Buuuuuuurns Lake

Well!

Just like that it's been another week! It's good to hear that there's finally a little bit of white sticking around Logan. Up here there's plenty of snow still, but the temperature has been really bipolar. One day it will be around 0, then the next day it will be -15, then the next day it will be 0, and so on. Winter seems a lot less scary than it did at first, too. We're getting used to it! -10 is just sweater weather now. It sounds like a lot of calls were given! Roger Mann will make an awesome bishop. That seems like a calling perfect for him. And I can just picture Amielyn Evans speaking Spanish in a southern accent. Exciting times!

Christmas season is in full swing up here. In the "mall" (which has like a bank and a dollar store connected to a grocery store) in Burns Lake, the branch puts on a "display of nativities" every year, and we spent quite a bit of time talking to people there this week. It was set up in this little room, and they had 171 different nativities on display. We counted them. We would go and stand in the hall and do our best to usher people inside and then give them Books of Mormon and pass along cards and things. On Friday, they had the primary kids act out a live nativity presentation, and they had a little musical program to go along with it. One of the members that was supposed to come and sing two solos was sick and couldn't come, and the missionaries are kind of the "go to" people in those situations, and so me and Elder Epperson both had to sing a solo that we had never rehearsed before in front of an actually respectable sized group of people. It wasn't too bad though, because they also had the community choir perform a couple of songs, and they went before us and attempted to sing "And He Shall Purify" from the Messiah, so the bar was set pretty low as it was.

Well, the work in Burns Lake is still moving forward. It's crazy how many investigators we are still finding even though every door has been knocked on a couple times. I guess miracles happen when you're trying to work hard. We found some really awesome people that we are excited about. We got a taste of what serving in the Philippines would be like. We tracted into this Filipino family, and without finding out who we were, the guy just tells us to come inside and runs into the house. We sit on the porch for another couple seconds, and he sticks his head back around, and asks us why we haven't come in yet. He sits us down, and then asks who we are. Filipino people are the best. They moved to Canada a couple weeks ago, and we're excited to be teaching them. We randomly have a Book of Mormon in Tagalog, so everything worked out nicely. We also found an older couple that live a ways East of town that we're teaching. The guy, Cliff, is a Freemason, which is pretty interesting. There's another less active guy who's about 30 who hasn't come to church since he was a deacon, and he's had a change of heart and we're going to be teaching him the lessons again. We're still seeing a lot of pretty awesome miracles.

There is so much potential in this area, because over the past few months we've hit the pavement (or... snow) really hard. We've filled up our area book with a lot of investigator records. We're teaching a lot of lessons. But for the life of us, we can't get these people to church. It's the worst. We had like 6 people committed to come to church, and from sick kids to health issues to just going AWOL, none of them made it. Again. Gah. We reminded them the day before, where possible, called them/knocked on their door in the morning, had members set up to give each of them rides, and pretty much everything else that's physically possible for missionaries to do without using weapons or kidnapping their children as a ransom to come to church. So... that's pretty lame. In short, we must just need to do some more studying from chapter 11 in Preach My Gospel or something, because the people that we're teaching are really struggling to keep commitments. I guess we just have to accept that these things happen in the Lord's time.

The members here are really awesome though. With their faith alone I remember when I first got here, they were really sluggish and disheartened about missionary work, but now they're all working with somebody, and they help us out a ton. It's awesome. They're really involved and they all make sure to try and console us when nobody comes to church. We haven't had to buy milk or eggs or meat or anything like that because the members always give us plenty from their hobby farms and things. And after 6 months, little old Burns Lake starts to feel like home. It will be really weird to leave this place, and transfer calls are in like a week! That's really weird.

Well, Merry Christmas!The timer on the computer says I'm about out of time! Hope that everybody has a really awesome week!

Elder Blotter