Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Hay Acea, thanks for the letter. It was pretty funny. Oh and if anyone asks if you a Republican or a Democrat, you always answer with "I'm a Conservative!" So the spring trip sounds like it was a lot of fun which is good. I told you it would be.

Thanks Karyl for the stuff! The dictionary was badly needed and I don't know exactly how I'm going to use the tape, but thanks. It'll be nice to have it around.

So I'm wondering who told mom and dad about my knee? Imagine this in a cough "Karyl". It's really not that bad. I went to some other trainers when I have gym in the evening and he said that it was likely the turns on that track are really sharp and I remembered that they didn't change direction those first two days when I ran all of those miles. They said that that and the kneeling probably contributed a lot to it.

Did you send anything out to anyone, especially Sister Jones? She sends me something like every week, but it takes over 10 days to get here for some reason. It was pretty funny when you sent the mail with the talk on it! It was like on the "Best 2 Years" when all of that mail was for Elder Vanpelt. It was really strange for me because I almost never get mail. Speaking of which why haven't I had any mail?

I guess I'll get the new shoes. They are the water proof hush puppies size 9 tie ones. They are really nice and I found myself wearing them almost exclusively.

So to companion problems. I know all of this stuff and every time I have an interview I express my frustrations and they always commend me saying, "Your doing the best you can and in fact you're the kind of missionary the MTC is made for or rather your perfect for the MTC. Your desires are in the right place, but the Lord put you with Elder Stout and there is a reason for that. Through the spirit you have to figure out that reason and learn from the experience." I know what I need to be doing and I'm doing the best I can to do it, my only frustration is with his lack of commitment to the "WORK". The fact that he is the district leader, and he is the one breaking the rules and leading others to break the rules too, is hard to deal with. It just looks like I'm going to have to drag him through the study portion of the MTC and just deal with it. I also know that there are quite a few things that I can learn from him. I'll just have to take those lessons, apply them, then move on and do my best to endure the frustrating times.

Our Branch President got released and that was interesting. The Mission President came to sacrament. I was able to sing in the choir that sang the song that His wife wrote. It's in the primary song book. You can look it up I think everyone knows it. The name is Ryskamp. It was pretty neat to hear the story associated with the song from her after which we sang it.

I'm still really pretty bad at Spanish, like really bad. You know how my companion never studies, well one of the reasons is that I can't push him and it has caused me to fall far behind him in Spanish. Sebring you can probably understand most of the Spanish right now, I know by the end of my Spanish class I could. Now everything has to be translated just for me, grrr, annoying. I'm studying more than just about everyone. There is one elder who, because his skill, talks in only Spanish all of the time. In fact we have this game that we "play" called nativo which means native and I'm it today. I am not allowed to speak in English, which is really hard for me because I'm so bad at Spanish. You know the sad part is that I'm really progressing too. Everyone else will like go through a day of nativo and learn a ton. I don't really remember much just because I don't know much anyway. So that's my Spanish, really frustrating, but getting a lot better. I also can't seem to memorize anything in Spanish. Nothing sticks no matter how much time I spend. The first vision, for example, took me an hour and now I can't remember a single word of it and that was yesterday. I have to work ten times harder to get half the stuff of everyone else.

On a more spiritual note. We got to listen to Brother, I can't remember his name, but he was the Mission President in Spokane in 1994 and knew President Borders. I got to talk to him about that. He talked about charity and how we need to love our investigators and so I noticed when we teach in Spanish we lose all of that love. It seems we just worry about the language. So we must not divert our attention from what is important, just like the light on the plane! Out of time.

Love Elder Sands