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