Report from Burns Lake

Familyyyy...

It sounds like everyone is doing good, other than some of the usual stresses of life! It's good to hear that everybody, minus Jed's digestive system, is doing well. I hope Jenessa does well with soccer and that Jacey gets all of the pet shops that her heart desires. :) Also, before I forget, since packages take about 2 weeks, and I might be leaving in 2 weeks, (although I rather doubt it,) hold off on sending packages to Burn's Lake from this point on. The package on the 27th should be good though!

I had the craziest dream the other night, and I say craziest because I actually remembered it. Usually, I have really intense dreams and I wake up feeling some emotion or the other, but I forget what happened in a couple minutes. This one, I remember almost perfectly. So, in my dream, we got to go home for a couple days after the MTC. No idea why, but they flew me to Sky View High School in a little airplane like the one I flew here in, and then I got out, and Ethan was waiting for me to be my companion while I was home. We walked home along the canal. It was a great welcoming, let me tell you. Anyways, I got home, and at first in the dream I was really excited to do all of the things that I did before I left again, but then I remembered that I couldn't do any of it because I was set apart as a missionary. So Mom had me cutting strawberries for a couple hours. I woke up realizing that in the mission field is where I am supposed to be, and even though I miss all of you oh so dearly, I am where I am for a reason.

Anywho...

The week was great! As I believe I mentioned last week, Elder Neher took a tumble mountain biking, and so he's been limping, but he's back to about normal now. We went to Smithers for a companion exchange/district meeting, and so that was exciting. We also did a lot of service, and so I did quite a bit of painting and electrical work for this community service project. By electrical work, I mean army crawling with wires underneath a building with dead rats, broken glass, and cigarette butts. It was quite the experience, ha ha. We also had a tire pop out at the very end of Cheslatta Road on Southside, which is pretty much the end of the Earth, as far as civilization is concerned. We knocked on the door of the one house at the end and this elderly guy talked to us about string theory explaining everything and we talked to him about God being the answer. Neither one of us was too convinced, but he helped us get the tools we needed to change our tire, so we were grateful! We taught some lessons, found some investigators, and had this native, when we knocked on his door, come out and grab us and say this really long prayer. It... was another week!

The members here are asked to do quite a bit more as far as missionary work goes than in Cache Valley. We're really struggling to get them to have the faith that their efforts will result in baptisms and blessings. Fast fact: investigators found by missionaries have a 2-3% chance of being baptized, while member referrals that result in investigators have a 20%-30% chance of being baptized. They just need to do the work. We recieved revelation that the way we need to do it is by having them have Family Home Evenings and otherwise studying the basic doctrines and missionary principles in Preach My Gospel and the scriptures. With an eternal perspective, trying to share the gospel isn't embarrassing or awkward, it's giving the person eternal happiness and doing what Heavenly Father expects us to do! Chapter 3 in PMG explains the first lessons so simply, and chapters 11 and 13 talk about what members can do. We think it can inspire them.

The missionary work in Burn's is slowly but surely progressing! Although... our most progressed investigator is spending the rest of the month fishing, and one is moving at the end of the month for as long as a year. That's a minor setback. We're still looking for truth seekers and working with the investigators that we have. Many have had trials and hardships in their lives. The Natives here have all had hard lives, usually as a result of broken families and drug problems. The gospel can definitely bless them, and it has been inspiring to see the changes in those that we have been working with. We have to move very slowly though the lessons because many of them have a hard time reading and understanding, which is probably a good teaching style for me to be learning right in the beginning.

Most of our investigators are from the reserves, but we have some solid potential investigators right now that are living along the roads East of town, so that may change soon. The reserves are interesting places, as are the gas stations around here. If you're going to be a Native American, Canada is the place to be. They have bands here, not tribes, and the bands are heavily funded and provide housing, and if desired, access to schools for natives. The natives also have status cards that allow them to hunt and fish whenever and whatever they would like, and they don't pay any taxes, so gas stations have two prices, "status, and non-status". I think that if they tried to introduce that in the States, it wouldn't go over well, but hey, it seems to work fine for the Canadians!

Our house is definitely not in that condition! Sometimes the table that we study on gets disorganized during planning on study sessions, but that's about it. We're pretty clean. No holes in the walls yet! We have an inspection on Wednesday though, so we'll have to see if we pass that! It is cold in our house though. It's usually below 60 degrees. Which is nippy. Summer here is only "hot" for about 3 weeks, and that was apparently my first 3 weeks here. The people were complaining about it being hot, but it was probably only about 80 degrees at it's worst. I thought it was nice!

Well, until next week!

Elder Blotter

PS- Next time you do send a package, send up the rest of the ties that I have at home. All the Elders here have like 50 ties and trade them all the time. I keep on forgetting to ask that. Also, for my birthday this year, here's the desire of my heart: some computer savvy family member should download Preach My Gospel as a pdf file online and put it on a flash drive. Then go down to Kinko's or wherever, and ask them to print it out at 60%, spiral bind it, and laminate the cover. The result is a PMG that will fit in a scripture case. Which would be nice. But that also would be a bit of a pain, so I know that it might not happen! Anyways, you guys are great!

PPS- My house number is actually #236 on 4th Avenue. I don't know what I was thinking earlier.

PPPS- Did I bring my retainer, or is that at home? I'll look harder for it.