Elder Jantsen Thorpe August 2017-2019: The church is true and life's good in Frankfort!

Hey gang! This week on #whatsmysnack we have some home made burgers! My new companion, elder Adams, is a stud when it comes to cooking. He has a smoker and smokes different kinds of meat every week and he makes home made bread! I'm so pumped haha! So he smoked us some hamburgers and made some fresh baked hamburger buns to go with it! I threw some avocado on that bad boy it was a lot of bun, but it was finger lickin' good!

Had a great first week down here in Frankfort! Frankfort is very different from my last two areas, Rockford and Joliet. People have a lot more money down here! The church building is real small too. The chapel isn't called a chapel, it's called the assembly room haha and there are no benches, it's all chairs you have to set up and take down. The branch is full of awesome members! Yesterday we had dinner at the Argyles and they are super cool. They have 7 kids all under the age of 15!! It's pretty wild but they are so funny. Brother Argyle is a stud, he plays basketball with us whenever he's not out of town for work. With his job he reports to the guy who reports to Warren Buffet! So yeah he makes bank. Frankfort is great though, the area is nice and clean haha unlike Rockford and Joliet. I love it, it's gonna be a great transfer.

Elder Adams and I had some pretty cool things happen to us this week. On Thursday we decided to walk to the church to do our weekly planning, in order to save some miles, elder Adams didn't think it would be that far... turns out the church was a little further away than he thought. 6 miles, 2 hours, and some sore feet later we get to the church. We do our weekly planning and right in the middle of it we hear a knock on the door. Both of us look at each other and think we might be hallucinating from the trek we just made, because who would knock on the door of the church on a Thursday afternoon. Sure enough they knock again. So we run over there and open the door and there stands a good man named L. He was interested in family history. He said he "did family history with the Mormons a while back and couldn't believe how much stuff they found for him." He told us that because most of his ancestors were slaves there weren't much, if any, records of them. But he found out a ways down the line he had a great great grandmother who was white! So he wanted the Mormons to work their magic for him again! Pretty cool experience having someone literally knock on the church. We should see him this week when we set up a meeting with the family history consultants.

Another cool thing happened as we made the long journey back to the apartment. We decided to cut through this bike path because we thought it would be shorter. Nahh, haha it added another 30 minutes but the scenery was beautiful. It wasn't until the end of the path when we realized why we had decided to cut through it. Along the way this guy about our age had ran passed us a couple times. He was all decked out in his cross country gear. Right at the end of the trail there he is again. We started making some small talk with him and he asked, why the heck are you two in suits in the forest? We said we thought you'd never ask! We got talking to him for a while and it turns out he is a theology major in college and has learned a little bit about our religion. We taught about the book of mormon and how it teaches of Jesus Christ. He was intrested so we will be teaching him more this week! It seems that every day I gain a great testimony that there are no coincidences and it's all by divine design!

Elder Adams and I are having a blast out here. He's a stud, he is going home next transfer and will be playing football at SUU. We have a lot in common so we have a lot of fun and laugh our heads off all day long. A couple mornings this week we went down to a field and I threw him some routes! It felt good to loosen up the 'ole cannon! The church is true and life's good in Frankfort!

Elder Thorpe