Monday, October 20, 2008

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 22, 2008

Family Letter 9-22-08

Dearest Family,
Last night I had a dream that I was home. Ahh!! What a nightmare…
So, A rumor around here says that the NFL season has started. I don’t think it is true because no one back home has mentioned a single word about the NFL these last 7 months. I think that after the Giants won the Super Bowl the NFL was cancelled. Somebody prove me wrong… J
Anyways, back on the ranch, how is poor little Elder Droge doing? Well…hmm… my normal response of ‘I’m doing good’ wouldn’t be the most correct response for this week. How ‘bout this: I’ve been doing good…most of the time. There’s been a lot of drama here in Brady this transfer. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Well, I’ve been meaning to. It’s just that I only have a silly little hour to do emails and sometimes I don’t have time to mention everything to the family and write President Robison all in the same hour. We do have a car here in Brady. We have to. It’s a small town and, for one, we have to cover a bunch of other small outlying towns and, two, we have to drive every week to either district meeting or zone conference and 45 miles is an awfully long way to ride the bikes, which we do ride occasionally if we want to save miles. That car, though, has gone through a lot. Poor little car.
First off, we were driving on a more baron road when Elder Pyle got bugged by a little fly that made its way into the car and took his eyes off the road for a second or two. Not the smartest idea. Always keep your eyes on the road. Suddenly we slammed right into the curb. BANG!!!! The front tire was slashed and the hubcaps were broken off.
The second little incident had to do with a squirrel. The little devils are everywhere here in Texas and one of them one day was a little impatient to cross the road and ran right in front of us. Well, when you match up squirrel against a tire wheel, there’s not much competition, if you know what I mean. Elder Pyle was laughing afterwards but I didn’t think it was so funny. I felt bad for the little guy.
The third thing came when we were driving to zone conference. We were a little on the late side, so Elder Pyle decided that he wanted to drive a little faster than he should’ve been driving and the police officer that he drove past didn’t think that was such a good idea because the roads were wet due to the rain that we had received. Well, Elder Pyle got slapped with a ticket and in missionary world that is not such a great thing to be in possession of. He got suspended from driving for 30 days and now I am the lucky one that gets to drive the car until October 11th. Yay!
On second thought, though, never mind. I wish I was in the passenger seat this last week. Our last little incident wasn’t so funny and has actually made me quite stressed out. Think about this for a second before going on. What is the worst sound you could hear in the world and what is the worst feeling that you could feel? Well, now that you’ve thought about it, let me put in a petition. Worst sound – the sound of a 7-year-old girl being hit by the car you were driving. Worst feeling – the feeling that comes for those few seconds when you don’t know if the girl you just hit is ok. Yeah… not a fun experience is it? But its not like I could’ve done anything better. We were just driving back to the apartment to grab a few things when the little girl just darted right in front of the car without looking. I didn’t see her until she was 2 feet in front of me due to the big paramedic truck on my left that was stopped and turning into the Sonic. I slammed on my brakes and swerved out of the way, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I was even going the speed limit. Luckily though, she basically bounced off the front left bumper and because of her bones of steel she was up and walking afterwards. They had to take her to the hospital over night to make sure that there wasn’t any internal problems. There wasn’t. She was home the next morning. I’m fine, she’s fine and everything’s all peachy right? Negative. Like I said there was a paramedic right there on scene and so in like 5 seconds there were police officers and firefighters present. That type of thing kinda attracts a good sized crowd. The fact that there were already tons of people around due to some sort of homecoming gathering didn’t help things at all. Except for the fact that I have 1,000 witnesses, it seemed, that said that it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing more I could do. But because of that and the fact that this is a rediculusly small town (5,000 people) the whole town knows that the mormons hit a little girl. News spreads fast and everyone wants to know what happened. I’m even famous. I made the paper. There is a little article, right next to the football story, that says Adam Droge from Utah hit a girl. Not very fun. I don’t like being the center of attention.
Outside that, I am ok. Trials are given to us for a purpose and like it says in D&C 122, they will be for our good. Brady is a great place. There was one other investigator story that I promised that I was going to mention. It is a Spanish family that is interested. They do speak a little English, but not a ton. Luckily good ole Elder Pyle knows some Spanish because poor old Elder Droge took French in high school and is Spanish illiterate. So I just sit around looking pretty (I got that phrase from Arctic Cirlce, there was a guy there that said that all the time) and throw in a small English phrase here and there while Elder Pyle does most of the teaching. Sometimes I wish that God would bless me with the gift of tongues, but I am not so lucky.
Anyway, though, that is all for now. Scripture/Trivia challenge is still up from the last two weeks because I haven’t received a response on that. Good luck to BYU. Keep kicking trash. I’m enjoying it. Good luck to Joe as well. I think its time that your team wins a game because I am not a big fan of sad news.
Peace out All!!!
PS – new signature again. That’s a nickname I have received via the missionaries out here for some strange reason. To say it right, drop the “E” sound on Droge and pronounce mister “my-ster”
Elder Adam R Droge The DrogeMiester

Monday, September 15, 2008

Letter 9-15-2008

Dear Family,
It sounds like everyone is doing great. Someone also had a birthday yesterday. Let me sing one more song. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR BRUCE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! I know you all are getting sick of that, but that’s happens when people have birthdays. The big 16. Holy cow. Bruce can drive and date. That’s scary. And he is in high school. Ouch. I feel old now. I’m almost 20. But Bruce, if you aren’t doing Football or Band, don’t feel bad or scared to tell me. I wouldn’t react bad. I’m just glad you’re having fun doing what you are doing. High School Band honestly kinda bored me at many times. If it weren’t for Pep-Band, I would’ve honestly quit after the first semester my sophomore year. Just ask Annie that. I had a really rough time that first year. I didn’t even hardly practice at all. I know. It was bad of me. High School football is also a lot different than Little League. Bigger game, bigger stage. But anyway, off that subject, I did celebrate yesterday. I sang happy birthday out loud in my apartment (yes, I’m in an apartment. Not a member’s home Sad. ). Did you hear me…? I also had some cake that was given to us by a member and I ate some ice cream that I had left over. It was fun. Also, thanks for giving me Julien’s address. That is way awesome.
So I also got some pictures this last week from Byron. That was way fun. It was cool to see pictures of Ethan, Sarah, Nathan, and Sammy. They are all so big. I especially liked the picture of all four of them sitting there on the couch. That was way cool. I also saw this new lady in the pictures and it took me a few minutes to realize who it was when dawned on me. It was Becca. I could hardly recognize her. She looks way good. Thanks a lot Byron. I will enjoy those. Anyone else who wants to send me pictures through snail mail, I will thoroughly enjoy them.
Mom, you mentioned something about everyone back in Bountiful Utah Stake preparing a talk, then a random person or two being called up to give that talk in stake conference. Its funny you mention that because we just did the same thing last week in zone conference. All the missionaries had to prepare a 5 minute talk on humility and then one person was selected to get up and give the talk. That same idea was also incorporated back in the MTC each week for sacrament meeting. That idea is really good. What it does is get everyone studying up for a certain topic and learning a lot, because you know that you learn more when you are preparing for a talk than listening to one in the audience. One secret from that for any that are preparing a talk back home. If you don’t do it, you’re the one who is going to get picked, so study up .
I’m sorry to hear from Mom that Brother Hope died. That is tragic. That’s not news that I like to hear, but thanks for telling me. Give Sister Hope my condolences.
One last thing before I move on to me, thanks to Dad for giving me that information about Alma’s authority. That helps. And it makes sense as well. Alma most likely got his authority to baptize before he was made a priest of King Noah, meaning he was grown up righteous, but then fell away when Noah was made king and got straightened up again with Abinadi and went down in the water with Helam only as a token of his true repentance.Now, I didn’t receive any insights from last weeks trivia about whether or not polygamy is an eternal law that will be incorporated in the celestial kingdom, so I will let everyone ponder on that for another week before I throw something else out. Remember that information is in my BYU BoM class packet in Jacob 2.
Now on to Brady. Like I mentioned before. Last week was Zone Conference. Half way through the transfer already. The trading deadline is almost here again. Just two more weeks. 6 week areas have been known to happen quite often, so I could easily be sent away from Brady already, but you never know. One thing is for sure, its not very often that someone gets put in two straight 6 month areas in this mission, but who knows. Brady is a good place. I can’t remember if I said this or not, but Brady is a very beautiful town. It has trees, hills, and lakes. It doesn’t really look like Texas. The small branch is also really fun. Great people.
Missionary-wise, we have pretty much now started from scratch. We are building up this area. The last set of missionaries left us with 3 good investigators to talk about.
First is an 84 year old black lady named Mae Usher. She is a legend in this mission. She loves the missionaries and the missionaries love her. She has been talking with them for 3 or 4 years now. She isn’t really progressing really fast at all, but is a very fun lady. She gives all the missionaries nicknames and the nickname that I have been given is “Flycatcher.” I killed two flies in two visits and that impressed her, so I got the nickname. She is progressing, just ever so slowly, that’s why we continue to go back. It took her 2 years to finally come to church and she has now been coming consistently for about a year now. She hasn’t rejected baptism, she just hasn’t made up her mind yet. If someone is feeling adventurous, she loves and waits for people to call and talk to her, because she doesn’t ever do anything and is very lonely at times. She’s even talked with other missionaries parents before. So there you go. 325-597-1467. Know one has to, but she would just be tickled, I’m sure of it.
Second is a young lady named Joleen. She is engaged (getting married this Saturday) to a less active member. Apparently, she had asked him what he believed in and that got the missionaries talking to both of them. The other day, we were at the lake on P-day (a member family took us there for lunch, but I promise, we didn’t get in the water) and she was there because her fiancĂ© is the son of the members who took us to the lake and out of the blue she told them that she wanted to get baptized. We hadn’t even taught her any lessons at this point of time, so that was way awesome. Now she is getting married and will no longer be breaking the law of chastity, so we can finish teaching and get her baptized. Only obstacle is that both of them work a lot, so it is hard to get in and teach, but she comes to church every week. She even came alone yesterday.
Third is another part member couple that aren’t married yet. LeAndra and Zeke. LeAndra is the less active member and Zeke is the non-member. The both come to church every week that they can and Zeke wants to get baptized and has been taught just about everything, but is waiting on LeAndra, who is still technically married to her previous husband and is going some legal issues for a divorce that she is trying to get settled. Complicated, but they are at a slight standstill for now, but he will get baptized eventually.
Anyway, I’ve talked too long. I have another cool story about a family we found, but that will have to wait for next week, so keep posted and I’ll write again next week. Peace Out
Elder Adam R Droge Antialienator345

Friday, September 12, 2008

Letter 9-8-08

Dear Family,

Well, another week has come and gone. I only received one family letter this week. That made me sad. L. That’s ok though. I suspect that the transition of addresses made it rough to transition in your system of letter-sending, so no hard feelings. Next time I say I get transferred, just send the mail to the mission office, that’s the one address in Lubbock that should be in the original book from my call, and they’ll know where to forward it to.

I wrote happy Birthday to mom last week because her birthday had just happened a day earlier, but what I didn’t realize at that exact moment is that Byron’s Birthday was the next day. That made me feel wonderful… Sorry. So, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR BYRON!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!!!!!” Hope it went well. I sang happy birthday that evening around my companion. He was a little confused, but then I told him that it was my brother’s birthday and I was just singing to him. Too bad you couldn’t hear me. It was wonderful.
Bruce gets a song next Monday because his birthday is on Sunday and that is close enough to next P-day that I won’t feel bad, but just let you know that I haven’t forgotten.

Joe – I got your letter this last week that you wrote on August 25th and you made me do some serious thinking. 8th grade was a long time ago for me, but I remembered what classes I took:
Band – Mr. King
French – Mrs. Olsen
Geometry – Mrs. Barton
Science – Mr. Wood
English – Miss Oveson
History – Mrs. Beckman
Health – Mr. Magalei ----- Gym – Mr. Duckworth
I feel proud of myself for remembering. Those last two, Health and Gym, were the one-semester classes while the others were all one-year. I don’t know how many of those teachers are still there. You should let me know. I don’t think I ever had Mr. King first period, but yet I can’t say for sure. By the way, tell him hi for me and mention I am on a mission in Texas. Mr. Allred wasn’t there when I was, if that answers that question. You also mentioned the weather. Funny thing was that where I was at during the summer in Midland it wasn’t all that hot. At least not as hot as I expected. It was always around the same temperature as Bountiful was. Late May and early June it got around 105 for several days, but that was as hot as it got. June, July, and August it rarely got over 100. Humidity wasn’t that bad either, but it was present occasionally and that wasn’t too fun. It feels like walking into the bathroom directly after someone just took a shower or bath, but it’s all over the place. It seemed to only be around when it was stormy, which was rare. East Texas is where it gets way humid all of the time, so I lucked out.

While I wait on more information from Dad and others on Alma’s authority (Dave’s article was helpful, I just want to see what else people can pull out) let me throw out another debate for everyone to look up and give me information on. “Polygamy is a celestial law. True or False and why.” My companion and I have differing views on that so some information would be nice. I believe that there is some great information in that Booklet I got from my BYU Book of Mormon class around the Jacob chapter 2 section. If I could get a copy of what that says, that would be great. Any other views would be good as well because apparently there are several missionaries in this mission that have the same view as my companion, so I will be warring for a while.

Anyway, about Brady. We still had a low week last week. Since both of us are new in town, we spent a little more time getting to know the people and getting a feel for the area. We feel like we have it pretty much down now so this upcoming week will be a lot better and I will actually have some stories to tell you about. We do have some good and interesting investigators and I promise that I will have more to talk about and more missionary stories to tell. But until then, I have got to go. Talk to ya later!!

Elder Adam R Droge
Antialienator345