Elder Burch π: “With the morning comes the rest of my life...”

Jedi and Sith,

I’ve been thinking about time periods, and how certain periods of time seem shorter than others, even if they’re the same length. I don’t really know how to describe it. Like, when I think back on history, the time period between 1947 and 1977 seems a lot longer than the time period between 1776 and 1806, even though they are both periods of thirty years. *shrug* Ah, well

This week was pretty awesome. Good news: We found a new investigator! Bad news: They are currently residing in the Cascade County Regional Prison. But, hey! Everyone needs, the gospel, right?

There have been some really cool experiences with following the Spirit this week. Like, there was this time we had twenty minutes before dinner. What do we do? Twenty minutes is pretty easy to just shrug off, but I had the impression that we needed to try a person, this “new investigator” that was in our area book, but I’d only met once of the numerous times we had tried to contact him. I even said in my heart, “Okay, Spirit, if they don’t answer, or if they DO answer and don’t set a specific return appointment, I am going to drop them.” We parked across the street, said a quick prayer, and knocked on the door. Lo and behold, he was there. And he was cordial. And we set a return appointment for Friday at 3pm (which went great, by the way). As we walked back to our car, I felt like the Spirit was giving me that kind of raised eyebrows I-told-you-so look. And, then we felt to try one other person before heading to dinner, this referral from a member in the other stake. We tried him, and got another specific return appointment. The Spirit is really working with us, and it is cool to see those moments where you realize truly how little you control, and how often God has His finger on your head pointing you to where you need to go.

Sunday morning, we are doing our studies before church, when we hear this rustling over by our washer and dryer. It sounds like a small animal is scratching around back there or something, but we don’t see anything. We’d heard something like this a few days before, but it had stopped relatively quickly, plus we live in a complex, so we figured it must just be the neighbors. This time, it happened again, and the exhaust hose of the drier even moved a little bit. Weird. I tried to pass it off as temperature and pressure changes in the exhaust vent, but continued scratching noises caused that theory to be destroyed. So, we scooted the drier out, and disconnected the vent at the bottom, and kept studying, seeing if anything would happen. It did, but nothing came out, so we finally took the hose out of the hole in the wall, and found a little bird inside of it. We put a torn piece of bread in there for the little guy. Eventually, he flew out, and we had to trap him in a box, but we were eventually able to release him into the outside again, and make it to church on time. Score!

I have been studying agency in the Book of Mormon and I have never had more powerful or insightful study sessions. I highly recommend reading through the entire Book of Mormon with one topic in mind. It’s crazy cool what you might find. Agency is a cool place to start. Helaman 6 is a wild chapter.

Thank you all for reading! I hope you do well.

Rock and roll ~

Elder Stephen Burch π

“With this empty glass, I will break the past. ... I want this to be my awakening.”