P-Day Letter

Buona giornata mia famiglia!

Hehe, that's all got the red underline, but it's actually spelled exactly right! I really like knowing another language. :) And Italian is perfect, because every word is spelled exactly how it sounds. Fratello Merrell even said that in Italy, if you ask someone how to spell a word, they just say it really slow. I thought that was pretty funny!

But anyway, thank you so much for your emails! I really love hearing about home, which I know may be a bit surprising, coming from me. I'm just glad to hear that everything is going along so well! Except that you all didn't get my letter. I sent that a week ago. I'm sure I had the right address and everything, where'd it go? I blame the Greeks. Not for any particular reason, except that I needed to put some group in that last sentence.

Italian is coming along SUPER well! We started playing a game in our district called "Native", where every morning class (which is every other day, almost), someone secretly gets picked as the native (picking a paper with an x out of a bag, the rest are blank), and they can ONLY speak in Italian until the next time. Everyone else is trying to convince everybody that THEY are the native by speaking in Italian as much as possible. Before we find out who the native was and switch for the next time, everybody votes to see who they thought was the native. If the native gets a vote, he/she gets 1 point. If a non-native gets a vote, they get 2 points. It's hard, but we're (mostly) learning a lot faster already! At dinner last night, I was able to have a bit of a conversation with someone without even really thinking about what I was saying. I mean, I didn't have to translate each individual word, it just came out. That was SO awesome! And I'm also able to make sense of what's going on in il Libro di Mormon when I read it, even if I don't know every word.

I absolutely love the devotionals here! This week we had Elder Bowen speak (he spoke in conference about his baby's death. I thought it was a good talk), and it was chock-full of good stuff! One of the biggest things I remember is that in our prayers, we should be able to say "Heavenly Father, I know I'm not much, but I AM obedient," completely truthfully. That's one of my goals here, to be able to be as obedient as humanly possible, and to know that I have to rely on the Lord as well. Another thing that he mentioned was that we can't receive revelation if we don't have a question. I realized as soon as he said that that I didn't really have a question, so I quickly tried to think of something that I really wanted to know about. Once I did, I immediately got like 3 answers out of his talk before it ended like 5 minutes later, and I got them in that Doctrine, Invitation, Promised Blessing format that I learned from Elder Bednar (I've been using that a lot, and it's awesome!).

I just want to say something really cool about yesterday. Honestly, that was one of the hardest days I've had here at the MTC. I had a hard time feeling good about the lessons with my "investigators" here, because I learned some hard things in their lives and wasn't able to help them as well as I thought I could. So I was feeling pretty down, but at one point I decided to read the Helaman's epistle to Moroni, where he becomes the leader of the Stripling Warriors (in Italian). While reading that, it struck me how amazing those young men were, and just how much faith they had in their God. Also, when they finally met up with the armies of Antipus, it said how they were so downhearted and tired, but the Lord provided them with this help, and it made them super glad. I felt really downhearted and tired yesterday, and I felt the Spirit come testify that it would all be ok in a bit. That was exactly what I needed. Some of that came with gymtime yesterday. I had decided that I would only shoot free-throws the whole hour, because I realized I was getting too competitive in the games and I was driving the Spirit away. So while I was doing that, I felt SO peaceful, and SO happy. It wasn't necessarily the free-throws that made it that way, but I was able to separate myself from something that made the days hard for me, and I felt a lot better afterward. So when you're downhearted and feeling low, well, let's look at a few inspirational words from Coldplay: "Lights will guide you home/ and ignite your bones/ and [He] will try to fix you." (Muahahahaha! Snuck in a spiritual thought from Coldplay!)

Anyway, I love you all a lot! Dad - I'm having to learn patience here too, I totally understand. It's hard. I want patience NOW. Kaden/Cameron - HOLY COW!! How were your grades so high? Nice job! Cole - YOU ARE AWESOME! Mom - I know you'll do what needs to be done to help the young women. You've been called by the Lord for that, and He knows you can (1 Nephi 3:7).

Tutte belle cose! (All beautiful things!)
Anziano Walker