but not much. So guess what that means? The missionaries in the branch are in the Branch Presidency. Yep, you heard me right. I am the 2nd counselor in the Branch Presidency and also the financial clerk. We also do most of the home teaching because there aren’t too many home teachers. The Branch President has the sweetest spirit and is a great guy, but he is old, a little slow, and lives out of town, so he doesn’t do much. Sad, but true. So the members rely on the missionaries a ton. It’ll make things fun. They also love us, too, so that is good. The past missionaries have been doing a ton of less work and very little investigator work. They’ve almost done so much less active work, that there isn’t a whole ton left to do that they haven’t tried, so my focus here is to find (tract) this area to death and really build up this area, working myself nearly to death in the process. My eventual goal for the town is for us to get out of the Branch Presidency. Why? Not that I don’t like it, I just want there to be enough male members that we won’t have to be and we can focus on missionary work. Whether or not that will be accomplished while I’m here is another story, but I will do my best and leave the rest up to the lord.So, speaking of Branch Presidency, I was told like 2 or 3 weeks ago by like 50 different people that the bishopric was going to change back home, but guess what? NO EVER TOLD ME!! That’s harsh. You can’t do that. Someone has to inform me of the aftermath.But anyway, life is good. The gas prices here have plummeted from 3.35 when I got to Eastland down to 2.75 in some places. That is crazy. What in the world is happening? Also, if anyone ever tells you that Texas weather is crazy, don’t believe them. It only got over 100 degrees a couple of times the whole summer and it is still in the 80’s right now. The weather is very consistent here and doesn’t change much, unlike Utah, of which it is raining, snowing, and freezing cold! Ha Ha! Losers! Now that I say that, I’ll probably have to spend a winter up in Amarillo sometime in my mission where I here it is miserably cold. Oh, well. Life goes on. Before I sign off this week, a special thanks to Dave who copied and pasted the college football standings as well as the NFL standings in his letter this week. I know you all wanted to write after I went off on a tangent last week, but I just didn’t get many letters because you all just didn’t know where to send it. That’s ok. Now you do. I had a weird dream that I got 12 letters in one day. It would be fun if that dream came true, wouldn’t it? If not, I won’t be offended. I don’t even really think of home too much. I’m too distracted with this missionary work stuff. Weird huh? I even got so distracted with missionary work that I created a whole list of all the missionaries in the mission and use it to predict zone leaders and APs. I update it every transfer with the new added missionaries that are in the newsletter they give us every other zone conference. That makes up for not being able to do NFL predictions. I was even talking the other day about school and instead of saying semester I said transfer. When you start doing stuff like that, where your brain thinks nothing but missionary stuff, you know that you have been out a while. I even looked at a guy on the side walk one day and the first thing that came to mind was that he would make a good counselor in the branch presidency. Wow. I better sign off now. I’m scaring myself. Adios Amigos!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
1099 Lago Vista Blvd Apt. #116
Eastland, TX 76448
That is my new address for the next while. Hopefully it will be that one for a while. I don’t plan on leaving Eastland for a while, but we’ll see what happens.So, yeah, just like I said. I am in Eastland. Last Monday night, I was all packed up and we drove to San Angelo to stay with the Zone Leaders for the night. The bus got there at 7:10 AM and all of us getting transferred threw our stuff on the bus and left. We in San Angelo were the start of the journey. The last stop is up in Amarillo 12 hours later. I was tired and I was looking forward to having a nice long bus trip all day. That would’ve been fun. However, it was kind of anti-climatic when we stopped at Abilene, the first stop on the trip, an hour and 40 minutes later at 8:50 and I was told to get off because I was to serve in Eastland. That disappointed me for a bit, but it was all cool after that.Eastland is a small town of 4,000 people. So I just jumped from small town to small town. The environment here is also a lot like Brady. Green and Pretty. Brady is greener and hillier, so it beats Eastland that way, but it’s all cool. It is the farthest east the mission goes. Its only 90 miles away from Forth Worth. It is another small town, but that’s ok because, one, I got used to being in a small town in Brady and, two, we are only 60 miles away from Abilene which is about as big as Midland, just over 100,000 and we go over there every week for District Meeting, then go to lunch with all the Abilene missionaries, so I still get a little taste of the big town part of the mission. I am not quite as exiled like I was in Brady. My companion is also way awesome. He is pretty much a legend here in the mission. Everyone loves him. His name is Elder Sosi and he is Samoan. He will hit his year mark the same day that I hit my 8 month mark, the 20th of October, next Monday. We’ll have a party on P-day! He is the friendliest, most loving missionary I’ve met. He also loves talking with people. He gets really sad and depressed when he finds out he offended someone or annoyed them. It’ll be a fun transfer.I echo President Monson’s words when he talked about the fact that things never get easier. That is so true. While I am rid of all the stress and distraction of Brady, things in Eastland surely won’t be easier. Eastland has only been open for 6 months. I am the 5th missionary here. 2 of the last 4 only stayed one transfer. Because of that, the teaching pool isn’t exactly too big. Hopefully that’ll change when I’m through here. That’s not the crazy thing though. In the branch there are around 30 active members, but guess how much of them are active Melchizedek Priesthood holders? 2 or 3. No joke. Most of the ward consists of old widowed ladies. There are a few younger families, but not much. So guess what that means? The missionaries in the branch are in the Branch Presidency. Yep, you heard me right. I am the 2nd counselor in the Branch Presidency and also the financial clerk. We also do most of the home teaching because there aren’t too many home teachers. The Branch President has the sweetest spirit and is a great guy, but he is old, a little slow, and lives out of town, so he doesn’t do much. Sad, but true. So the members rely on the missionaries a ton. It’ll make things fun. They also love us, too, so that is good. The past missionaries have been doing a ton of less work and very little investigator work. They’ve almost done so much less active work, that there isn’t a whole ton left to do that they haven’t tried, so my focus here is to find (tract) this area to death and really build up this area, working myself nearly to death in the process. My eventual goal for the town is for us to get out of the Branch Presidency. Why? Not that I don’t like it, I just want there to be enough male members that we won’t have to be and we can focus on missionary work. Whether or not that will be accomplished while I’m here is another story, but I will do my best and leave the rest up to the lord.So, speaking of Branch Presidency, I was told like 2 or 3 weeks ago by like 50 different people that the bishopric was going to change back home, but guess what? NO EVER TOLD ME!! That’s harsh. You can’t do that. Someone has to inform me of the aftermath.But anyway, life is good. The gas prices here have plummeted from 3.35 when I got to Eastland down to 2.75 in some places. That is crazy. What in the world is happening? Also, if anyone ever tells you that Texas weather is crazy, don’t believe them. It only got over 100 degrees a couple of times the whole summer and it is still in the 80’s right now. The weather is very consistent here and doesn’t change much, unlike Utah, of which it is raining, snowing, and freezing cold! Ha Ha! Losers! Now that I say that, I’ll probably have to spend a winter up in Amarillo sometime in my mission where I here it is miserably cold. Oh, well. Life goes on. Before I sign off this week, a special thanks to Dave who copied and pasted the college football standings as well as the NFL standings in his letter this week. I know you all wanted to write after I went off on a tangent last week, but I just didn’t get many letters because you all just didn’t know where to send it. That’s ok. Now you do. I had a weird dream that I got 12 letters in one day. It would be fun if that dream came true, wouldn’t it? If not, I won’t be offended. I don’t even really think of home too much. I’m too distracted with this missionary work stuff. Weird huh? I even got so distracted with missionary work that I created a whole list of all the missionaries in the mission and use it to predict zone leaders and APs. I update it every transfer with the new added missionaries that are in the newsletter they give us every other zone conference. That makes up for not being able to do NFL predictions. I was even talking the other day about school and instead of saying semester I said transfer. When you start doing stuff like that, where your brain thinks nothing but missionary stuff, you know that you have been out a while. I even looked at a guy on the side walk one day and the first thing that came to mind was that he would make a good counselor in the branch presidency. Wow. I better sign off now. I’m scaring myself. Adios Amigos!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
Letter 10-6-08
Dear Family,So I have just been devastated and shocked. I just read the email from Mom that informed me that Uncle Dick had a stroke and died on Wednesday. Holy Fire! That’s not what I wanted to hear. I don’t like it when people die. President Monson’s talk on change now rings in my head. This life is fast and we need to stop thinking about tomorrow and focus on today. If we have too many full tomorrows we will have a bunch of empty yesterdays. Also, it was good timing with conference seeming to focus on overcoming our trials. It helped me a lot too with all the fiasco that is going on in Brady.All the talks were really good in conference. I enjoyed it. I’ve been busy between conference and right now (I’ll explain in a second) so I haven’t looked over it extensively to decide what to comment on, but off the top of my head, here are a few winners in a missionary sense. First off, the overall winner for missionaries won by a mile. The little Spanish lady, Sylvia H Allred. Her talk was all about missionary work. Specifically member missionary work. She gave a big huge list of very specific things that the members can do that will help the missionaries out. I listened to the things she said on that list and every single one of them hit right on the nail of what we missionaries need out of the members. Another thing she said was to WRTIE YOUR MISSIONARIES. Most of you are doing a good job, but here is another perspective. Things that are said in conference are doctrine and pretty much scripture. So now it is a commandment from God to write your missionaries, not just a nice thing to do if you have time. COMMANDMENT!! If you don’t have time, make time. If you don’t have anything to say or your life is boring in your eyes, sit down on the computer and just start typing and see what you come up with. If the latter is your excuse, here is something. I love news and have heard hardly any news in a world persective. The NFL is 5 weeks in and I haven’t heard a word. If someone copied and pasted the weekly NFL standings and sent it to me, they would be my new best friend. Also, in accordance to this, here something worth note. I got a letter from a guy from dearelder.com. Apparently that isn’t just for the MTC, so all you that liked that before can still use it. Either way, find something to say, somehow to write, and time to write because you know what happens to those who disobey commandments…right…?Now that I have spent too long on that subject, the other winners that I can think of missionary wise was Marcos A Aidukitisiiswhateverhisnameis who spoke boldy and threw down on the Book of Mormon. Robert D Hales spoke on Christian Courage, basically talking to us people that get squandered with anti from almost every person that we talk to, telling us how to react in the best way possible. I can almost bet that we will be going over that for a Zone Conference or District Meeting. Last but not least, Dallin H Oaks threw down on the Sacrament and now I have material to go read to all them less actives in Texas and bring them back to the fold.So the news here in Brady is this. I’ve know this for a week or two now due to the situation I have been in and several talks with President Robison, the district leader (my companion), and the zone leaders. I am getting transferred. I go from 6 months in my first area to 6 weeks in my second area. Kinda weird, but all is good. I am looking forward to a new area, a new companion, and new experiences. However, even though I don’t know my address, don’t let that stop you from sending letters. Just send them to the old address in Brady and because Elder Pyle (my companiaro right now) is a good missionary he will forward them to me. Aight?So my time is running thin, but let me bring the argument of polygamy up with you so you know where I am coming from. I asked the trivia question, is polygamy a celestial law or not? The reason I asked that stems from the debate I had. Now that I’ve seen one or two responses, let me elaborate. Elder Pyle told me that polygamy is indeed a celestial law. His reasoning though bothered me. He said that women are a lot better than men and because of that they will outnumber men in the CK like 10 to 1. As for all those women who didn’t get married, no problem. It is 100 % the guys’ fault for that and so in order for God to be just, polygamy has to be practiced. All us guys who make it will have like 10 wives because these girls deserve the highest degree in the CK, which marriage is prerequisite, and all the stupid guys don’t deserve. I thought that was a little too intense and it didn’t sit well with me. So now you can give me your thoughts based on that.But I have to log off. I still have a lot to do today. So I have an assignment for you all this week. GIT R DONE!!!!!!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
Letter 9-29-08
Dear family,First off, if you remember from last week, I mentioned how I hit a little 7 year old girl in the car. Well, she is doing perfectly fine. We talked with her and her mom this week and she is the funniest little girl. She is big-boned and hard-headed. She has also grown up with 2 older brothers so she is a very tough little girl. Like I said, she got right up afterwards and walked to her mom. She was at school within a few days and at school she was actually bragging about the fact that she got hit by a car, got up, and walked to her mother. It was quite funny to hear. I bought her a Hannah Montana CD as a little gift. Apparently, Hannah Montana is quite the thing amongst the girls in the younger generation these days. She liked it a lot. So everything is ok.Bruce – you mentioned a few things. First – how did I know that you quit football and band? Well…I’m a missionary. I know everything… Second – how does it work to be writing a non-member and is there any rules or guidelines or anything like that? Well, no rules. No guidelines. I’d just write like I was writing any other person. I’d just talk to him like I have always talked to him. I can just be a little more sneaky and use gentle boldness about the gospel. Ok, I’ll confess. I knew about you quitting band and football because someone named Mom told me. Get mad at her.So last week I forgot to mention, we had one of our investigators get married. Yay!!! She’s not breaking the law of chastity any more. Now she can get baptized. Only one minor problem. She works like all day every day so it is like impossible to get a hold of her to teach her. In the 5 weeks we have been her, we have talked to her a lot, but only had one lesson. We’ve tried, but she is always too busy.So this week has been interesting. A while back, L Tom Perry told the mission presidents that everyone in the states needs to be teaching 20 lessons a week. Well, that’s been kinda hard to reach. The highest total lessons that I’ve had in one week was 12 or 13. Usually its somewhere between 8 and 12. Well, this last week was horrid. We got a total of 5 lessons taught. 2 to investigators and 3 to members. It was bad, but its not like it was our fault. That’s just what happened. We tried our hardest, but we just couldn’t get in if our lives depended on it. However, 5 lessons in one week wasn’t the interesting thing. The interesting thing is what happened at church. We had 6 investigators show up at church. It was quite the pleasant surprise. More investigators at church than lessons taught. If you only look at lessons taught to investigators, our church attendance tripled our lessons. Its not very often that that happens. Now the next task is to get things accomplished with this area and take advantage. We’ll work hard as always and we’ll see what happens. I’ll take the Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego attitude in Daniel chapter 3. I’ll trust that the lord will help us to get this town going and the investigators to progress in the gospel because we have a lot of people at a standstill right now, but if not, we’ll always trust in him and never give up.That’s it for this week. I’d give a new trivia, but this other one in previous weeks still hasn’t been answered.
Peace Out all!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
Peace Out all!
Elder Adam R Droge
The DrogeMiester
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