May 27, 2014 at 1:17 PM
Amigos!!!
So, no one at church for us today, dad, but we keep hoping
and working. Congrats to Juston on all the hurrah for Israel going on.
I didn't know y'all were going camping. Good stuff.
Life's good. as always.
We had a beautiful memorial day yesterday, and we had a
crazy adventure. So, we went mountain biking with President again.
Another 8 elders joined us. So, another Elder and myself were the
sweepers, so we followed in back to make sure no one got left behind.
There was one Elder who was struggling a little bit, so we got separated
from the main group. When we got to this fork in the road, we asked these
other bikers who were fixing a flat at the fork, which way the big group had
gone. They said left, so left we went. Too make what could be a
very long story shorter, left was not the correct direction. So instead
of just heading back out for a few miles they way we had come in, we took this
crazy 8.2 mile loop. We were already out of water, and our struggling
Elder had even less energy than before; however, we didn't know that we had
gone the long and wrong way until after this was all over. But seriously,
it was one of the craziest adventures I have ever been on. I'll just tell
you a few highlights, but this was an amazing and intense experience, but also
spiritual in some ways. We had some moments where I felt like an early
pioneer. My saliva got thicker and thicker; I started getting a head
ache. My lips got really dry, and I felt drained and exhausted, and there
was no end in sight. Finally, we had another pioneer experience where 2
elders came back on the trail and found us, exhausted and low on hope.
They stayed behind with the struggling Elder and sent us along so we
could just power through to the end. The Elder told us that we had like
40 minutes left though when we met and my heart sunk. But we started
going. Eventually, the other elder with me passed on ahead and I was
alone, biking in the woods, dehydrating. Several times, I just couldn't
go any further, and I had to stop and I just draped myself over my bike.
At one point, I tried to swing my leg off my bike, and both legs seized
up and cramped and I couldn't do anything about it. I just fell into the
side on some pine straw and rotten wood, hoping that the ticks wouldn't crawl
in me. I just had to lay there, and eventually, I crawled to the
trail and laid all the way down. I just couldn't go anymore. I
probably laid there for like 15-20 minutes. I think I fell asleep for
part of it. I was having periodic conversations with Heavenly Father, and
I had a bunch of random weird thoughts going through my head, like "what
would I do if my family needed me?" I had Romans 8:31 float through
my head. And somehow, I was granted the strength to count to 3, stand up
and keep moving. I felt some heavenly mental encouragement as I went,
especially in a few cases where I just wanted to get off my bike again. I
felt so dehydrated and drained. All I had for lunch was a powerbar at
12:30. We started biking at 1:30, and because of our detour, we didn't
get out of the forest until 7:00 at night. President had gone down to the
convenience store at bought Gatorades, waters, and candy bars, so when I came
out, I just sat down and started drinking water. I might have been
semi-delirious. It was hard in the forest because I didn't have an end in
sight, nor did I know how much longer I had, but I knew that I didn't have any
water or food, and I wasn't sure if my body would have the capability of continuing.
It had nothing left to burn. I probably burned well over
2000-2500 calories... and the longer I was in there, the less energy I
would have. Hope was hard to come by, but I asked Heavenly Father to give
me strength. I told Him I couldn't do this by myself. It was a
crazy experience, but an incredible and memorable one. We definitely
bonded as missionaries. Oh, and as a side note, I probably went over my
handlebars 4 or 5 times. I ran straight into a tree and twisted my ankle
on it before sliding down the slope in a clump. I wish I had some of
these on video. For example, one of them, which has left a huge bruise on
my hip, I was going down this slope; I picked up a lot of speed, and then my
feet lost the pedals; I was semi-flailing, managed to snake between 2 large
trees before losing my balance at the same time of hitting my brakes and I
superman-ed at a significant speed. I landed straight on my hip and then
proceeded to plummet forward several more feet before I came to a complete stop
by kicking a tree stump with my ankle. Groaning, I stood up and walked it
off . . . for we had a long way to go :) Now mom, don't freak out too
much; I'm still alive, so all is well as manifested by me typing this email. ;)
So, we're teaching this ex-Baptist preacher, who basically
forsook Christianity as a whole, and I have an analogy to describe the
difficulty of helping someone who once professed such great faith and then
forsook it, to regain faith. It's a lot more difficult than helping
someone grow in faith or build from scratch. It would be as if I asked
you to eat this chocolate chip cookie I had made, but I had poisoned it, so it
made you sick for the next month. At the end of the month of sickness, I
came back to you with another Chocolate cookie, professing that this one was
better and wouldn't make you sick. What is the likelihood of you taking
that cookie, slim to none. Why? Because of your life-shattering negative
experience in the past. He's super nice though, and he said the prayer at
the end, which was a shock to his girlfriend, but he said the Mormons asked him
to :) But in his prayer, he said ," Dear God, the elders are
cool." That's how he started it :) It was great. We left
him with a ton of chapters to read in the Book of Mormon, so hopefully he'll
read them. We're going back over there this Wednesday evening.
Life's good.
Not much else to say. We're striving to find new
investigators, ones that are willing to progress/have more than 1 lesson before
dropping us like a stuck pig.
Thanks for being the best family, ever :) Love,
Elder Thornton
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