Hola my amigos,

 

I'm a real life missionary now and I'm starting to like it.  Crazy, I know.  The first five days here were pretty hard for me to adjust to.  My companion is awesome.  Unlike my twin Sister Eliott, Sister Castañeda is kind of the opposite of me in many ways.  She's super sweet, shy, sensitive, and a little robatronic when it comes to inviting people to meet with the missionaries or have their friends meet with the missionaries.  We are learning how to use both of our strengths as we teach.  Her English is pretty good but she just repeats herself a ton and sometimes this causes visitors to get sleepy and often causes me to get sleepy as well.  My job is to liven up the conversations.  We were having a pretty tough time finding people to teach for the first few days that I got here.  We were frustrated especially in the Beehive House because we didn't get trained a whole lot/at all.  So we were praying real hard for something good to happen.  This brings us to Jackson.   Jack is our miracle for the week.   He came to Salt Lake from Orange County for some kind of dramatic arts competition that he got selected for.  He was really outgoing and open-minded so we were excited to give him a tour.  We showed him the tabernacle and then explained about the temple.  After we looked at all the things that had to do with the construction of the temple we stopped at a manican of Brigham Young.  I asked Jack if he had ever heard of Jospeh Smith before and he hadn't so BAM out came a lesson on the fly of the restoration of the gopsel.  I loved teaching him and he was really perceptive of what we had to say.  Then we went over to the north visitors' centre and talked a lot about the Book of Mormon and Jesus Christ.  After sitting and talking for a bit at the Christus, Jack told us that he wishes his family had religion growing up.  He just kept saying that everything was so beautiful, the buildings and the concepts.  So Jack checked the box to learn more from the missionaries in California.  Yeeeeh!  We were so happy and we'll keep in touch with him as the other missionaries teach him. 

 

I decided that my favourite thing about temple square is giving tours.  We aslo got to take two middle-aged women around on a tour.  They loved all of the principles that we taught them.  We showed them a little presentation of God's plan for families and they loved everything.  It's obvious that they were touched by the Spirit but they told us that they didn't want the missionaries to teach them.  I still feel like we did our job well and hopefully they'll remember what they felt here.  We focused a lot on eternal families in the tour and one lady is single so she asked if there were any single women in the church.  Then I bascially bore testimony of Sheri Dew.  She enjoyed that. 

 

Testimony meeting with 130ish Sister missionaries is so interesting.  I don't have a chance of bearing my testimony unless I get up just after the bishopric member bears his since there's a sworm of sisters that go up to the stand right away.  Man, there were so many tears in that room of women.   

 

I overcame my fear of talking on the phone this week.  I called like a zillion people the other day and talked to basically no one so there are a bunch of nice phone messages from me, out there in the world.  We also answer calls from people with questions who call in from mormon.org or lds.org.  In my first inbound call, I talked to a nice lady from Cardston.  I reckognized her canadian accent right away.  She's pretty sure she served in the Temple with mom and dad.  Her name's Linda Redd p.s.  She called in with a question about emailing her friend a link.  So I helped her with that and we had a forever long conversation about life.  We talked about how her niece also moved in her last year of high school.  I told her I hated everything for two seconds when we moved but the rest was good.  I also told her that it was my first transfer then I heard all the other sisters in the room turn and glare at me.  Yikes.  We're not suppose to tell people exactly how long we've been out.  I figured this woman wasn't going to find me and kill my family.  I keep breaking rules here that I never knew existed.  For example, I went on google to find the time zone where my investigator lives.  Bad move.  I figured I was allowed on google because it wasn't blocked.  I'm not used to having rules and just being trusted to follow them.

 

My next inbound call was basically a suicide call.  She wasn't telling me that she was going to kill herself but she just felt like her life was of no importance and that she didn't want to live.  She was really shaky and started to cry while she spoke to me.  She told me she's in counseling and isn't a member of the Church.  She fell asleep listening to BYU radio and said that when she woke up, they were talking about someone named Nephi.  She had searched the Bible looking for someone she could relate to but hadn't found anyone so she thought she could relate to Nephi.  She wanted to know a specific chapter and verse in 2 Nephi and I was panicing looking through my scriptures so find what she was talking about.  I'm no scriptorian and I knew this was a really delicate situation.  I read her 2 Nephi 4:17ish which seemed to be what she was looking for and we breifly discussed the power of the Atonement.  I directed her to lds.org where she could read the Book of Mormon online and that's all she wanted from me.  I have her phone number saved so I think I'll check up on her soon.  My heart was pounding through that whole conversation because there was so much that she needed to hear right then.  She seemed a tad better after our conversation.  So now I'm still scared of phones. 

 

It's so interesting having a companion from the Phillipines.  It's obvious that life is so different there.  I feel like such a brat for getting braces like it was no big deal.  She's still super nervous to be my trainer here.  She said maybe Heavenly Father fell asleep when he assigned me to be trained by her.  Nahhhh, she's solid. 

 

I haven't gotten any letters since the mtc so I'm just going to assume that my family still loves me and that the mtc is no good at forwarding mail. Oui?

 

Alright, that's it for this week.  DearElder me!!!!!!

 

Love, Sister Kyle