Elder Alec Martin: Email #6 - Fifth Week in the MTC

Hello friends and family!

I apologize for my lame-sauce short email last time, I did not play my timing with P-day well at all. As of today I have four days remaining here in the CCM, and then on Tuesday I fly out early morning and go to Provo, where I´ll begin right away as far as I can tell. Luckily for me, since most of my district here is leaving on Sunday, I won´t have classes, just time to pack and email on Monday, so I´ll still get some sort of a P-day instead of going for more than a week to get everyone updated.

But yeah, things have been getting better and better here. It´ll be sad to see some people go, I´ve made a bunch of friends here. Like Elder Jones, my companion, we´ve gotten real close and since he plans on going to BYU Provo after his mission, we´re bound to hang out again sometime. Since he´s a surfer, he was teaching me the other day about how waves work and all the different variables and factors that count in to make a wave good or bad, plus some of the surfer lingo they use to describe things. I got it all written down, made me miss the coast a lot! Like I realized this summer while at BYU, being landlocked is kind of weird feeling, and I´m surprised how much I notice it. Ah well, better get used to it, I won´t see the sea for at least two more years, minus my upcoming flight! I´ve been learning stuff from other Elders too. Elder Blood, who left a week or so ago for Albuquerque, New Mexico, had an amazing conversion story and completely turned his life around so that he could come on his mission. He´s kind of a building-genius tool; he wants to make a invention company when he gets back, and turn ideas into reality. He´s a really cool guy, hope to see him again. Elder Ballard in my district is a 2nd degree blackbelt in Tang-soo Do, and I´ve been learning some basic self defensive from him, as well as ambushing him from time to time to see how he would react. Luckily, he is merciful and I don´t always get thrown to the floor. We´ve been becoming good friends too, and since he lives close to Cedar City, we´re planning on meeting up at the Shakespearean festival down there post-mission. That should be fun! In fact, Hermanas Hatch, Pearson, Hammond, and Buys from my district are all going to Provo after their missions, and since they´ll be in Provo they´ve promised to hunt me down and try to be members for my lessons. We´ll see, it looks like I´m already making friends for life in Provo afterwards haha!

Onto more events of this week and the last, my favorite is probably the priesthood blessing of comfort I was able to give to Hermano Fernando, who´s picture I included in the last email. He was out this week and last because his wife was giving birth to his first child, a little girl named Abish. While the baby was born healthy and fine, his wife was having some difficulties recovering from the C-section, and when he finally had to return to work and we first saw him, she had been in the hospital for 10 days and was preparing for additional surgery. He was feeling very worried and troubled, and so he asked us for a blessing. We said of course, and asked who he´d like, he said anyone would be fine. My companions both looked at me, and said, "Well Elder Martin, you do have the best Spanish". So, translating what I could as I went, I gave him a mixed-language blessing, and the Spirit filled our hearts and led me to say things I would never have said to anyone. It was a great experience for me, and Fernando said he felt much better afterwards. We saw him later that day and he looked much better. We continued keeping him and his wife in our prayers, and just a few minutes ago I ran into him and he said his wife was home today and recovering just fine. What a blessing the Lord has given me to come, if only for a short time, into the life of this wonderful and faithful man. It makes me even more excited to get into the field do things like this all the time!

Though this is likely my favorite, there have been numerous spiritual uplifts here for me, and plenty of fun times as well. I will suffice it to say that I challenged a Cara De Niño, aka Jerusalem Cricket, a few nights ago, and gained $20 in the process. I will divulge the full story some other time. Frisbee has been my gym time go-to, and while my performance is inconsistent, I am getting better as a whole. I´ve been making friends left and right, some of them Latinos who only stay here for two weeks, like Elder Mendoza from Mexico who plays drums and is a big Radiohead, ZZ Top, and Red Hot Chili Peppers Fan. Some nights our district will go to the building with piano rooms, and I´ll take request for songs, figure them out, and play them while we all sing along, it´s a lot of fun.

But, I do miss you all, and want to hear more about what´s going on at home with everyone. Thank you for all your prayers, and please know that you´re in mine. I have many spiritual thoughts and new things that I´ve learned since I´ve been here, but I think I´ll close with just one at random: I´ve been reading in Alma recently, and I just hit chapter 30. Right before hand though, the Sons of Mosiah reconnect with their old partner in crime (literally) Alma as they return from their seemingly-impossibly successful missions to the Lamanites. As they share the blessings and miracles that they have witnessed in their own lives and others, Ammon, who feels so much love for his new brethren in the Church, who are faithful beyond anything they have seen among their own people, is so overcome with joy that his body literally cannot handle it, and he falls to the earth out of lack of strength. I quote from Chapter 27:

17 Now the joy of Ammon was so great even that he was full; yea, he was swallowed up in the joy of his God, even to the exhausting of his strength; and he fell again to the earth.

18 Now was not this exceeding joy? Behold, this is joy which none receiveth save it be the truly penitent and humble seeker of happiness.

Thus, along the lines of the goal of my mission to not only bring others unto Christ, but to do so with as much love as I can possibly muster, I now have a new maker by which to set my goal with: I would like to feel this way, or at least a portion of it, every night before I go to sleep. If I am penitent and humble, and of course if the Lord sees it fit, I would have my strength so wrought out of me unto others and suppressed by so much joy of serving the Lord and my fellow man, that by the time I finish my closing prayer each night I am literally zonked to sleep by the sheer force of my experience. We´ll see if I can make it work!

With love to all,
Elder Martin