First week in Colorado!

October 23, 2014

This week was....incredibly difficult. I lost track of how many times I thought of coming home, and not just thought about coming home, but seriously considered it. I never thought that being in the mission field would be so difficult, but really what it comes down to is me battling my selfish desires to go back to an easier life. 

Quick synopsis of everything:

My mission president is a self proclaimed zealot of the white handbook...so yeah.

It also turns out that our mission is one of the more disobedient ones. Ironic how that works. I believe Gordon B. Hinckley said "if the church weren't true, the missionaries would have destroyed it a long time ago".

We don't currently have iPads in our mission, but I'm quite convinced our mission president has them and just refuses to give them to us. It might be wise on his part, since who knows what they'd actually be used for, but it's still frustrating. 

I had P-day on Thursday this week since my companion is at the temple right now. The reason I didn't go with him is because if I did, it would have counted as my "year mark temple trip"...I'm not particularly fond of that ruling. My P-day will almost always be on Monday, and every time I get transferred to a new area I can email that Wednesday.

We've actually had a lot of success this week, thanks to my so called greenie fire (that's not what I think it is, but my companion is giving me the credit).. I insist that I actually would rather sleep than go out and try to understand what the heck is going on in Spanish, but my comp says it's my burning, greenie fire. We've added about 5 or 7 investigators this week, and so far I haven't had to go knock doors because we've had enough appointments.

Cool thing about everyone having the light of Christ and foreknowledge of the gospel: one of our investigators, a 17 year old girl that has relatively little Bible or scriptural knowledge and doesn't know hardly anything about our church asked us, "How did God become God?". Not "why is God God", but "how did God become God". I was amazed that she had even thought of that question. It's kind of hard to answer that in a first lesson, though.  Also in another lesson with her, I'm 95% sure that a certain legalized drug was being used just in the other room of the trailer, the smell wafting around us as we are trying to teach about the Savior. Good 'ol Colorado.

My companion is freakishly similar to me in some regards. He didn't particularly want to serve a mission, wanting to get married instead, he hated his mission the first little bit, he's a self proclaimed hopeless romantic, and then I got really freaked out when I found out that his birthday was also the same as mine. He keeps trying to tell me how my mission is going to go, that I'll hate it for awhile, go home for health problems, come back and love the mission, but really I'm just hoping to skip to part 3 of that and be happy. 

In summary, I'm glad to be in the US, but man has this week been hard to get over myself. I came up with the brilliant idea to carry around good scriptures in my pocket, and every time I think of wanting to go home to instead pull them out and read/memorize them. I encourage you all to try and think of ways to turn difficult times into ways to learn and progress. Hope you all have an awesome week! And I'd love it if you could keep me in your prayers. Second best option would be to send me some candy, since I don't think they sell strawberry sour belts here since there's no Winco...

If you want to send me letters or packages, my address is:

Elder Kennon Bacon

5285 McWhinney Blvd Suite 100

Loveland, CO 80538

That'll be my address for the whole 2 years, since they just forward letters to our current addresses. Also, if you send any packages, make sure it's via USPS, since that's the only company they can legally forward packages with. Thanks!

The pics: one is obviously my companion and I, another is the sunrise from the plane (the sun was on the opposite side of the plane), and the third is an aerial of somewhere over where we flew...sorry I don't have a lot of awesome pics.

PS.  Oh! I had dinner with this family called the Porters, who grew up in Orem. We got to talking, I said my grandparents are the Woolley's, and then he asked about Rebecca. I said that was my mom, and he freaked out. He went to a high school dance with my mom!