April 25, 2016

I thought that it was impossible to be bullied now that I'm out of school. Little did I know that the meanest bullies I would face in my life would not even be human beings but.....turkeys. There we were out in the sticks looking for a referral named Steve with the only direction to where he lived being, "On that road, the house with dem cows with dem longgg horns." 

How specific. 

Still we pressed onward until we reached a house with a massive assortment of animals--average angus cows, herds of goats, sheep, squads of ducks, chickens, a couple pigs, and even some quail. We pull up into the driveway (there's no fence for the animals by the way, so they could just roam off into the road and hills if they wanted to), open the doors, take one step out of the car when we heard....gobblegobblegobblegobble. My least favorite sound in the world. Around the corner of the nearest barn, two massive male turkeys walked side by side like territorial siamese twins, lurking toward us. We grabbed our bags, quickly walked down the road looking for long horned cattle, and felt relieved as the gobbling faded after a while. Eventually we found Steve up on a tractor far down a separate driveway. Although he was drunk as a skunk, he was very pleased to show us his enormous long horned cattle. Holy cow were those horns giant. He told us how he wasn't religious at all and sent us back on our way. 

To my horror, the two turkeys had leaped onto the roof of our car in our brief absence. My heart sank  into me as they turned toward us and began the gobble doom once again. I yelled at them and even threw a rock at them but nooooo, they didn't even flinch. Only the car alarm got them off the car enough for us to hurry in and peel out. I will forever look forward to Thanksgiving dinner's main course from now on.

On a friendlier note, God helped us with an inspiring answer to prayers regarding a high schooler kid named Alec who has been off and on toward the Church. Alec is one of the member's good friends and has attended Chruch once befoere and is often at their house. Before we left our car to enter this member's home for dinner, we said a fervent prayer asking for Alec to show up. Dinner began, Alec was nowhere to be seen, but we kept on shoveling that hamburger helper. At exactly the moment I asked if we could share a spiritual message, someone knocked on the door. You guessed it. Alec felt like he should walk on over for some reason. He sat down and we taught the Restoration of the Gospel with his best friend explaining what it means to have purpose and direction in life by a living day prophet, with the prefectly restored teachings of Christ to lead us to eternal bliss. Miracles are everywhere you live, as long as we live by faith and not by sight. 

xoxo

Elder Burgess

 There's Elder Abraham and I with Eric Green from the Denver Nuggets