Hello to my Dear, Sweet Family & Friends!

Hello to my dear, sweet family (and friends)!

I love being a missionary!

This week has been crazy! The days are soooo long, but the weeks are so short (missionary time is beyond weird). So, I wrote you last Friday, but here is what has happened since then: On Sunday, we had basically all day to study, so naturally, my district all watched Mormon Messages together. We love Mormon Messages. It's an obsession. But, we did also get to study. And go to sacrament meeting. Two of the districts in our zone were leaving, and it was fast Sunday. One of the districts sang the EFY song, and uhhhh... long story short, they basically laugh-sang the whole thing and it was pretty awkward, but so funny. I bore my testimony, the first (and one of the only ones) from my district. We also had mission conference on Sunday, and we sang ALL THE VERSES of "If You Could Hie to Kolob"... as soon as they announced that, I pretty much laughed out loud.

 Did you know that there are missions HERE at the MTC?   They get called to serve in the MTC and they do the online stuff! I thought that was pretty cool. We got to go to the Provo Temple on our P-day, which was really awesome, we get to go again today. Whenever our district has free time, or gym time, we all go play volleyball together. We are sooo bad, but it is so fun, and funny.  Tad R. Callister came to speak at our devotional on Tuesday, which was really good.

 Dear Elder is AWESOME, I have been getting those on the days that you send them. I can't respond to them right away, obviously, but seriously they are so great. You should tell everyone to write me dear elders... It's basically a competition to see who gets the most at night when we get our mail... I haven't been winning, so get on it! :) Just kidding... sort of. I have sent a few letters too, so be on the look out!

Yes, I did get an MTC t-shirt, of course! I got it before my calling card... hahahhaa. Sorry, Mom. But I did get a calling card, so I don't feel too bad :) I just had to get a shirt first, because you told me like ten trillion times that I had to get a calling card. I told Sister Hutching that you had been crazy about a calling card, and then I opened a dear elder from you, and it said something about "don't forget to buy a calling card" and we both laughed soooo hard hahahhahaha.

So, the teachers at the MTC are great... but our district had quite a hard time focusing during the first few days... or week... One of our teachers "quit" our district (he has a brother going on a mission, so he went home). We joke about it all the time. We got a new teacher, Brother Trone, but we call him "Bro-tron". I'm pretty sure he hates it, but oh well. Anyways, we wrote out a pact that we would all be better at paying attention and becoming better missionaries, hahah, we all signed it. It's been working pretty well… most of the time at least. But we are learning. A LOT. When we go home at night, I pretty much fall asleep as soon as I get into bed because I am so exhausted!

Yesterday I had my in-field orientation, which was literally TEN HOURS LONG. IN THE SAME TWO ROOMS. It was crazy long, crazy boring, but we learned a lot. We learned about including ward members in missionary work, referrals, finding and contacting, everything basically. In class we have been studying the lessons and about teaching and stuff like that. It feels like we go over the same stuff like ten thousand times. But I guess repetition is important. Camille Bett's husband was one of my teachers there!

We have been teaching our investigators all week- our companionship is like the two elders from the district, the one that talks all the time and the one that never talks... I bet you can guess which one I am... ahahhah, the talker. Speaking of them though, Elder Christensen, from the district videos, he was one of my teachers in in-field yesterday. At the end I went and shook his hand (I thought you would like that, Dad). Also, he actually does speak! I was like, whaaaaat, you have the ability to talk!?  We teach 4 different investigators. It has been going really well! We challenged one of them to be baptized on the second time we taught him and he said he would. Teaching by the Spirit is so crazy. Sometimes I come out of a lesson, and I'm like, wait what did we even just teach him? It's awesome. Sister Hutchings and I learned like, everything about each other. Seriously, I can tell you where all her 8 siblings served missions...

 We were pretty discouraged at the beginning of the week, we had one bad lesson, and just felt like we were going to be horrible missionaries. I was studying from Preach My Gospel and was looking up a scripture (D&C 84:85). It was talking about teaching by the spirit, and in the margin I had previously written "Don't worry about it". It was so weird, since I pretty much had never had a reason to write that in there, but it was really cool, because I needed someone to tell me that. I just encouraged myself... go me.

By the way, we pray like 78 times a day, it is crazy.

DAD YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS: One of my teachers served in Chicago and he said that once they were teaching someone to pray and they started their prayer with "Yo, yo, Homie J up top" HAHAHAHAHHA I was dying laughing, it reminded me of you and your really cool phone messages... :)

I got to see Alyssa and Emmi, it was a great reunion! I took pictures and will hopefully be able to send some.

I love you guys so much and miss you! You are the best!

Love,

Sister Coltrin