There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch

Me showing off my hot bod after moving some furniture

Another week in Texas for Will.  In addition to his letter (which follows) here is some other information from a letter he has sent mom and dad.  I took out anything too personal. :)

Next, yes I'm a Facebook mission now, more information will be forthcoming after they tell me the details at zone conference in Waco.

There are roughly 80 members in the branch and we've had dinner at 3 houses (multiple times fortunately) the building is also teeny tiny. The chapel is smaller than our TV room and it also functions and the primary room and the nursery also functions as the Relief Society room. Priesthood meets in the Hallway.

My area is massive, it includes: Mexia, Groesbeck, Kosse, Teague, Fairfield and a few others that we haven't been to yet. If you've never heard of these towns before that's normal, the population of my entire area wouldn't even be close to the population of Draper. Rural life is hard, we have limited miles per month on our car (free gas woohoo!) So we have to be really careful about where we choose to drive. Waco is about 80 miles away and so that's going to hurt us a lot. It's also hard because these rural areas lack certain amenities that I grew accustomed to growing up i.e. drinkable water. But I'm learning to adapt don't worry about me. 

His address is: ELDER MURDOCH 762 Oak Hill Dr., Mexia, TX. 76667

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Dear Family and Friends,

There's no such thing as a free lunch:We got a call from Brother Jordan earlier this week asking if we could reschedule our dinner with him on Friday and have lunch instead. We agreed because his house was on the way to Fairfield which is where we would be headed that day anyway. We pulled up at his house and when he saw us he said, "Did you bring your work clothes?" I kind of thought he was kidding and told him we hadn't. "I can't believe you came to WolfHaven (The name of his ranch) without any work clothes." Still, we thought he was kidding. He told us to get in his truck and we'd go to lunch. We ate at a gas station Sonic but right after he finished he said, "Now I'm going to work that lunch right out of you." At this point I realized he was not kidding. He told us that he needed help moving all of his dysfunctional daughters things out of her house-- and I'm not at liberty to explain why that needed to be done but let's just say it was important for a lot of people that we did this.  So here we were, two scrawny missionaries in white shirts and ties, a trailer, a truck, and a whole lot of dirty furniture and boxes. And of all the days I could have chosen to wear long sleeves I chose this one.

I rolled up my sleeves and Elder Rowley and I got to work. There was cigarette ash all over the floor so we were getting really dirty but we were able to move most of it by ourselves. Finally it got to the point where we had to move the super heavy things (fridges, massive dressers, display cabinets etc.)  and so we had to call Brother Jordan's son, Sean, to help us move all of that. Finally, after taking 2 trips to the storage unit we were finally done. When we returned to WolfHaven Brother Jordan apologized that he couldn't feed us dinner because he and his wife had to drive to College Station to pick up their granddaughter. Sean, seeing that we were hungry offered to take us to a diner called "Something Different" in Fairfield that boasts the best catfish in the state. When we got to the diner I told the waitress in had never had Catfish before and the entire restaurant went dead quiet and looked at me as if I had thrown off the Emperor's groove. Then the waitress said, "Do you want fries or hushpuppies" and I said I had never had a hushpuppy before, and at this point Sean decided that he'd get us all the sides just so we could experience them. Overall, I decided that catfish is basically just a better version of fish and chips and that hushpuppies are good. And I realized that's the first real southern dish I've had since coming here.

Estate sale:
A few weeks ago we knocked on this guy's door and he told us to get lost. As we were walking away he said, "Wait are you Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses?"

Side note: People don't mind Mormons here but absolutely despise Jehovah's Witnesses

We told him we were Mormons and he said that his recently deceased wife was a Mormon and that she had left behind a bunch of LDS books and that someone from the branch needed to pick them up because he was moving soon. We told the branch clerk and that was the end of that. Or not.
After we got back to Mexia on Friday, tired, sore and full of Catfish (and having done absolutely no proselyting that day) we got a referral that a woman named April was moving and that we needed to go pick up her Book of Mormon or she was going to throw it away. We pulled up to the address and it was the same house of the guy we had talked to a few weeks prior. We knocked on the door and the woman, April, answered and told us that her mother was LDS and left behind a lot of books that her father in law didn't want to take with him when he moved. April and her husband weren't members either and so they didn't want them. When they said a lot of books I figured like 2 or 3 Book of Mormons. But a lot of books actually meant a lot  of books. And not just Book of Mormon's, books written by apostles and prophets, I even found an RLDS Bible. Not just books though there were paintings and even a wheat grinder that apparently she was borrowing from the church when she died.(I didn't even know churches had those?) So it took two trips to ship everything to our apartment. As we were loading the car April's husband told us he had recently written a paper on Mormons and I thought he was going to go all anti-Mormon on us but he never once insulted us. He told us he really likes the idea of food storage and that he stores food too. He then talked about the Golden Plates and how so few people got to see them and he thought that it was cool that Emma Smith even held them while they were covered. He asked what became of the Golden Plates after Joseph Smith died and we weren't entirely sure on the details but that they had been taken up to Heaven and the only people that knew the specifics had been martyred. He then said something to the effect of "You know a lot people say the entire thing was a conspiracy and that the Plates never existed, I say it's not a conspiracy if it's true. I really believe they existed." Which made me want to ask if he had read the Book of Mormon for himself, but he had to leave so I never got the chance. 

Cats:
We were in an investigators house on Thursday and the lesson went really great but they have  lot of cats. 17 to be precise and at least 7 dogs, maybe more. These cats really liked me (and that's understandable I'm just a likeable guy) and so they were crawling all over me and taking naps on my bag and stuff like that. After the lesson I noticed I kind of had a stuffy nose but didn't think much of it. Then my face started feeling weird. I looked in the car mirror and my lips had swelled to unnatural, almost Kylie Jenner size. I had to take Benadryl consistently throughout the rest of the night and the next morning to get it to go down. This confirmed it. I am allergic to cats. Which isn't good because literally almost everyone I've met in Texas has at least one cat. And those investigators are really solid so I have to stock up on Benadryl every time we go over to their house now. 

Geckophobia:

The other night I was sitting on the floor in our bedroom and I saw a little critter scurry around on the floor and up into Elder Rowleys bed. At first I thought it was a brown tree cockroach which disturbed me but after looking harder I realized it was a gecko. Elder Rowley is terrified of Geckos every night when we get back to our apartment there are always 2 or 3 lingering outside the door and he always quickly opens the door and runs inside. When I told him he nearly shut down. He was terrified, he couldn't move. I mean I'm scared of spiders but when I see them I get rid of them. He was quaking, I told him to go get a jar or something so we could catch it. I finally managed to trap it in a jar but I cut off it's tail in the process so that was writhing around on the floor which just freaked him even more out. I told him that was normal and the tail would grow back. I kept it in the jar while I changed out of my missionary clothes and when I came back Elder Rowley said, "Its tail isn't growing back. Why isn't it growing?" I explained that it was going to take weeks for it to grow back. " How are we going to kill it?" he said to which I replied, "Why would we kill it it's harmless, besides I don't want blood on the carpet." I let it free and it dawned on me that the geckos probably came into our apartment during that day to hunt and that's why the only bugs we see indoors are fruit flies. When I told Elder Rowley this he was so scared. The last thing he said that night was, "Can geckos kill you?" I told him they were harmless and that finally put him at ease. What a funny guy.

Traditional Texas meal: Fried catfish, hushpuppies and fries

A bunch of books we had to give to the church library, but some we got to keep