Serving in Kentucky: Trunked

March 6, 2017

Dear Family,

Yeah, you read that correctly. I'm trunked. I hit 23 months this week. Elder McIntosh hits 12. I have like 4 weeks left.

Oh my... I've been doing this for so long!

-> Large Plates <-

-Monday-

I think I've got 3 more P-Day's left. That's crazy! Speaking of that, I've been on my mission for so long that I'm finding it difficult to remember my home life. I barely remember... well... basically, everything.

Is there a life after the mission?

This was a very relaxed and very normal P-Day. Emailed, shopped, cleaned, and saw the H family. One highlight, though a small one, is I found out that Febreeze makes Gain-scented plug-in air fresheners! I was so happy to find those! They were really expensive but worth it. Now our apartment smells like Gain! 😁

At the H family, we watched some older church videos. Neither of them were feeling well. One slept through half of everything. Oh well. It was good seeing them.

-Tuesday-

Tuesday was something. A bad something. It rained off and on through the day. Like usual, we called bingo again. The nursing home was celebrating Mardi Gras. It wasn't as crazy as Valentines Day though. Elder Diel invited some of the residents to come to church. What was funny about that was how casual about it he was. "Do you go to church?" "Yes." "Have you ever been to our church?" "No." "Services start at 10. Do you wanna come?" etc. No one wanted to come.

Later, we wound up in Crothersville. We got in contact with a less active part-member family, did some tracting, and meet some nice people. No new investigators, but at least we had some positive interactions.

-Wednesday-

We got little sleep Tuesday night/Wednesday morning because there was a MASSIVE tornado storm that lasted most of the night. It was loud. Lots of thunder and lots of hail. Later in the day we saw that several people's trailers were damaged/destroyed. There were a few large trees that were ripped from the roots and thrown on some houses. Overall, the damage wasn't too bad, but there are some people who were probably hating life after that storm.

We were finally able to teach Miss B for the first time in forever! We taught her about obedience, praying often, and studying the scriptures. The lesson went really well. She had good answers to our questions and she retained a lot of what we said.

Yeah that's about it for Wednesday. Oh! Wait! There's one more thing! I hit 23 months on Wednesday! I feel like I just barely hit 22 and now I'm already at 23! It's March! Because of the extension, I'm coming home on April 5th and that also means I'll hit my 2 year mark on the mission. Elder McIntosh hit his year mark this week. Soon, I'll hit my 2 year mark. I almost feel bad for McIntosh. Almost 😉.

...I'm so trunky...

-Thursday-

The Clearinghouse isn't open on the first Thursday of the month but we and the Diels forgot that and went anyway. We didn't get in but because we were all together, we didn't just go home. The Diels took us to the "Goat Milk Stuff" place in town. GMS is a small business owned and operated by a family. They specialize in making things out of goat milk: Soaps, shampoos, fudge, lip balm, etc. I bought some soap and tried their fudge. The fudge was super-chocolatey and the soap is very soapy.

Like usual we went to F4RS (Food 4 R Souls) and served there.

-Friday-

Another district meeting in Madison! Woo! I don't have many more to go to! Irwin trained on studies. It's been a while since I've had a good study training. After the meeting we went to the Downtowner and I got a turkey sammich and a crab asparagus soup.

Yes, I order a crab asparagus soup. It was good!

Elder Diel did more casual missionary work with some of the people who were sitting next to us. It's cool to see the senior missionaries do missionary work because they tend to be a lot better at it. They know how people work better than most other people do.

After lunch we started my 2nd-to-last exchange on the mission. I took Elder Stucki to Scottsburg. Stucki's been out for about 8 months. Not much happened in the first part of the exchange but later on we saw Sis S and the H family again.

With Sis S, we just answered some of her Q's on becoming gods. It only took a couple scriptures to answer her questions. That was about it for this visit.

With the H family, we watched "The Refiners Fire." One of their son's, who isn't a member, has been going through some stuff lately. So we watched that video with them and discussed trials. The dad is worried about his son.

-Saturday-

We exchanged back early in the morning.

In the middle of the day we found ourselves working in Austin again. Along the way, this stray dog started following us. It followed us for over a mile. It was a nice dog. It wasn't aggressive at all.

The highlight of Saturday was finally being able to see H & P again. They're the couple we taught a few weeks ago who are super family-oriented. This time, we were able to teach them a full first lesson. We answered their Q's and increased their interest to read the BoM. They told us some of the ghost stories they've had and they let us borrow their 1930's KJV Bible to look over. Pretty cool! They're also the ones who gave us the farm fresh eggs not too long ago.

-Sunday-

Went to church! Miss B finally came. It's been a while since she's come. It was good seeing her. After church we had another episode of "Dinner with the Diels." Every time we go over they tell us story after story about their adventures in the Philippines. This time they told us about the giant spiders they had that took care of the cockroaches. Apparently, house spiders in the Philippines are a lot bigger than house spiders here.

Later, we saw Ms Ro and gave her the "Come, Follow Me" book. We started studying out of it with her. This last week was the first week for that book. I studied the first chapter myself as part of my studies and actually got a lot out of it. I hope she studies it on her own.

-> Small Plates <-

Here's something I've been thinking about lately.

We can learn A LOT from the examples in the scriptures. We can learn a lot from the good examples and we can surprisingly learn a lot from the bad examples too.

So, for example, as I read about Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel in my recent BoM reading, I noticed something about examples. Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel are about as opposite of each other as possible. Nephi is good. Laman and Lemuel are bad. None of those 3 are in the middle somewhere. They're all either black or white. No one's gray.

What I noticed is that the scriptures are full of things where both extremes are present. Good and bad. I already mentioned Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel. I just finished reading about King Noah and Abinadi this week. Same thing. Black and white. No one's gray or in the middle somewhere. Probably the biggest and most often used example of this is Heavenly Father and Satan.

What's interesting is that the scriptures teach us how we should be by giving us good examples like Nephi, Alma, Abinadi, Jesus, etc. but they also give us examples of how we shouldn't be with people like Laman, Lemuel, King Noah, Pharisees, Sadducees, etc.

I honestly can't think of any characters in the scriptures that are in the middle. Gray. Some people go from bad to good or good to bad but no one stays in the middle.

This idea of examples led me to another interesting thought. Nephi probably learned a lot about the gospel from Laman and Lemuel. How could that happen? Well, if Nephi looked to his brothers as examples of what not to be, then he would have pushed himself to seek the light, or the good, and follow it.

A lot of Nephi's words are worded in a way that seems like he's writing to his brothers. As terrible as Laman and Lemuel were, Nephi still cared for them and wanted to help them. Nephi's words don't just come from revelation. They come from revelation and experience. And I've learned that all the prophets have worked the same way. Their words come from experience. Listen to them.

-Elder Benjamin Kohkonen Cox (GKLM)