A Difficult Week

We were able to call Ben last week, as we had to break the news to him

that his sweet cousin Leah had passed away.  It was so hard to hear him sobbing on the other 

end of the phone.  Leah and Ben had a very special relationship.

Here is his email from this week... It seems he had quite an adventure with some severe winds in California!

Family,

   Yeah, it has been a difficult week. Looking at all the pictures from the funeral and just thinking about Leah is making me cry. That came as a huge surprise to me. I've been praying for Linda and Al all week, I hope everyone is doing okay. Make sure they know I love them!

    Honestly, this has probably been the craziest week of my mission. I don't know if you guys have heard about the wind storm in southern California... but I live right in the center of where it hit. We were out of power for 4 days! It hit Wednesday night, I didn't sleep at all haha. We woke up in the morning and looked out of our apartment, it didn't look super bad, just some flower pots broken and a broken umbrella is all we saw, so we didn't think much of it. When we left our apartment though... that's when we saw the damage. Tons of trees were fallen over, tons of road closures, and absolutely no power anywhere. It took us almost an hour to drive to the church building that day because all the lights had to be treated as stop signs and all the road closures. So that night we came home and used a candle to plan and stuff. And to top things off, the next day we were driving and our car broke down, so we had to have some other elders drive us around for a while. It was an extremely ineffective week, and I just felt super weird all week. But that's okay, things happen! But yeah, they say this kind of storm hasn't hit this area in a way long time, so I do feel kind of cool to be apart of it. Yesterday at church a member brought a generator, and we lit the primary room with lamps that some members brought from home and had sacrament there. It was a really touching testimony meeting, everyone talked about how grateful they were for the food storage they had saved up and how nobody was hurt. The sacrament meeting ended up going for 2 hours because so many people wanted to share, it was really sweet. Our high priest group leader told a story, after the wind storm his wife wanted to go out and find a place to charge their cell phones, so she and his son left. When he was shutting the garage, the wind caused the garage to shut really fast and it clipped off one of his fingers... at that time there was no electricity and his wife had his cell phone, he couldn't even call 911! But his son had a feeling to come back, and they were able to take him to the hospital in time. Crazy stuff.

   Well I love you guys. I hope everything is going alright. I got a confirmation in my prayers that Leah is in a better place. I'm grateful for her.

Love, Ben.