A Visit from Noah

Not literally, but pretty close. The temperature this week was finally taking a dip. We knew we had a problem when we were celebrating it being 'only 100' which is still too hot but it beats 108, amazingly enough. I thought it was all the same. But we also got visited with some brief rain showers during the nights, and even got a special visit from Noah. If you're confused by now (which you probably are), let me explain. Once a month we have a branch Family Home Evening at the church to invite investigators to and also to strengthen the ward, and the 1st counselor of the branch presidency and his wife was in charge. She worked in the Primary so obviously it was geared towards the Primary-age children, but years ago she had a lesson on prophets, complete with an Ark and a get up for Noah, so she pulled it out again for the FHE. Thus Monday night Noah made a return to explain to us the purpose of prophets.

Something I forgot to include last week was a service project we and the other elders in the branch did for our President. For 7 years he had been planning on re-landscaping his yard and with a Fourth of July party looming ahead of him, he decided there was no better time than the present, so he gave the missionaries a call and went to town on his yard, taking out half the grass to replace it with pavers and borders. We were only there for the part where we lugged roll after roll of cut up turf in the 102 degree weather but it was still a fun service. It is always great to get out of the shirt and tie and move some dirt around for 3 hours.

In the random department this week, we were walking around some apartments and across the fence we heard Mexican karaoke music going on. I got bit again by another dog in retaliation. I found out afterwards that the fence gate I opened had a spring attached to it so it swung open rather forcefully into the 10 pound dog's face. Thankfully the hit must have disoriented it or something because he tried to bite my shin longways up down instead of the normal short way side to side. It was nowhere near effective. We also this week in our escapades found a converted hospital that was now a housing complex. It was pretty interesting. Definitely wouldn't be on the top of the list of places to live in my book, but I'm sure it would make a great place for some epic nerf fights.

On Saturday, we got a call asking us to help out on Sunday and give some talks since nobody had been assigned yet. Thankfully, since we spend hours in the scriptures on a daily basis it wasn't too hard to pull something together last minute to help out. Overall it was a great experience for me being able to once again see my efforts magnified by the Holy Ghost.

This week, the quote comes from a phone call I had last night with my zone leaders who also had to give a talk yesterday in church and one of the lines that they shared was the following:

"Christ is the fruit of God's love for us."

I had never really thought about it like that before but it definitely puts it all into perspective. Because of God's incomprehensibly large love for us he needed a way to enable us to come back, and that way was Jesus Christ. It makes me extremely thankful to know that we don't have to be out here doing it on our own, that there really was someone that had gone through all of this before and paved and prepared the way for us to return to our heavenly home.

Until next week,

Elder Kupferer