Letter 10-20-2008

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