Sunday, August 10, 2014

Email received 8/4/2014

 Woops!! We forgot to post this last week.

Hey,

Happy birthday Kayleigh!! I was sitting there eating lunch on like Wednesday when it struck me that it was Kayleigh's birthday on Monday and I was like, "oh, crap!" That's awesome that she's driving! I am an awful driver, it is definitely not one of my strengths. I have slowly been losing the ability to drive, and it's been frustrating. I can't back up anymore or park along curbs. It's been irritating.

Well that's good to hear everything is going well with school, and church. Listening to promptings is good, it helps your lessons not suck, etc. It's good that dad is getting out and exercising! Even if it's not Olympian-level athletics, it's still good! I think Tennis will be exciting too, I played Tennis last p-day while our zone went to the park. By zone, I mean only us, the ZL's, and one set of sisters showed. We threw a pie in my face! Somebody gave us a pie, but we didn't like it so somebody suggested we throw it in somebody's face. I figured why not, I was going to go back and shower anyways. I'll get the pictures together and send them soon!

That's cool that you were able to go to Alpine for a wedding! If it makes you feel better, I would appreciate your political jokes Dad! It must be neat to see friends from college. I always think about what it would be like to see you and mom back when you were in college!

Yeah, with the whole school: would it be better for me to apply on my own or would it be better to have you do turn the applications in? I would like to apply to BYU and USU. My mission president gave me the okay to do college applications online, so it's possible for me to get it done here. Not sure which would be easiest though.

Well, our week was... not that great. In fact, this has probably been the worst transfer of my entire mission. It's just been full of a lot of struggles and challenges, and it's left me just exhausted in every respect. This week we met with like one or two people, got dropped by half of our investigators, and all these very hopeful lessons we had planned all fell through. The sisters in the ward have been going through similar struggles, one of the people they were teaching who was going to baptized in like a week dropped them and now they have like nobody to teach either.

The ward is AMAZING though, everybody is so strong and awesome! They're all great and have a great desire to share the gospel, but agency and other factors have just slowed things down. So it's (hopefully) going to pick up soon— or else I will be knocking many, many doors. Whatever you have to do though, right?

Glad that Bishop asked about me. Yeah, I thought that the youth were the ones with issues but my mission has completely changed my perspective. I think as you get older, it only gets harder. I figured once I finished a mission, that all of the sudden life, from a spiritual perspective, would be smooth sailing but we just keep experiencing trials until finally we're through. I am hopeful I spend the rest of my life in the church as a ward librarian, or possibly working in the primary so I can just eat snacks, color, and just worry about the basics (having faith, making good choices, the simple stuff).

I don't any of the missionaries live here still, those were just their last areas before the went home. Like Elder Lasley is in Arizona still, last I heard. I am going to have a lot of friends from the mission, I have met a lot of great people from this experience.

Well, I love you and hope you all have a good week.

-Elder Samuel A. Burge

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