Hello Family!!! (Week 2)

So this week went really really well. The language is getting a bit easier to learn and the Spirit is still strong.

Elder Mulder Studying

So you guys asked me about apostles coming to speak to us, this week we had Elder Cook come speak to us. It was really powerful, he talked a little bit about how missionaries are assigned and said that while they are thinking about where people should go they consider a couple things: which mission president they feel the missionary will learn the most from, the people that the lord needs them to teach, and the language that the church needs them to learn. It was interesting how he talked about the language because he talked about it in the future like that even if I don't necessarily need to learn Polish now, in the future the church may need a polish speaker. Speaking of which we got new elders going to Turkey yesterday, they are in our zone, their mission is really cool because Turkey only allows 12 elders at a time (no sisters) and its a non proselyting mission. But what makes it crazy is that the mission hasn't been open long enough for there to be RM's to teach the missionaries (I think there are 4 RM's one of which lives in Provo so he is the only one who can teach here). So anyways, we were talking to one of our teachers and we asked if he served in turkey, he told us he actually served in Russia, that confused us quite a bit because they don't speak Turkish in Russia. He told us that one day he got a feeling that the Lord wanted him to take Turkish classes at BYU, so he did that and got to the point that he can teach the Elders in the MTC. Super cool, its actually a miracle that they found 3 people who can speak Turkish in Provo at all.

Brat Jensen

Brat Jensen in the depths of despair

Dad, you wanted to hear about the missionaries in my district so here goes:

Elder Christian Little, he's from Sandy and went to BYU for a semester before his mission

Elder Theodore Mulder who was working / going to UVU studying aviation science (he's really really smart, he's DL right now)

Elder Nathan Garrison, I think mom has been talking to his mom so you probably know a bit about him... He's from Boise Idaho and went to Boise State before his mission.

Elder Paul McPherson, hes the oldest elder in our district at 20. He went to high school in Thailand and has been studying at BYU-I.

Elder Jacob Klein, he's the only one straight out of high school... kinda... he graduated early then went a semester at LDS Business College. He just turned 18 and would be a senior right now if he didn't graduate early.

My teachers are great, their names are Brat (Brother) Jensen, Brat Smalley, and Siostre (Sister) Barth. They are all really good teachers and and good at explaining difficult concepts (like cases) to us. Speaking of which we learned our first case yesterday, its the nominative case that words normally are in the dictionary as, its used whenever a noun is the subject of a sentence. Basically you just leave nouns as you find them in the dictionary then case adjectives to match the nouns. Really fun stuff...

One of our teachers, Siostra Barth

For our Tuesday night devotional, which was broadcasted to all the MTCs we sang Praise to the Man. It was super cool because the director(cant remember his name but you can look it up) explained the circumstances that W.W. Phelps wrote it under. Basically W.W. Phelps turned his back on the leadership of the church after having a disagreement with Joseph and the Brethren and went to a judge and delivered a damning testimony basically calling Joseph a murderer and conspirator (he later admitted to making up the whole thing). The result was that the testimony was a huge part in landing Joseph in Carthage Jail. Long story short Phelps wrote to Joseph years later begging to be let back into the church after feeling the coldness of not having the spirit with him and Joseph invited to come back with the Saints in full fellowship. After Joseph was martyred in Liberty Jail (where Phelps was with him) He wrote the hymn to commemorate the loss of Joseph. Anyway, now when I hear/hum that hymn I get chills.

So I'm running out of time right now but I love you guys!

Keep sending dear elders (DearElder.com) and letters! I love them.

-Starszy Everett

P.S.  One more thing...we were told about the first Turkish elders who got transferred from Bulgarian to turkey (languages are not similar Bulgarian is Slavic, Turkish is something else entirely) they made a mission goal (between the 4 of them) to memorize 100 new words every day, which they did. They were all fluent by the time they went home a year later. Crazy, hopefully i can get that good at memorizing vocab.