A Miracle Saved My Life

     Oh my goodness, this week sucked. It was filled with depression and dark thoughts galore, but it's ok because I've been given an absolute miracle. 

      Tuesday through Thursday was absolutely awful, I could barely function. We did basically no missionary work though I tried to a couple of times and quickly discovered that I'm not currently capable of missionary work. Really the only good thing I remember from those days is that one of my friends brought me In-N-Out and I got to talk to them about things. 

      I woke up Friday feeling 100% trapped. Things were going so poorly that I felt like it was only a matter of time before I gave up. This would make you think that I should come home, but I highly doubt that would've been helpful. So I felt like a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off with nothing I could do about it. 

      That sounds pretty bad and it was, but luckily Friday morning is when I got my miracle. If any of you guys have forgotten, the Utah Layton Mission along with 9 others are piloting the integration of service and proselyting missionaries. Well since that was introduced back in July, it's been deemed successful and will be incorporated into every mission in the world by the end of the year. Well as of last week our mission will be the first and only mission to be doing a pilot within the pilot. So what's happening is there's 1 service missionary who will be serving a full-time proselyting mission and 2 proselyting missionaries who will be serving full-time service missions, all within their originally assigned mission. So what I'll be doing is I'm going from a full-time proselyting mission to full-time service mission, but unlike the other 2 that switched from proselyting to service, the plan for me is to keep me as a service missionary serving in Layton, Utah for only a transfer or 2 and then they'll transfer me back to being a full-time proselyting missionary. The reason this is such a good plan is that it takes away a lot of the stress of serving a proselyting mission which will allow time for the medication that I'm on to kick in. (Oh yeah, I don't think I told you guys that about 3 months ago I made the massive mistake of thinking that I no longer needed medication and have just recently started taking it again) 

      So why is this a miracle? I'll explain. As I've already mentioned I literally didn't think I would be able to survive if I stayed as a proselyting missionary or if I went home and did a service mission. Those 2 things used to be the only options and still are the only options for every mission in the world other than Layton Utah. In case you're wondering, there are currently 411 missions in the world. So the odds that it was taking place in the same mission I'm in is so low. Also, the fact that it's happening right at this time is a miracle. Like I said earlier, they started doing this last week. We've had an integrated mission for 8 or 9 months now and I don't know how long service missions have been around, but it's been decades without any change. Another reason is a big deal that it's happening right now is this is a pilot. It's only guaranteed to last 2 transfers, after that the opportunity might never be available to anyone ever again. Another thing that makes this so incredibly improbable is that it's President Johnson here. My counselor told me that President Johnson is such a forward thinker and creative person and that he doesn't think there's another mission president in the world that would have this as an option. Again, off of pure chance this would be so incredibly improbable. Currently, I'm the only missionary in the entire world that can swap back and forth like this and I get to do this staying in Utah. 

      This experience has given me a strong testimony of a verse in the Bible. 1 Corinthians 10:13 seems tailor made for this experience, "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." I'm so grateful for the opportunity I've been given. I don't have any details on how this is actually going to work, but I'm so confident that it will work. 

      Today is my year mark, kinda a weird thing to just throw into the end of the email, but because of that I decided to just include some of my favorite pictures

      God wants me here and I guess I'll go and figure out the reason, Elder Blacker