Arizona Week 35 - Interviews

Hey everyone,

This was a pretty ordinary week. The only thing different was that we had interviews with President Sweeney. This is always a good experience, especially up here in the mountains because we really only get to talk to him once every six weeks. It becomes an event of sorts.

So today I don't have any crazy stories (last week's makes up for it). The only thing I want to share today are some things that President Sweeney shared with me. We were asked to come prepared to bury a metaphorical weapon of rebellion. I pondered for a while on what I could sacrifice and decided that the only thing that leads to rebellion is pride. I decided to bury my pride so that the Lord could better use me to do his work. I told this to President Sweeney, and he asked what the opposite of pride was. I quickly responded, "Humility," but he said he disagrees. He told me that, for him, the opposite of pride was charity. This puzzled me. I've always been taught that humility and pride are opposite. He went on to explain more using the scriptures. He shared with me Moroni 7:45 from The Book of Mormon Which is a commonly used verse on Charity that reads: 

"And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

Having heard this verse many times I wasn't sure where he was going with this. Then he continued and it made sense to me. He had me read it over replacing "charity" with "pride" instead and also to replace all the attributes of charity with their opposites which would go like this,

"And pride is impatient, and rude, and envies the things of others, and is very puffed up, seeketh after his own, is always easily provoked, thinketh of evil constantly, and rejoiceth in iniquity and despises the truth, beareth nothing, believeth nothing, hopeth nothing, endureth nothing."

Is that not also an accurate statement? This helped me to better understand what it is I need to bury and what I should be trying to attain.

I just wanted to share that experience and insight with all of you.

I hope you all have a great week and happy Valentine’s Day. I love you all. I hope the best for you.

Elder Kirk

Arizona Week 34 - The Hike

Hey everyone,

This week had a lot going on. On Thursday, we went to the Gilbert Temple Open House with a family that wants to be sealed in the temple. It's a beautiful temple! And big! In fact, it's the biggest temple built in the last 17 years and its main sealing room is the largest in the Church with the ability to contain 80 people. The main motif throughout (and I mean throughout) is the AGAVE plant symbolizing learning from those before you and interweaving with past generations. It’s a wonderful message to send to people and to remember in the House of the Lord.

Also, we have had two wonderful experiences with fasting this week. I may have mentioned that our area will be splitting this coming transfer so that the two wards we cover will each have their own set of missionaries. Because of this, we have been trying to get more work in the more neglected of the two wards so that the missionaries who will be there after the next transfer don't suffer so much. We fasted on Friday for help in this endeavor. JUST as we were breaking our fast (the only closer to the exact moment of breaking the fast would be if my teeth were actually touching the food) we received a phone call from one of the members of this ward. She asked if we could come and teach one of her tenants on the coming Tuesday. She explained that she had been feeling prompted to ask him if he would like to learn more, and he agreed. The second experience with fasting came from the stake fast for snow. About the time that most people would begin their fast (after dinner on Saturday) sure enough the clouds rolled in and the snow began. We received roughly 3 inches of snow in answer to our fasting and prayer.

Now to the crazy story from which this email receives its title; it is long but I promise you will enjoy it. Here we go:

Remember Old 9? That truck that we are using that has basically unlimited miles...yeah. So, we were trying to plan what crazy things we would do on Monday (our preparation day) with our unlimited miles. We finally decided that we would like to go way out to the boundary of the Ward near a ski resort called Sunrise. So, Monday came, we emailed, shopped, got changed, and hit the road. In about 30 - 40 minutes we got to Sunrise. And then we went 2 miles past it to where the road is closed. We parked the truck so that we could look around. The time now was roughly 2:30 or 2:40.

In the distance, my companion could see a hill that was black. Probably just burnt but let's check it out! We crawled through the barbed wire fence and began our trek. The terrain was that of plains but rather bumpy and populated with many rocks and stones that tormented our feet. As we walked, we looked back periodically to see if the truck was still within sight. The truck is red; not too hard to miss.

So we continued. We crested a very small hill where the plains bottlenecked between a fence on our left and some dense wooded area to our right. We now entered the second portion of the plains that was fairly larger than the first. The hill we were aspiring to get to was a tad bit further than it had originally seemed. How deceptive. Yet we continued. Once we arrived at the base of the hill the confirmation of its burnt nature came to us. However, we had not come this far to stand at the base.

We began our ascent. About 1/4 of the way up we spotted some movement toward the crest. Elk! A herd of elk numbering about 50. Whoa! Never having encountered elk before, we called the man whose garage we live in to ask about the characteristics of their behavior. The reply we received was, "I wouldn't go pet one..." Alright, keep our distance but don't be afraid to keep climbing. Sure enough, they fled before we got much closer.


We continued the climb, and were becoming very winded, our pace decreased. We finally reached the top. The time was now 4:30. The plan was to climb up the bare face of the hill and come back down through the forested, un-burnt portion, go across the plains again and back through the forest part (where the bottle neck was) followed by the other portion of plains and back to the truck. --- Allow me to pause for a moment to describe our attire and equipment. For attire, I am wearing a pair of jeans and Vans shoes, a t-shirt and a canvas type jacket. My companion is wearing Athletic shoes, a pair of shorts, and a t-shirt. Our equipment included our phone and our cameras. Water, we had none. Food, I brought a single granola bar that I had just consumed. Now that you have a visual of our preparation, I will continue. --- We began our descent through the woods. It took us less time to go back down the hill than it had going up. We started across the plains towards the trees, shooting for the right side of them so that we would be roughly where we came through in the first place. As we walked, we begin to realize that we had been walking across a frozen marsh near a frozen pond. Hmmm...don't remember that. After we gingerly walked through the frozen waste (breaking through the ice occasionally) we arrived at the trees with cold wet feet.

There was a good amount of snow cover in these woods. We tried to walk across the top but with little success. We trudged through snow that was about calf-deep. It was very pretty through this area, and we were enjoying snapping pictures. I realized that the sun was starting to descend behind the mountains in the distance. I picked up the pace of climbing this much-bigger-than-expected hill when the snow deepened in an instant. When I say it deepened I am talking hip deep. My entire leg was below the level of the snow, and I continued that way all the way to the top of the hill (about 15-20 more steps).

Finally, we arrived at the top just in time to catch a picture of the sunset (the reason I sped to the top). Beautiful!






But there was a fence in front of us that was travelling perpendicular to the direction we expected. After a few moments, we realized that we were in the wrong bunch of trees. From the perspective of the top of the black hill we were on the right side of the section of trees to the right of the woods we wanted to be in. Between us and where we supposed to be was a frozen pond. With great difficulty, we crossed this frozen pond breaking through again and again as we went. So now, we didn't just have snow in our shoes but they were also soaked with ice water. The sun was down now…let's just establish that. We got to the bottleneck and couldn’t remember if we had come in along the fence line or if we gone cross country. We decided to travel at a slight angle away from the fence in the direction we assumed would land us right at the truck. With the sun down, the rocks and stones along the way tormented us all the more. Blistered feet with stubbed toes were attached to our bodies with twisted and strained ankles. Then, in the low light we could make out a pile of bones that had been picked clean by some predator. Companion began to worry about coyotes. I had wolves on my mind. – When we told people about this experience, they expressed that they were glad that bears hadn’t gotten us. -- We resolved to move back toward the fence hoping that it would lead to where we needed to go. This fence was not one that we remembered but we assumed it would lead to a fence that we did recognize. We paused for a moment along the way to again call the man whose garage we live in. We told him that we couldn’t find our truck. "You lost your truck?" he asked. "No", we replied, "We're lost." We told him that we figured we could find our way back but also told him that we would call him in 20 minutes or so. We then came to a fence that was perpendicular to the one we were following. Not knowing how turned around we had gotten; we prayed to know which way to go. After the close of our prayer, we looked to the right, and then to the left and there, off in the distance, was a little blinking light that was barely visible. We figured that it was a good sign of which direction we should go. We walked for about 15 minutes along that fence, and we come to another fence. In the darkness, we didn’t realize that our truck was literally 10 feet from this fence. We finally noticed it, crawled through the fence, got into the truck and we were safe. The light that we had seen earlier was the "road closed" sign that I mentioned at the beginning of my story. The time was now 6:50 and the outside temperature was 26 degrees. Needless to say, we learned a good lesson about preparation from this adventure. And boy, have we been using this in our lessons to teach doctrinal principals through spiritual parallels.

Anyway, I am safe and well. I hope you all enjoyed my thrilling story. Have a great week.

Elder Kirk

Arizona Week 33 - Old 9

Hi Everyone,

It's been an interesting week. We dropped our truck off at the repair shop on Monday to get the door dent fixed (someone backed into the truck in November before I got here). We get quite a way back home (the shop is in Show Low), and they call to say that the key didn’t unlock the door. So we had to drive all the way back to give them the remote. We got home and then the time began where we had no transportation for ourselves. We spent the rest of that night hopping from person to person that could drive us around. The next day came, and we did the same thing. By Wednesday we found out that we would be without the truck until the following Thursday....It's going to be a long week...but then we decided to call the vehicle coordinator for the mission and whine to him for about 10 minutes. He finally decided to be merciful to us. So on Thursday, he came up the mountain with "Old 9." This is the truck that he's been using for the past few months. It's a Chevy Colorado like ours was but it is red instead of white. As he handed me the keys he looked me in the eye and said, "We just got it detailed and ready to sell. Be careful with it..." I stated that I understood and began to walk away when he called out again, "Be careful with it..." So we've been trying to be nice to Old 9 this week. 

The other day we got home and were getting ready for bed when my companion points out a spider on the wall. A big fat brown one! I must have the qualities of my mother because I was instantly filled with fear. I petition my companion for its immediate death. My companion gives the OK but expresses that he cannot kill a living thing...oh, brother. It is now up to me to climb on the chair with my shoe to squish this unwelcome intruder. Not knowing what kind of spider it was or what super powers it had, I was very cautious. Trying to keep as much of my body as far away as I could I swung my shoe and It SLAPS against the wall....just below the spider! A small shriek escapes me. He starts to crawl up the wall. Another swing! Again my shoe just misses but this time the spider falls off the wall onto the floor. Leaping from the chair I began to be in shock as he moves towards the door, I am unable to move. I realized that he would soon be protected by going under the threshold.  I violently began to beat the ground with my shoe to no avail. He found shelter. In a last ditch attempt, I sprayed Permethrin (bed bug repellant) around the door hoping that this would poison him. Sleep did not come easy for me that night. However, last night, we found him....in the garage. The same mistake was not going to be made twice. We weren't going to take any chances so we went upstairs to get the owner of the house to kill it. As a side note, the man mentioned that his wife had heard our…scratch that…MY screams the night of the incident.

The work is going well here though. One of our wards is going to have a fast for missionary work that will last 40 days. This will definitely bring the needed work to the area. Also, the whole stake will be fasting for snow on the 2nd of February so if you find that you have run out of things to pray for, ask for Arizona's White Mountains to get snow. I don't feel like getting evacuated in the summer when the fires start.

I hope you all have a great week

Elder Kirk

Arizona Week 32 Mountain Life

Hey Everyone,

It's been fun up here in the mountains. Things are fairly different here. It's quieter and cleaner and colder. I'm enjoying it though. There's a lot more to do here. The place that we stay in (the garage apartment) is newly made so all the junk left over from the construction was still in the front of it. We decided to help out the man whose home we live at so the three of us started cleaning it up one morning. This didn't last too long though because he soon asked if we knew about the zipline that went through his backyard. It isn’t his zipline but it does go on part of his lot. So, we decided to test it out. We learned, after we all crashed at the bottom that this zipline was designed for children that weigh much less than we do. We also learned about how stopping at the end is supposed to happen. There is a tire at the bottom that we now know is meant to be slid up on the cable so that it will be a more gradual stop. The way we had it, we were basically hitting directly into a bracket behind the tire. It was a good time though and we did end up finishing the job we started. Over the course of the cleanup, we found 6 mice living in the pile...only 1 got away. Natural instinct took over at the discovery of the infestation because this poor family had been finding droppings throughout their house. I hope that we contributed to the solution.       





 Our garage apartment. 















The view out the front door.

The town here is pretty neat. There are some cool little shops and everything is mountain themed country stuff so I'm really enjoying it. I bought a little knife at a shop here that I think gives a good indicator of what the area is like. 

We're hoping to take a family that we are teaching to the Gilbert Temple Open House. It will be a really good experience for them because they want to be sealed in the temple.

It's a little different to be in the middle of nowhere. We rarely see other missionaries. But on the upside, when we finish planning for the following day, we can go to sleep. When you live with other missionaries, you stay up till the very last minute. 

Just for fun!

I'm having a great time here. Hopefully it will snow soon. People are getting worried about how dry it is. I hope you all have a great week.

Elder Kirk

Arizona Week 31 - Road Trip

Hey Everyone,

So, I'm sure I mentioned that we were going to have a special tri mission conference where the Apostle, Elder Holland was going to visit us. This was going to happen in Mesa, so we began the 4 hour drive on Friday afternoon planning to stay with missionaries down there. No sooner had we begun to leave than our zone leaders called to ask if we had a way to get there and to inform us that Elder Holland had been given a special assignment and would not be with us at the conference but would be replaced by Elder Wright of the Seventy. I know Elder Wright from the time I served in his ward in Mesa. I was, of course, disappointed that we would not see Elder Holland but I knew that Elder Wright would do a great job as well. 

The drive down went smoothly, and we arrived safely. We spent the night in my last apartment with good ol' Elder Davis. It was very fun. My companion spoke in a Dutch type accent for the night and fooled all the Elders in the apartment to thinking that he was from Holland. 

The meeting was wonderful. There were great testimonies shared and Elder Wright did a wonderful job. I felt bad for him because at one point he paused and said, "No one is more disappointed that Elder Holland isn't here...than me." You could tell that it was a shock to him when he was asked to fill in for an Apostle. I was able to see many of the missionaries from my MTC district that landed in the Mesa mission so that was a treat. 

The drive back went well also. We arrived late Saturday night and now it's back to work. I hope you all have a great week.

Elder Kirk

P.S. While they were gathered for the Mission Conference, they took a picture of the entire mission. Elder Kirk is in the back row in the center next to the elder in sunglasses.

Arizona Week 30 - Five Forests

Hello Everyone,

Transfers were this week. I have been moved to the Pinetop area in the White Mountains. I'm sad to leave the area in Mesa. I had made good friendships with many of them. Nevertheless, the Lord has a task for me to complete here, and I will work hard to do it. My new companion, Elder Burggraaf, is from Alpine, Utah. He got into the mission a transfer after I did. He's a really nice guy, and I think that we'll work well together. 

Before leaving Mesa, I was able to help out a family that hopes to be sealed in the temple. We've become close with them. The missionaries in that area will soon move into the same apartment complex that they are and so will be their neighbors. We helped clean and organize the garage attached to their apartment. It used to be the maintenance shed and so it was full of all sorts of random junk. The whole job took about 4 hours and it looked dang good when we got done. They had their baby boy blessed on Sunday, and we were able to participate in the blessing. 

Elder Davis was pretty upset that I wouldn't be in the same apartment as him up until he goes home. We had become really good friends over the past few months. 

Transfer day went smoothly. I got pretty much everything packed up. In my new area, we will be driving a truck instead of a car or being on bicycles.  I have been assigned as the driver of our Chevy Colorado. Also, we have a quasi smart phone because the other phones don't get enough service in the mountains. 

The drive up to my new area was so pretty. I didn't realize that Arizona actually has trees. It took about 3-4 hours to get here. Of interest, we drove through five National Forests on the way here. We live in a garage that has been converted into a studio apartment. It is 40 degrees outside and there are little patches of snow around where we live. I'm excited to be here and to have a new opportunity to serve in another area. 

I hope you all have a good new year and that you accomplish the things that you want to. I hope you all have a great week.

Elder Kirk

A Letter From a Sister in Elder Kirk's Ward

Here's a photo of some people you know!  Elder Watson and Elder Kirk have been serving in our ward for the past few months and have done a terrific job.  Not a pair that wastes any time,they have been so good at putting all the puzzle pieces together - who is related to whom (many of us), whose home this couple now lives in and remembering names, faces and relationships. They have worked well together and have had a good measure of success.  Most of all, they have motivated us as ward members to join in the great gathering that is spreading across the world!


They have been quick to lend a hand to those who need it and look for ways they could serve others.  Yesterday, they picked bags and bags of citrus from some member's trees and planned to deliver them to some of those who have been listening to their message.  When many weren't home, they came to our
house and spent some time juicing, learning to section a grapefruit and
make orange "cupcakes."  (A skill they'll be certain to show you when they get home.)



We love these elders and are so grateful for their consecrated service to the people in our ward and most especially to our Heavenly Father.  As parents, you should be very proud of them and the work they are doing.  They are representing you and your family well.  However, we are sad to see Elder Kirk go up north and leave the "true" ward.  He he he :)