Duty to God

Good morning everyone! Due to the change this Friday, allowing us to call our families weekly, I'm going to be revising my weekly emails. If you would like additional details and are not my family, please email me personally, I have a little more time to reply now.  As far as this week goes, it was great! As usual, it flew by, but we had fun while we were cruising. The spiritual highlight of the week was on exchanges this last Wednesday. It was too cold to knock outside, and we'd exhausted all the indoor apartments we could think of, so we had no clue where to go finding. So Elder Billiter suggested that we pray about it! (who would've thought!) As we finished the prayer, i felt the distinct impression to go to some locked apartments in a particular part of town. I suppressed the prompting for a bit, thinking that it was silly and that we'd tried that before, but no one else was feeling anything, so I finally chimed in. You might think that the doors wer...

Good morning everyone! This week has been an absolute blur. I'm not totally sure what happened...  I do remember that it was cold, usually close to 0 degrees, and often dropping below - 10. Usually that sort of weather calls for us to get inside and avoid exposure to the fierce winds. However, this week we had two exchanges, and both of them were in carshares. That means that I ended up on the streets for several hours, trying to show some younger missionaries how to be diligent  despite the cold. And boy, was it cold.  We did find a lot of really cool people as a result, and probably the coolest ones we found while taking refuge in little shops and gas stations along our trek.  This type of extreme cold has reminded me so much of the early saints. They were left exposed to the elements in one of the coldest winters on record, and in a smaller way I've also been exposed to the coldest winter on record. It's amazing to have such a parallel experien...

Wowzers. What. A. Week.  For starters, it was pretty cold outside, to say the least. We're talking an average of -35 with wind chill, and an extreme at -59 degrees here in Bettendorf. 3 people died of the cold in Iowa this week. There were also 40+ cars off the highway in an hours drive from here to Iowa City. So understandably we weren't allowed to leave our apartments for 3 days. So that was the longest 3 days of my life.  I did take advantage of the time, however, and read the entire Book of Mormon on Tuesday in 16.5 hours. It was exhausting, but also one of the greatest experiences of my life. I didn't think I would actually get very much out of it reading it so fast, but oh how I was wrong! I wish I could describe the experience to you. I know now why people like Brigham Young and others who read it very quickly their first time have such incredible testimonies of it's divinity and purpose. I would highly recommend that sort of study, it will bless you...