Friday, October 5, 2012

Fifth Letter, September 21, 2012

Hi mum,
I love you. You're the best mom.  And an amazing example to me.  Thank you for always loving me so much.
So this week was pretty good!  So i wrote down a lot of little things to send home about.  But i will get to that in a bit.  This week there was a lot of joy and teaching in Spanish and doing my best to really seem happy because the Gospel is in my life, which is true, I am happy for that reason but sometimes we forget to show it and/or we forget where it comes from.  That's my challenge to everyone remember to show how happy you are because the blessings of the Gospel are in your life.  Just think about how lucky we are to be able to experience so many blessings.  I love the Gospel so much.  Oh mum I just remembered to ask, you're forwarding all my emails to Nicole right?  Thank you.  Oh speaking of Nicole her birthday is coming up, could you and kim brainstorm for somethin for her maybe? pwease? She likes lasagna and I know you and kim both make really good lasagna so i thought maybe you could make that for her. just an idea :)
So let's start the list-
=Tell Brian to read Haggai 2:17 in the Bible, I used it as my spiritual thought in one of our classes and said we better be careful to turn to the Lord or we'll get all moldy.. you'll understand haha.
=I see Brother Luke Stoddard here a bunch and we chat every once in a while it's awesome because he helps me with my Spanish a bunch and it's cool because we basically grew up together, we were in Priest's quorum anyway
=Could you tell dad that I love him a ton and i'm so thankful for his example to me, oh and also could you ask him if he knows Dave Rose? Our branch president President Claybaugh brought him to a devotional meeting the other night and I guess he lived in Auburn at one point and thinks he knows dad.
=Could you thank Trampus for me for sharing his experiences about his conversion and things like that at Church, we had a discussion about how important it is for new members and members to share their conversion experiences all the time for themselves and for the current investigators to hear about those things, I thought about Trampus and how he was a good example of that in Elder's quorum.
=So the other night we had a hilarious experience, we found out that someone from our district was changing our alarm clocks to wake us up at random times in the night, but we got fed up one night before they had changed it and we set up like a spy cam thing right next to where my alarm is and then went back and got it later after we noticed the alarm was changed.  We all huddled around the tiny camera screen to see who the alarm clock bandit was.  Dead silence filled the air, a couple minutes in we saw ELDER GARCIA! With lightning hands he changed my alarm under one second and went on his way like nothing had happened.  The crowd went wild and we all were busting up laughing and joking with Elder Garcia it was great.
=So my rubik's cube skills have improved haha tell Brian I'm down to 1:43
=Finally not a big deal or anything, I wanted to try out for a musical number to sing infront of like the relief society or the new missionaries coming in so i was working on the song Nearer My God to Thee and it was going pretty well, but then I invited some other Elders to try out with me and to do a different song so for the last couple weeks we have been practicing the song Ye Elders of Israel with a group of 8 elders from our zone.  we thought it was going ok but didnt think much would come of it if anything.  We went and tried out for the music director and the MTC president and his wife just happened to be there.  We performed and the music director lady seemed pretty impressed with it we were surprised because a soloist girl performed right before us and she did really well.  So all in all not much happened..... Until last night we got a note front the director saying she wants us to perform our song in front of THE ENTIRE MTC, 2700 people, at the mtc fireside this Sunday! O.O scary! So wish us luck haha we'll need it, I have a partial solo-ish part in the beginning haha but we cant record and i dont think they put these on the internet.
Love you so much, i miss everyone so much, I pray for you all every night individually, thank you all for your amazing examples to me.
With love and joy, Elder Branden Carl Astle
PS Tell Aaron i really liked his letter alot alot alot it was awesome and made me laugh a ton and was inspiring to me, I can't wait for Aaron to get to go on his mission so he can experience all of this too

No comments:

Post a Comment