1st Email! July 14 2012

Dear Mother, Father, Family and to anyone else that my mom is forwarding this on to,

For Gary: My companion is a Yellow.

So basically I know nothing! :P For the past three days in the MTC I've gotten to know how much I really don't know. My second day here in the CCM (MTC in Spanish) we did a role play situation with three different investigators that were really good at acting their part. The first one was a Japanese guy and he was really good at distracting the missionaries from their desired lesson plan, given that they were 50 brand new missionaries who don't know anything, that task was probably pretty easy :P But I got the chance to try and teach him and I started asking him questions (Like you told me to Father) and at that point I felt like we were actually getting somewhere with this man in being able to have him understand the Atonement. But then we were out of time and didn't get the chance to continue to teach him.

Also yesterday, my companion, Elder West, and I taught our first lesson completely in Spanish. It was rough. I felt like I had so much to say but I couldn't even put a coherent sentence together :( I'm going to need a lot of help with this language. But despite that I feel like we brought the spirit to the lesson so hopefully the next four lessons will go well. I don't know if they had this program when Gary or Ryan went through but every day we are teaching lessons to a "progressing investigator" who is really someone who has been on a mission and is playing the roll of someone that they talked to on their mission. Although it was a mock lesson it still felt very real so I'm glad they have this program now.

I'm kinda jumping around in the topics here but my roommates have been in the CCM for 3 weeks already so my companion and I get to hear all the golden nuggets that they wish they had known when they were noobies.

My branch president said that if you want to get good emails from me it might be a good idea to write me using dearelder.com so that I can read your letter beforehand and use my full 30 minutes to write you back.

I'm very grateful for the opportunity that I have to be a missionary and that I can take two years of my life and give them to the Lord, every moment I'm out here I am accountable for to the Lord, and because of that I don't want to waste a minute of it. Thank you for your love, support, and prayers :)

Elder Hall

P.S. Hopefully I'll get better at writing emails in the future.