Lots of Service

I am definitely bummed that I missed such an amazing experience. I think it is so funny that as soon as an apostle is scheduled to come visit everyone decides to be active for that week. Well hopefully sacrament meeting continues to stay super full for awhile. So first of all I want to thank you so much for the package. It was crazy because the day before I got your package, my wonderful Aunt Shelly had sent me one with a TON of goodies. There was literally 5 big freezer bags fulls of cookies, brownies, rice krispies, and some chocolate bars from heaven. I don't know what I'm going to do now that I have so many sweets in the house. I'm seriously doomed. There is too much to even share and not get fat. All well! :) So while it's on my mind, I thought Paige was in Europe or she was or I sent a letter out there for nothing. Let me know what's up with that. Also the socks are wonderful and I am very grateful for all the things you sent. I put that great spiderman picture in my binder where I keep all my talks. It is the cover. I love you all and I am super grateful for all that you do.

So this week has gone by crazy fast. We did a lot, but it seems like our numbers weren't affected all that much. We did do a ton of service which was great and I think next week we will start to see some blessings from all the work we have been doing. We had four major service projects that we were able to find, which were kind of different and interesting. The first one was helping an elderly man in the ward out in the farm. We first pulled out all his corn stalks by hand which destroyed our backs, and then we got on our hands and knees and harvested potatoes, snap beans, and jalapenos. Oh it was funny because this man is hardcore southern and his accent is hilarios, but for the longest time I thought we were digging up "Ice taters", but then as I caught on it hit me that only because of his accent were we digging up "Ice potatoes", but they were really "Irish" potatoes. I love the south. The people are sooooo hilarious. Anyway that same day after harvesting veggies, we had another service project planned where we went to less active sisters home and helped her clean her snake tanks. She has a closet full of about 25 different kinds of snakes and we had to clean their tanks. So I handled snakes for an afternoon and cleaned out their poo filled homes. Those things can get really nasty. Then the next day we went up to the Eagle's nest campground and spent three hours building a huge burn pile out of all the brush and fallen branches and junk in the area, then we lit it on fire and watched. That was fun besides singing my arm hair a couple times. Then later that day we helped our ward mission leader go over to his girlfriends house and paint the outside of her home because a tornado hit it and tore off a ton of the siding so they were redoing the outside or something like that. So we helped out a lot I felt and hopefully we will start seeing the blessings in the rest of our work. 

Other than that we worked hard finding and teaching and doing all we can, but we only were able to find one solid investigator this week. It was nice because she owns a mexican/salvadorian restaurant that we ate at and that's how we found her. She accepted a baptismal date on the first lesson and she plans on having her family present for the next. We are excited for that. 

So other than that not too much happened. Oh we did eat pretty odd this week. We had pig stomach and turkey neck.

 My companion also caught a garden snake and gave it to our ward mission leader who stuck it in the freezer and is going to cook it up for us to put in a soup. I guess when you are out in the country by yourself for this long cooking weird things keeps you busy. I don't know, but I eat whatever they give me. :) 

Well that was pretty much my week. Hopeful this next one is going to be better. I love you all and I hope all is going well. 

Here is a quote I read from Elder Richard G. Scott: "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day." 

Pretty inspiring I know. Well I love you all. Thanks for all the support and love. I am very much blessed to be part of such an amazing family. 

Con Amor,

Elder Burnham