Campbellsville, KY

Oct 5, 2015

Dear Family,

Yup, transferred to Campbellsville. There are a lot of Elder Jensens in the mission. I actually met my companion for the first time in Corydon a few months ago. He and his companion came up for a P-Day in Corydon because they both served in Corydon last year. It's cool to have a companion who previously served in Corydon. 

Well, my first week here it rained for 4 days straight without any sort of break. We had General Conference, and we had to take a sick day because I got a cold and Elder Jensen got some stomach thing. With all those combined, we didn't get a whole lot done this week.

The transfer meeting was interesting. Elder Jensen said its most likely the stress of moving to a new area that cause me to get sick. Campbellsville itself is a nice area. It's more urbanized than Corydon. There is unfortunately, only 1 Emery's in existence and that's in Corydon. :(((((((((

I watched General Conference at the church. I stayed there all day for both days. Food was provided by a couple members between sessions. Conference was completely awesome! I took 25.5 pages of notes in my little study journal. I'm summarizing the notes and am going to send them to you to have. I'm hand-writing them. I've been working on improving my hand-writing for the last 6 months. I've come a long way. It's still not at the level I want it at, but it's a lot better than when I left. I wanted to improve my hand writing after I saw Elder Lynch's. He has nice hand-writing. My new companion, Elder Jensen, has even nicer hand-writing. I was a little sad to see President Monson struggling like that during his talk. But I was happy to see he pushed through. I don't think he's going to live a whole lot longer. There have been a lot of deaths this year. Deaths in the family, deaths on the mission (a recent convert in Corydon, Ms G's daughter, died about a month in my time there), and deaths in church leadership. But we can all take comfort from the fact that death is only a step in God's plan.

I've learned a lot about the love of God for others in my time here. As was said in conference, God looks at who we can become. When you realize that everyone has the potential to become like Heavenly Father or Jesus Christ, you start to treat everyone like royalty almost. Think of it. Think of who Heavenly Father is and all the love He has for us. Everyone has potential to become just that. A perfect being with infinite love. Isn't that cool?

Want some more good videos? I don't know if you know about this, but the church recently made 12 videos for the 12 Step addiction recovery program the church has. Each video is about 5 or so minutes long and each one is someone's personal story with an individual step. You can get them on addictionrecovery.lds.org. Watch all 12 of them in one sitting. That should only take an hour. I would also suggest you read through the addiction recovery program itself. That can be found in the Gospel Library app under the Family section.

It's hard to think I've been doing missionary work for 6 months now. This last conference was my 2nd conference on the mission. I'm half way done with conferences. I've learned so much. I celebrated the 6 month mark on Thursday by burning a tie. I recorded it! 

I got a lot of great pictures from my last days in Corydon and my first days in Campbellsville. I thank God for my family. You've all been so good to me. You've taught me a lot. Keep being awesome!

-Elder Ben

Look at this awesome picture of Mt. Timp I found. It's now my iPad background.

For District Meetings we meet in Sulphur Well KY, or "Sulphur Heck" as

Elder Jensen puts it. It's missionary tradition for new members of the

district to be "baptized" into the district by drinking out of the

well. It was nasty. I'm never doing it again.