'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

We Moved...Again!

Well this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone but we moved again this past week. Out from one basement and into another one. Still don't have anything really to complain about though. The generosity of the members lending out basically small houses to us is awesome to see. The nice thing about our new house is we are again living in the middle of an apple orchard and we have some killer views. I think the best view though is out the front door to the soft serve ice cream machine. Yes, you read that right. Soft serve ice cream. All day and all night. Waffle cones and an extra 20 pounds here I come.

In all seriousness though this was a pretty good week in terms of the normal things we do. On Tuesday we drove down to Kennewick to go through the temple. The member that took us volunteers in the temple as a temple worker on Tuesday mornings so we left Manson at 3 AM. Surprisingly enough the 2:15 wake-up call wasn't as bad as I had imagined. It was just like high school all over again. Since he had to be there by 7 and our session wasn't until 9:30 we had a bit of time to kill so my companion volunteered us to clean whatever we could. It was pretty cool though because we got to go under the baptismal font. Even mechanical rooms in the temple are nice. Only the best for the Lord I guess.

This Friday we also got to help some of our investigators thin apples. If you remember a couple of months ago my last companion and I helped a member plant an orchard. Well this time we fast forwarded in the tree process a couple years to when it started bearing fruit. Since it’s a commercial orchard they want the apples to be as big as they can so the workers go through and "thin" the tree of apples, which is going through and removing 'excess' apples so that there is space enough between all the apples for them to grow sufficiently large. We only spent two hours and it was not physically demanding, but it was more repetitive than "run it back, do it again" (thank you to those of you who got that). I was convinced I was going to dream of apples for days to come. Thankfully I haven't (yet) but let’s just say that if my parents hadn't told me I was going to college, this sure made me want to even more.

Now for the more unfortunate side of things, we were driving along the road doing our thing and my window was down, enjoying the cool evening breeze. So imagine my surprise when all of a sudden I hear this loud smack and then a little black thing bouncing off the frame of the window. I was thoroughly confused until I looked back inside the car and saw a single, solitary white feather slowly float down and come to rest on the black dashboard. The only thing needed was some sad violin music and it would have been straight out of Hollywood.

So on a happier note this quote comes from Sunday School yesterday. I won't be able to quote it word for word but when the member said it all I could think of was me and my two brothers growing up and how hard it would have been for my mother.

"Sometimes you see kids do things that would make it hard to love them if they were someone else's kids."

Having done my fair share of stupid stuff, I can attest to that fact. For some reason my parents still kept me around. 

And with that I thank my parents for not having strangled sometime in my early childhood and sign off until next week.

Elder Kupferer