Wednesday, June 6, 2012

June 6, 2012

Hi! How are all of you? Thanks for e-mailing me! I'm glad you've got all my letters so far! It has been nice being able to send so many so quickly here at the MTC. Only one Elder in our District has his Visa so far but that is because he's from Canada and for some reason theirs come extremely fast! For the rest of us we asked at the travel info center and we get all of ours the day we leave for Australia, which is next Monday! Something funny and crazy about the flight to Australia (which is something like 22 hours total!!) is that we leave opn Monday the 11th of June from the LAX Airport and get in Australia on the 13th of June!! We will be some of the only human beings to never experience June 12th 2012! haha. And thanks for the last package too! I especially loved the cookies, as did the other Elders that had some! Also I did get the full amount of the money for the bike and stuff so you don't need to worry about that! I'm not sure what my companions parents names are but I'll have to ask him soon and let you know! I have been to the Provo Temple twice since I've been here, we do it every morning on P-Days. The Temple is really nice and it definitely is very peaceful and relaxing compared to the busy MTC schedule. And the Longs are back now??? That definitely makes me sad that I'm going to miss them! Tell them hi from me and that I've missed seeing them! And my cold is tons better now so thanks for all your prayers!! I'm glad that you are all feeling blessed back home! I sure miss all of you!
       Now just a few stories from this past week. It's hard to know what to write a little bit though because the days have all been blurred together a bit so what I thought happened yesterday actually happened last week haha. One of the Elders in our District, Elder Orgill, has a brother who's something like 25 back home who has a really hard time keeping commandments and stuff and Elder Orgill is the only one who really keeps him somewhat on the right path, so it was extremely hard for him to leave on his mission because he didn't want his brother to fall too far off the map. So one of our teachers decided to do a teaching practice where Elder Orgill pretended to be his brother and the rest of us taught him as a group to try to get him back to the Church. The Spirit was unbelievably strong as the lesson went on and some of the personal stories that were shared were so sad and touching that everyone was in tears by the end of it (which is I guess a normal occurance at the MTC!). Anyway, I don't remember much of the details or what was said but we've had several experiences like that which make us that more excited to teach real people and we don't have any doubts in our minds that what we're teaching is true.
    The new group of missionaries got in today and 4 of them are actually from Australia!! What are the chances of that happening? So we've been asking them questions about Australia all the time to see what we should look forward to and watch out for. Apparently the Kangaroos can get up to 11 feet tall and will sometimes be out on the roads where they'll actually total cars sometimes if they run into them!! But the Kangaroos come out esentially unscathed so they're pretty powerful creatures. They also said that most of the people the missionaries talk to down there are Asian becuase the Australians in the more well-off communities do not like the missionaries even walking on their sidewalks! They told us some other cool stuff as well but I'll have to save that for another time!
     I hope you're all doing great back home and I'm glad that you've felt blessed because I pray for you every day! I hope to hear from you soon!
    Love,
        Elder Hopkins

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