Alaska: The New Frontier

Hey Family!!! 

I hope everything at the house is going well and of course i'm sure you're missing me! 

This week in the mission we have been focusing on fellowshipping inactive members and part member families. There are a TON of part member families and so we've just been trying to make a plan of attack, if you will, to try and bring them back in and get the rest of their family baptized. 

Fellowshipping is huge for bringing people back to church and keeping them there.  We spent some time figuring out who the families are, and who they are friends with.  We would go over and meet with them and talk about what needs are. Then we would head over to the part members house and ask if they need any service done or help around the yard. While we're working with them we start talking about the gospel and set up a time to come back and teach their families the lessons. When we teach the lessons we bring the friends to it so that they feel a lot more comfortable. We were excited when 3/3 of those families attended sacrament meeting! 

This week we went over to help Brother K out on his ranch. A ton of people out here are literally self sufficient and hardly go to the store for anything! He is a little different. He thinks that the Liberals and "Obama lovers" are trying to sneak on his land and spy on him so he has booby traps ALL OVER! When we walk around we have to always follow him so that we don't get caught in any of them. Plus he has three bomb shelters on his properties for when the "terrorists" come and bomb the back woods of Alaska. I asked him about how many acres of land he has and then he started accusing me of being a spy that was sent to come and map out his homestead. 

I little different kind of guy, buy you gotta love him! He has a big lumber mill on his property and he needed a bunch of trees cut down so he could finish his house. We went out with the chain saw and downed about 3 100ft trees and had to haul them a few hundred yards back up to the mill.  Yea so I guess you could say i'm pretty much a lumber jack now so you probably should start calling me Paul Bunyan now. He's a nice guy but our efforts might be used more productively somewhere else. 

I had my first encounter with a member of the Alaskan wildlife family yesterday the cow moose. We were walking down the steps of our a less active members house and weren't really paying any attention to anything but right as we turned the corner there was the big mama Alaskan moose with her baby about 10 yards away (keep in mind most of the members here live 2-3 miles off of the main roads on an ATV path/dirt road). They're so much bigger than the little moose back in Utah. My companion has been in Anchorage for most of his mission and all of the moose are pretty much tame there so he thought was he knew what he was doing. Our truck was the opposite direction of the moose so he figured that he could just walk to the car and be fine. The moose started charging after him but luckily she was just trying to scare him so she didn't run too far. The bad thing was now she was between me and the car! So I had to sit up on the deck for about 20 minutes for her to slowly feed away so I could make a break for the car!! Haha I got pretty scared when she started chasing after him. 

So from now on i'm expecting a weekly report from you guys and what you've been doing since I have no idea! I'm felling a little bit out of the loop.

Love you guys!!!

-Elder Brown