Hey mom! How's it going? This week has been so great for me. I've been waiting all week to write a full letter to you. Our p day is on wednesday, so we went to the temple this morning to do a full session. I actually like the Provo temple a lot haha. But I'm glad to hear that you guys are doing okay without me! I was worried that you and Jamie would go nuts without having me there to help mellow things out a bit. So, to answer your questions, right now we all have personal study time to read whatever we want out of the scriptures/preach my gospel for an hour everyday. What I've been doing is reading like 2 or 3 chapters out of the BOM (I finished and restarted so I'm in 1 Nephi right now), once in english, and then immediately after in spanish out loud to myself to try and get the language down. I feel like its helped me remember phrases and improved my accent a ton. We have in total about 3 hours of study time each day. 3 more hours account for in-class time with a teacher who's mainly just helping us with the language. We've also been teaching lessons in spanish to a fake investigator in all spanish (the lessons are about 20 minutes long), and those have been kind of rough. My companion isn't too good with the language so I've been having to carry most of them. But we've been learning a lot and there's no better way than through practice.The rest of the time we are either playing basketball, soccer, volleyball, or eating haha. Everything we do here is in spanish. Prayers, hymns, heck even my class time is probably about 80% espanol. I feel like I'm doing really well with the language, I'm probably near the top of my class as of right now (mainly because I've already taken 2 years of language study). But I know that the Lord has blessed me and helped me get the language down much better than I could on my own without his help.
Alright, now for my companion/roommates/district. They are awesome. Elder Butcher wants to work hard and do what's right, so we both have the same goals and we get along really well. It can get annoying having someone around you 24/7, but I think I've gotten used to it. My roommates are so great. We all get along so well and we all know how to have a good time. Most of them are into sports and music like me and we joke around all the time which removes a lot of stress from us. The rest of my district is awesome too. I love them all and their testimonies are so strong. We bare them to each other in meetings almost daily. Last night we heard from Elder Groberg (the missionary that's portrayed in the movie The Other Side of Heaven) in our devotional and he gave a really great talk about bearing our testimonies to others. You never know how much of an impact your testimony can make on someone, even if it's thirty years down the road from now. So bare it often, and show your testimony in the actions you do daily.
Tell Jamie I love and miss him too,
Elder Thayne
Alright, now for my companion/roommates/district. They are awesome. Elder Butcher wants to work hard and do what's right, so we both have the same goals and we get along really well. It can get annoying having someone around you 24/7, but I think I've gotten used to it. My roommates are so great. We all get along so well and we all know how to have a good time. Most of them are into sports and music like me and we joke around all the time which removes a lot of stress from us. The rest of my district is awesome too. I love them all and their testimonies are so strong. We bare them to each other in meetings almost daily. Last night we heard from Elder Groberg (the missionary that's portrayed in the movie The Other Side of Heaven) in our devotional and he gave a really great talk about bearing our testimonies to others. You never know how much of an impact your testimony can make on someone, even if it's thirty years down the road from now. So bare it often, and show your testimony in the actions you do daily.
Tell Jamie I love and miss him too,
Elder Thayne