Don't Forget Snail Mail

Dear family and friends,

This week went by super slowly. In my last e-mail I neglected to mention a fact or two about my area. I am in the northeast part of my mission in an area called Cottonwood. Half of the geography of my mission went to the new Farmington, New Mexico mission that opened up but the number of missionaries in my mission has increased since that time. We now have over 200 missionaries and when I got here our mission had two new zones. One of them is the Cottonwood zone where I'm in. Elder Mortimer and I cover two wards: The Black Hills and Mountain View ward. Both of them are pretty small wards.

It's the mountain-ish area and it's super cold! Yesterday it snowed twice! I've been having to use my suit a lot more than I thought and as a result it's gotten dirty. Elder Mortimer and I will be going to the Thrift store and getting me a suit for about $10.

My p-day situation has been very weird up to this point. My p-day in the MTC was on Wednesdays and my p-day in the mission field is on Mondays and I left the MTC on Tuesday the 16th. As a result I didn't have a p-day that week. The weird thing is that the Monday before I left I was allowed to do my laundry. Then the following week p-day got moved to Thanksgiving which is why some of you got the e-mail from Sister Connolly saying I wouldn't be able to write you all until then. Then the weird thing about that is that we were allowed to e-mail because the Family HIstory Center would have been closed on Thanksgiving which is why Ryan got the e-mail from me on Monday.

 Despite the fact that my e--mail account has been set-up I would still like letters and real mail and I'm still probably going to write letters. The reason why is because I only get an hour to read e-mails, write my e-mail to you all and e-mail President Beck. Yeah that time goes by really fast! When it comes to letters though I get more time to both read and write those. I wrote letters to some of you on Thanksgiving and you'll probably get them some time this week.

Elder Mortimer and I have been sifting a lot of wheat from the tares this week. We've dropped like seven people because they simply aren't progressing. We met our contacting goal and contacted 149 people! This has never happened before and we are sooooooo happy! Each day seems to drag and also act as an emotional rollercoaster. One of our investigators is a girl named "Aussie" Cooper. She's 14, shy and the daughter of one of our recent converts. She has a piercing on her lip and we're working on teaching her about that. She's slowly, but surely, progressing which is a blessing to us considering how everybody else drops like flies or cancels their appointments.Her baptismal date is on December 18th and we are confident that she'll be ready by then.

We're also teaching this awesome family know as the Valdez family. The mother, Frances, was found by my companion and his former companion while tracting. She seems really gung-ho about the Gospel, which of course is fabulous. She basically said that she wants to be baptized, she just wants to know more about our church first. She has three daughters: Jennifer (18), Tania (14) and Emma (5). Neither of her two teenage daughters seem as gung-ho about the Gospel as she does, although Jennifer said she felt the Spirit (after we explained that to her) and liked what she felt. Her problem is that she works all the time so it's hard for us to find a time to teach the entire family. The Valdez family came to church yesterday, which we were very excited about. The father, Edson, only started joined our last lesson and he liked what he heard and he came to church too. They'll get baptized, we just need to keep teaching them.

Thanksgiving was interesting. We played a lot of basketball which tired me out because I am super out of shape. We went shopping and I was pleased with the fact that I only had to spend $8 on food. Most of everything I get comes for free anyway so being thrifty doesn't seem like much of a problem. President Beck initiated a new rule that we had to have a less active member or an investigator at our dinner appointment or else we couldn't have one. I thought that that rule would kill off our dinner appointments, but we've gotten quite a few. We don't get them everyday and often go back to the Connolly's for dinner, but there are people willing to feed us. On Thanksgiving Elder Mortimer drew the most awesome looking ghetto turkey I've ever seen. Seriously it had awesome shades, a University of Utah hat and a nice gun with some serious bop-boppage.

I've gotten all of your letters and I LOVE IT! It usually takes about 7-11 days for it to arrive to me. I love reading all your letters and I would encourage everyone to continue writing actual letters to me. There's just an awesome rush that I get from getting mail. Not that e-mailing is bad, I just like letters and packages. Thank you all for your love and support. I just simply can't thank you enough for your love. I feel it and am strengthened by it.

Love,

Elder Boothe

In the Mission Field

Dear family and friends,

I'm sorry I haven't answered your e-mails yet. I only activated my account today. I didn't get much of a chance to activate it while in the MTC. I'd rather not say why because it would greatly stir up contention. Needless to say I'm grateful that I have my e-mail account set up so now I can e-mail the people that I love the most and that mean the most to me.

 

I suppose you all have a lot of questions right now so I'll try to answer them all starting from the MTC to my mission field experiences.

 

In the MTC my classes were very long and we mainly read from Preach My Gospel. We also role-played as well. I had three teachers: Brother Peterson, Brother Clarke and Brother Hainsworth. All of them were cool guys who were return missionaries. There were eight people in my district, five of us were going to Phoenix while the other three went to Jamaica. I think I wrote a letter explaining where they're all from and what they're like so I won't go into that right now. I was in the Dan Jones building, which is called 15M. My companion was Elder Pearson and he was one of the elders that went to Phoenix.

 

My branch presidency is awesome! President Lafferty answered a lot of my questions and resolved a lot of my concerns and he gave me some helpful advice about how to recognize and follow the Spirit. My biggest challenge in the MTC was looking for the strengths in Elder Pearson and believing that he was a competent teacher. I treated him pretty poorly and I feel really bad about that. If we're ever companions I promised myself that I'd make it up to him somehow. I also promised to believe in my companions no matter what and to strengthen, encourage and support them.

 

I loved the cafeteria food and all the elders in my district frequently commented on how much I ate. We frequently had eggs, hashbrowns and bacon/sausage and I loved it so much that I frequently had three helpings of it. I usually had chocolate milk everyday but as we came closer to the end I started drinking more water instead. The only other people I saw there that I knew was Sean (oops I mean Elder) Vincent. He left about a week before I did.

 

Now for my the mission field. My trainer is Elder Mortimer as I'm sure Sister Connolly told you. He's blond haired, blue-eyed and from Utah. He was born in Sandy but moved to Salt Lake when he was 14. He loves fried chicken and ribs, and he almost likes hot sauce as much as I do. He's been on the mission for about one year and he's the youngest of four. His three older siblings are all girls. Two of them are married (the oldest one served a mission), the youngest sister is not. He's been extremely patient with me and I am very thankful for that. He's been sure to teach me and inspires me. He's helped me a lot and again I am very thankful for his support.

 

On Saturday we had a baptism. We baptized a single mother named Lisa and her hyperactive son Josh, who's about 11 years old. I lead the music and I think I messed up but somehow we got through that. It was really cool meeting them both. On last Thursday, which was my second full day in the mission field, nearly all our investigators with baptismal dates dropped like flies which really hit Elder Mortimer like a bombshell. I didn't really feel anything since I'm still trying to get to know everyone. The work moves on and we got some more investigators with baptismal dates. President Beck issued a standard of excellence for the mission, which we reached for this week. The standard of excellence is:

• 2 Investigators baptized a month
• 3 investigators a week with a baptismal date
• 4 investigators a week attending sacrament meeting
• 7 lessons taught to investigators with a member present per week
• 5 new investigators a week

Before I wrap up my letter I'd like to remind everyone to send any mail/letters to the mailing address on the blog and NOT the Connolly's.

 

Love,

Elder Boothe