'Muurica!

Well I hope everyone had a fun and safe Fourth of July weekend! Mine wasn't terribly fun but it sure was safe. With a 6 PM curfew and instructions to avoid Chelan like the plague we basically just did a lot of service all weekend. From what we heard, it sounds like the firework shows up here were pretty cool. At least I learned how to put up sheet rock though. And, how heavy ice cream machines can be. But it’s all okay because we helped some members pick cherries off their tree and an investigator pick some blueberries and let me tell you, it is impossible to beat freshly picked cherries nor blueberries. Those made the weekend totally worth it. Especially when you combine it with soft serve. Best. Stuff. Ever.

There was a pretty big disappointment this week though. As some of you may recall, Tuesday mornings we help out at the local food bank and they usually let us take some food home with us. Well this week somebody had donated a box of Samoas. Not Caramel Delites, but Samoas. At first I was a little apprehensive and commented to one of the sisters that I thought they had stopped making those and so the box had to be several years old. She said no they had actually started making them again so I thought I was the luckiest man alive and grabbed it like it was going out of style and contemplated how delicious it would be crumbled a top some soft serve ice cream. Fast forward a few days and we are at home and as per the norm I was hungry so I grabbed a bowl and served me up a nice size helping of soft serve and then walked back inside to grab the Samoas. Well I open the box and the five cookies in one tray were stuck solid together. I manage to break one off and try it really quick to see if the taste was still good and ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you it was not. It was one of the most disgusting things I had ever tasted. Girl Scout cookies do not age well. I was so sad I almost started crying. And then I remembered the freshly picked blueberries in the fridge so that helped but it was still a rather disappointing night. I'm not sure I can ever trust a box of cookies from the food bank again. 

And in other news, if you want to seriously confuse a set of missionaries, drive past them when they're walking down the street, slow down to a crawl right next to them, and very conspicuously take a picture of them on your iPhone, and then speed away. It will leave them speechless for a little bit, make them contemplate fame as the picture goes viral, and cause one of them to mention it on his blog. Don't ask me how I know this. Just trust me on this one. 

So unfortunately no quotes from this week come to mind at the moment so I am going to go back a few weeks (months? I don't even remember) to a Stake Conference we had with  Elder Aidukaitis of the First Quorum of the Seventy. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, a leader from the church that covers a large area came and talked specifically with the members in the Wenatchee/Cashmere valley. Since it seems to be the only topic today, he was speaking on “Hastening the Work of Salvation.” He was commenting on how there are a lot of good ways to invest our time but right now the work of salvation needs to be the #1 priority in our lives, whether for the living of the dead. But he said: 

"If you were God for a day and saw the state of the world, wouldn't you want to hasten YOUR work?" 

I know I would. With the moral decay happening at a faster and faster rate we see today, the only choice we have is to stand firm in our morals and beliefs. And I'm not talking just Mormons. If Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Atheists around the world would just stand up for the beliefs that worked pretty well the past several millennium, the world would be in a much better place. 

And with that food for thought, I sign off. 

Stay awesome America. 

Elder Kupferer