An open letter to the person who gave me my favorite memory...

While this is probably also Danielle, I'm gonna choose a different memory.

Dear Anne-Kate,

I will always remember the night Elder Maxfield and I came home at the end of an exhausting day, ending an even more taxing week of the most difficult and disappointing kind of missionary work, to your voice on our answering machine.

We'd been "flushed into" an area where the prior missionaries had not been doing a whole lot of work (hence they were flushed out). I was a new zone leader, training a brand new missionary, and doing absurd full days of tracting to try and get just a few investigators in a fairly wealthy area of Birmingham where most people would sooner talk to their living room wall than to us.

Dinner that night had even been disappointing. I was served fish. Not deep fried catfish or something I could stomach, something freshwater with the head and scales still on it. I made it through dinner and our short member visit and got on my bike, but it wasn't more than a few hundred feet before I was prostrate and vomiting the whole mess into somebody's bushes.

When we got home and checked the answering machine, the first call was from our only promising investigator who had just been given a heaping dose of anti-mormon literature. He had called us to say he didn't want to visit with us any more. Then your voice came on and you said, "I've read the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price and I believe everything and I'm ready to be baptized. Please let me know how soon we could do that."

Our mouths about hit the floor.

I think you probably feel like I'm the one who helps you to continue to believe, but I assure you, your call gave me a significant faith in the promises God had made me. Nothing I could do was giving us someone to teach. Then God gave us someone to baptize. And not just someone. One of my best friends in life, and a woman who taught me a tremendous amount about compassion and fairness and love.

May God always bless you with what you need and reward your diligent search for truth with understanding. May he bless you and Greg with health and strength and grace.

Worlds without end.
Allahu akbar.

Love, Elder Mooney.