War's Been On For A Year Now (12/31/2018)

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Dear friends and family,

Three days from now I will hit my 1 year mark. I'm closer to that now than I will be by next week so I figured I'd make note of it today. I don't have much to say about it right now but I will be posting about it on Facebook on the day of. So, watch for that. Suffice it to say that this is by far the best decision I've ever made.

Nothing too different from last week as far as the work is concerned. I think I mentioned that Jon's baptismal date has been pushed back. We're pretty confident he'll be able to make it by the 12th of January.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this but the family we were hoping to teach kinda fell through. They still have a possible connection with some members we got them in contact with, but we sadly pushed them away for the time being with our imbalance of too much enthusiasm and not enough tact. Pretty sad, but I know one day things will turn around.

The last two days have consisted of nothing but finding. Cold, boots-on-the-ground, bare-knuckle finding. It's a tough challenge sometimes, like we have to claw and fight our way to success in this spiritual war against sin and faithlessness. We went to some places in the area we hadn't really been before, like Jeromesville, Ohio. Some of these small towns are so quiet! Tracting is pretty much the only thing we can do or otherwise we'll almost never see anybody. Hopefully that's just because it's cold outside.

The final three-hour block of church was yesterday. Pretty odd that church will only be two hours from now on. I have mixed feelings about that, I think, because on one hand I will get less out of church each week (and I don't know how much time, if any, we as missionaries will get to do the Come, Follow Me booklet), but on the other hand people we teach will be more comfortable with two hours rather than three.

I finally got (most of) the pictures from off my camera and onto my cell phone so now I can actually send them to you all. I definitely won't be sending them all at once. Hah. We're gonna do a bit at a time each week, reminiscing as we go down memory lane. So I'm not gonna be sending an email without pictures attached for a long time!

See you in 2019.

Love,
Elder Gallagher

PICS:
- "Alien" lakes from our area that Elder Lewis and I found. Lake 1 looks like the chestburster and lake 2 looks like the full-grown xenomorph. Pretty funny. Heh.
- The first pictures I took using my camera when I got to the apartment in Las Vegas. I kinda miss that place. Still the cleanest apartment I've had. Though maybe that was mostly Elder Smith's doing.



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