Hello all,
First and foremost let's hit the big news: Yesterday was Taylor Swift's birthday I believe and I am known in my district for being a Taylor Swift fan so I thought I ought to prove my true colors. Yup. Moving on..
So the MTC is a pretty rollercoaster of a place. I'm sure that the whole mission will be like this but I'll have great days and I'll have some kind of downer days. That is what the MTC is like. Sometimes studying in a room for that long is hard! But it's alright I'm learning a lot, especially when it comes to Spanish. I'm mostly just trying to learn most of the grammar while I'm here and I have somebody legit to teach me the proper stuff. I'm a little worried that learning from Elders in the field might make me sound like a gringo haha, because apparently a lot of them down there learn the rules the entirely correct way a lot. So that's what I work on a lot. Vocab will come with time of course. Somebody asked me if I see a lot of people leave and the answer is yes. A lot of missionaries come and go pretty quick. It's grand. And whenever somebody leaves the whole floor gathers together the night before and sings: "Para siempre dios este con vos" or God be with you til we meet again. It's loud. I will not be calling home from the MTC on Christmas. Too many missionaries and not enough phones. So I thought you might want to know not to expect that. Also, if you did send me a phone card mom that would be great for the airport. I've never really used one of those old school gadgets (pay-phone) but I'm sure that I can figure it out about as fast as I figured out that tape recorder gadget :) I'm glad to hear that you are getting the Murano sold. Such a grand car. I honestly must say I will not miss it a ton, although it was a great car to drive for the last month and a halfish of my time in the amazing Cache Valley (Pretty sure Elder Woodbury thinks it's Cash Valley). Speaking of which, I miss snow! I can't believe Beaver opened on the 3rd, that's gotta be like a record of some type for them. There is no snow down here. It melted like a week and a half ago. It's sad.
So last Tuesday we had W. Craig Zwick of the Seventy come and talk to us. It was great. He came and talked to the Institute about 2 months ago and I heard him there and his talk was very similar, but it was still very good. It was about if we "Know Jesus," or in other words how is our personal relationship with Him? It's of course something we can work on at all times and being here in the MTC of course makes me want to work on that. It of course must be done through prayer and the Holy Ghost though, so it will always be an ongoing relationship builder I hope. For our Sunday devotional they had the BYU men's choir come and sing to us for an hour. It was great, except it really was rather boring haha I ended up distracting myself with other things like reading the scriptures and stuff.
My ankle is doing fantastic. I gimped around last Monday and Tuesday and was back playing volleyball on Wednesday. Now I know some of you think I'm a fool now, but that's ok. I still don't have my visa so I'm stuck here for what I'm expecting to be the rest of the time now. I am very interested to see if I get reassigned somewhere in the U.S. for a little bit. Maybe they'll send me out to North Carolina for a bit and I will get to be fed by the Larson family. That would be crazy! Speaking of which I hope that Natalie's still on track for the Jan. 4th (I believe) date. Keep me updated on all of that. I am not sure if you can send videos in email. I think you can, but if I am at the MTC I will not be able to open it. If you put it on a SD card and sent it to me I could play it on my camera though. That is always an idea. Mom, I could not find my other SD card (my camera thing doesn't even have any pockets haha) so I will probably just go buy one from the bookstore, but it is not a big deal at all everything there is super cheap for missionaries.
I am sad to hear about Max! Please keep me up to date on him and include him in your prayers. It must have been a pretty bad crash, he's a tough lacrosse player!
So a few people have asked me about DearElders, so I will explain them. We get mail twice a day, once at lunch (12:30) and once at dinner (5:30) the lunch time is the real mail, that ancient stuff that comes in envelopes, and the dinner time mail is dearelders. If a dearelder is typed and sent by I believe it's noon, I will get it the same day. If it is typed and sent after noon, I will receive it the next day. For the most part we always get them on time. Occasionally they will miss one and we will get it a day late, but that is usually only if it doesn't have a box number on it or a wrong name (They had to look up Elder Tanton Eclipse once. No last name. No box number. No exit date. Luckily I have the most unique first name here. If it was Elder Jake Eclipse, I would never have gotten that one probably.) So it's usually quite reliable. We do not receive them on Saturdays or Sundays though. We do get real mail on Saturdays though. That's always nice if it comes. Everybody in my district has the same box number and then the district leader (who, as of today, is me by the way) then disperses it amongst the missionaries. So if anybody wants to write somebody else from my district (Elder Martell says he's open to mail from anybody, especially Kylie hahaha) then you would just put their name in the same address as my address, but without a mission code. It will get to them. Nobody has gotten me Connor or Branson's addresses yet, and if somebody could get Joseph Quillen to write me a letter I could stop being bitter towards him, haha just kidding. Oh, and a couple last things on DearElders. You can do it when I'm in Spain as well, but it will cost the 98 cents that regular mail costs, so they just print it out here and mail it to Spain Mission office from here. So I don't know if you would rather do that or just handwrite it/type it at our house and mail it from there. Might be just as easy (and more personal too) :) Aunt Stacy, your DearElder did work. Thank you. So I am pretty much out of stuff to say and I still have 9 minutes left, so in the future if you would like to give me challenges (such as supply a crazy word(with a definition) I will try to put it into this letter at some point or stuff like that) I will do what I can to accomplish them.
Welp, I have a few more minutes so I'll give everybody a weekly update on something I learned in the scriptures/teaching lesson 3 this week. I read the end of 2 Nephi (that area) this week and it really hit me hard (I think it's chapter 31) how important baptism is. It is the doorway that leads to the straight and narrow path of enduring to the end. I see this as 3 steps. 1-Baptism, 2-Gift of the Holy Ghost, and 3-Enduring to the end. They are all of equal importance and if you lose any of those 3 then it is essentially incomplete. I think the Enduring to the End part is the hardest, but it really helped me to understand they importance of the work that I am doing. I think it was Elder Oaks that said that it is important that we don't just bring people close to the door (just teach them and let them feel the spirit/happiness of the church and then hope somebody actually baptizes them later) but that it is very important that we actually help them through the door. As holders of the restored priesthood we are the only church that can do this work, whereas other churches can help bring people just closer to it. I liked hearing that. I also hope that I will be able to do a good job as the new District Leader. I hope I can be a good example to the others and help them feel of the love that our Heavenly Father has for each and ever one of us. Pray for me!
Thank you everybody for your prayers, inspiration, letters, DearElders, jokes, stories, requests, and especially support and prayers. I really do appreciate it all and I love every one of you!
Love,
Elder Jeppson
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