"Secretly, I was pretty daggum scared!"

Hey! So, here it goes. My first email to home from the field! WoW!

So, I'm hear in the Salt Lake City South Mission. My branch is the Sandy Union Park Stake. I have no idea where that is, but now I have different mountains to look at! There are four of us living in the basement of a retired member's house.  Me and Elder Clark were paired with Elder Hathaway and Elder Mullay. Me and Elder Clark sleep on air mattresses in the familyroom/ kitchen.  It's better than it sounds.  We have been living out of our suitcases because we are probably gonin to  be transfered to a Spanish branch until we get our Visas. I have no idea how long it is going to be untill I get my Visa though, but i dont mind staying here for a while, as long as we can stay busy.  We have a car and bikes, so me and Elder Clark switch off with Elder Hathaway and Elder Murray. We go around contacting members for refferals.  We have gotten a small list of people to teach.  Apperently, in Utah you cant do most tracting stuff because most people are Mormon, or just  because of all sorts of reasons. So pretty much, our work is from member refferals. 

It was really great to get to go to a normal ward again. In fact, we went to three sacrament meetings yesterday. I thought it was really cool! All the people here have been really nice to us.  I never really noticed how much people really appreciate the missionaries and look up to them until I was in church this past Sunday. (Hopefully this next part somehow gets to Hermano Baron at the MTC.  Because I can relate to Hermano Baron's first day in the field! HA.)

So after we were put with our companions, we were given one more bike, then went home, kinda tinkered with the bike a little (The thing was in pretty bad shape, not to mention its the size of Sophia's bike at home!). The pettly shafts are like two inches long, hhahaha. It makes hills interesting!   Anyways, so me and Elder Hathaway were gonna go meet up with some ward members but then the bike tire decided that it wasn't  going to hold air :/

So I was riding around this little bike with super low air and then Elder Hathaway's bike gear thing in the back just randomly falls off, so we were pushing our bikes around for a while till we finally got to Wallmart where I could get stuff to fix my bike. I was messing around with that for like an hour, and we pretty much have spent most of the last four days dealing with the stupid mission bikes, but dont worry I just laughed it off. I think somthing that is sometimes my biggest problem out here as a misisonary and in the MTC is that I just get too tense and un-relaxed about things, so something I'm working on is to just chill about everything and not take everything so seriously so that way I can be more focused and relaxed. 

So on Sunday we tought two lessons: one to a guy named Noe (he just moved here form Nevada and worked with a member in the ward).  He is young 20s and he had some questions about the church, so we were invited to come over and to teach him. We tought him the first lesson (secretly I was pretty daggum scared!) haha, but it seemed like it ended up turning out pretty good! He committed to be baptized on July 24th if he felt like it was true, and he still wanted to by then. The spirtit was so strong during the lesson. It was sooo cool! he seemeed pretty interested so we will see.

Then, when we were riding our bikes around we randomly decided to visit an investigator's house. It turns out they just found out their married daughter is pregnant and they wanted to give her a blessing of comfort, so me and Elder Hathaway helped them out with that. 

Ohh and another cool thing, i finally had a real stake! Ohh man it was soo good! Wow it was such a good dinner. For the record, I finally got to go to Carls Jr. again! Woo hoo! haha.

So after the blessing we went and taught an 11-year-old brother and sister who have very inactive parents. We taught them lesson 1, but this time I wasn't scared. I like teaching kids alot more, hahah! They also committed to being baptized on July 24th, so hopefully their mom will let that happen! But it's cool to teach for reals. I still have sooo much to learn, and there is just soo much I need to improve on! Man, I thought I was ready for a lot of things in the MTC, but daggum, there is always room for growth. I'm a little bummed that I dont get to practice my Spanish, but it probably would have been overwhelming anyway.

So the money they gave us equals out to four bucks a day, so I'm prett much living off of beans and pasta, haha! But I really do like it here, and it's soo great to finally get to listen to music, which brings up a new subject: I need more music. I need up beat stuff though. Everything I have is sooo slow and downbeat it gets really annoying, and it just is hard to be upbeat with slow, downbeat music, so i really want/ need upbeat music so i can be an upbeat missionary. 

So another funny thing that happened this week was last night Elder Hathaway and Elder Clark decided to to the Habinero pepper challenge, which is to eat a habinero and wait 5 mins to do whatever you can to get rid of the burn. It was so funny. I will work on sending a video of it home! But that's about all for this week! My Pdays are on Mondays form now on.

Umm, i have no idea how the mail system works here, so it would probaly be best to just have people email me for now. We get an hour to email.  So im guessing I probably wont hear form you till next week, but hopefully I will, ha, I'm probably gonna be in the Spanish branch, so I'll let you know how that goes.  I love you all. Thanks you so much for everything! Good luch to you with whateer you do. 

Ps. Jake, Ukrain looks beautifull! Good luck and keep up the good work!

Hasta Luego!