Week #29

Family,

Sorry that my letter is coming in so late.  Our P-day was a little bit skiwompus today.  We filmed with a lady from the service project that we did this weekend.  But I'm jumping ahead of myself, and I need to tell you a bit more about this week.

The highlight of this week was probably our service project that we had down in Crawfordville, which is about 30 miles south of Tallahassee.  Elders Murdoch and Shepherd, the elders down there, organized this service project for both of the Tallahassee Zones to help with the Keep Wakulla County Beautiful Coastal Cleanup.  It was super fun, basically what we did was we walked along the salty marshlands and picked up trash along the way.  I found a car drive line and we found a ton of beer bottles.  It was pretty fun because we got to venture into the underbrush a bit and pick up all sorts of stuff along the way.

It turned out to be pretty sketch though, because we saw a few snakes, all of which were poisonous. We saw two cottonmouths, pretty good size, and I almost got bitten by a little baby rattlesnake.  I reached down to pick up a piece of trash and then saw it slither a bit, so I jumped away and then looked back on it.  It was so small that it's rattle only sounded like any old southern bug buzzing away, so it's good that it was more scared of me than I was of it.  That definitely would have ruined my day, so I was a bit more wary of where I was walking and picking stuff up.  We got a lot of it on footage, so I'm sure you'll see it at some point.

Other than that we have been pretty much just been filming.  Transfers were this week, so we traveled around with all of the other missionaries and got some good footage.  I saw some old friends in different areas and made it all the way out to Pensacola for the first time, which was pretty exciting.  Transfers were nuts because we got 36 new missionaries into our mission, which is the equivalent of an entire zone.  And that's going to happen again next transfer.  Super nuts.  During the entire thing Elder Burnett was doing most of the filming, which I was a bit frustrated about, but it's all good because I'm not very good at it anyway.

I was a little bit frustrated this week because I haven't felt like I haven't been contributing much and the video is coming along slowly, but things are going to work out.  We are going to begin editing this week since the new computer finally arrived.  Elder Burnett will probably be doing most of the editing, and I'll be throwing in my two cents every so often, but like I said, that's alright.  Something that I've noticed about myself is that I'm very much a conceptual thinker, but when it comes down to the actual process of doing things it takes a bit for me to get into it.  Maybe it's a blessing or a curse, because I feel like a nefarious planner;  I love to just think and think and expand on an idea until it's completely exhausted and there is nothing left to do but to get it done.  Because of this I'm still leaning towards going into marketing, which I think I would be really successful at.

I actually have a new idea that I want to start implementing while Elder Burnett works on editing the film.  This is an idea that I haven't proposed to President yet, but I have thought about it quite a bit and I think that it will be successful.  There's all sorts of talk about the missionaries getting Facebooks, and also we have been working on these videos and collecting media, and there are ward and stake activities throughout Florida, and there are tons of resources online (Mormon.org and lds.org) that the Church has published in order to bring people to a greater understanding of who Jesus Christ is and how this is literally his church.  And all these things are great in and of themselves.  But a thought that I had was that perhaps, specifically for our mission, we could create a blog that links all of these things together, so that if an individual interacted with a missionary digitally, or found a ward event on a member-friend's Facebook, any of these things would lead that individual into the huge web of the Florida Tallahassee Mission and the missionaries in it and the things that they stand for and the doctrines that they teach.  That was a really long sentence, but I'm really excited about it.  Missionary work in the 21st century.

You want to hear the most ironic thing ever?  The hardest thing about having Elder Burnett as my companion is that he is too much like me.  We are both very particular in the way that we like things, and for some reason those things don't seem to align with each other.  I particularly like to be as low maintenance as possible, just chilling when there's time and not stressing out too much.  Elder Burnett is very high maintenance and isn't afraid to tell you that the food that you eat is going to kill you after you just spent thirty minutes preparing it.  It bugs the crap out of me because there are things in him that bother me and then I look at myself and realize that I do the exact same thing and I want to just slap myself and him simultaneously.  I don't like it.  It's probably the best thing for me, because I prayed for the Lord at some point to point out my weaknesses, but he's doing it in a way that I had not expected.  When they say the Lord answers prayers through other people, he means it.  

Well, that's about all that I've got for ya.  Hope I didn't bore your ears off.

Bye,

Jack