Was It Hypothermia Or A Holy Moment?

So, I'm in the middle of Iowa, specifically Cherdan, Iowa, which no one has ever heard of, I'm assuming, about two and a half hours away from Des Moines.

It is February of 2025.

It is snowing everywhere, glistening snow, but also extremely annoying snow.

Our cars have gotten stuck on the way up multiple times.

So as a second year focused missionary, I'm trying to be as spontaneous with the guys as possible, as adventurous as possible.

And a lot of these guys are really struggling with addiction to phone, And not being able to get out into the outdoors and be childlike.

So I planned this amazing trip over to my buddy's cabin in Iowa.

And we got nine other guys to come join myself.

We drove out there.

And it was going to be a pretty smooth trip until the snow started hitting.

It was a bit of a disaster to drive out there, obviously.

The three-hour drive.

And as we got there, it was pretty hard snow by that point.

And the boys were in for quite the adventure of a weekend.

Some of the activities that we started diving into right off the bat to take advantage of the snow was building some of the biggest snowmen you've ever seen.

Insane snowball fights.

We snuck into the garage and took out the ATVs.

Then we had to, of course, go into the woods, climbing trees, jumping off of branches, building snow mounts to jump into, playing king of the hill.

Anything imprudent than you can imagine we did, but not sinful, obviously.

Eventually, we had to get to Daily Mass on Saturday, and that was a disaster.

At one point, we had one of the guys lose their keys completely, which led to a lot of near hypothermia from the guys who were dressed for, you know, 50 degrees on Lincoln weather when it was in reality about 20 degrees in the middle of Iowa.

So we had a couple of close calls there.

We eventually found the keys.

But this weekend was just full of all sorts of shenanigans.

And me as a missionary, I'm trying to make it as spiritual as possible.