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Week 71: Do You Think They'll Ever Build a Railroad Feat. Pictures of Sheep

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Dear Loved Ones, When I was in elementary school, I loved playing the computer game Oregon Trail. Not the really pixelated version from back when computers were young. Version 5.0 has these fancy animated cut scenes where you watch a family of pioneer kids make their way out to Oregon to meet their dad, surviving rattlesnakes and rapids along the way. In one scene, the oldest brother asks their trail guide, "Jim, do you think they'll ever build a railroad here?" Of course they will! It was totally obvious to me, sitting at my high tech computer in 2007, that railroads out west could be a thing. The cut scenes were set in the 1850s, so I knew they'd see the railroad in their lifetime. And yet they talk about it like it's some far-flung possibility. Don't they know that the future is long? Don't they know that the world isn't going to end that soon and there's plenty of time for,railroads, and not only railroads but cars and planes and spaceship...
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Week 73: Words on Far West

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Dear Loved Ones, This week marked my final zone conference. Usually I hate these because they drill us on obedience and never get into something as menial as the gospel or teaching lessons.  But this time, we held it outdoors at Far West with about sixty-two other missionaries. My companion and I (all two of us) can't teach one person indoors or outdoors, but is a truth, universally acknowledged, that people outdoors sitting four inches apart have different germs than people do indoors. Far West never attracts so much attention as Liberty or Independence or Adam-ondi-Ahman. Taken at face value, it's just another place the church was headquartered, like Kirtland or Nauvoo, and unlike those two cities, it wasn't really taken over by anyone else after the Saints left. I once heard it said, "The most remarkable thing about Far West is that there's nothing there." Five thousand of us lived here at one point, and now there's nothing. Nothing but the cor...
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Week 49: Temples and Timing

Dear Loved Ones, This week I did something I've wanted to for a long time: I taught a restoration branch person! Before I moved to Independence, I thought the RLDS church became the Community of Christ, but that's not really what happened. That's like saying Henry VIII's Catholics all became Anglicans. In 1984, RLDS women were given the priesthood (though they still don't speak or pray in church, so I'm not sure of the function of that) and people who didn't like that formed splinters groups. They all have names like Church of Jesus Christ Outreach Restoration Branch, Church of Jesus Christ New Jerusalem Restoration Branch, Church of Jesus Christ Living Hope Restoration Branch, Mount Zion Restoration Branch, etc. I don't think there's any central prophet or leader. It's just every pastor for himself. The woman we met with this week goes to the Outreach branch. She was very nice and has a love for the Book of Mormon and a genealogy sheet mappin...
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