More from the MTC

Well I made it through my first week! And it has been just fabulous!!!! I feel slightly bipolar here...like one minute I am all stressed out (like let me go and rip my hair out for a minute kinda stressed...okay thats a slight exageration:) and then to.... "I AM SO HAPPY I'M GONNA DIE!!!!" haha actually the time I got the most stressed out was when we had our lesson on stress management, I felt like mostly the were telling us how stressed out we should be and I was like " ahhhhh I am so stressed...except for not really;) Seriously though I am doing so great and I feel like I have been here forever and am going to be here forever! BUT! We did get our flight info finally so wahoo! We are leaving Aug 20th at 6am so I will probably be calling around 5 I am guessing;) I will let you know for sure next week and how many minutes I will have. We then make a stop in Minosota (pretty sure thats not how you spell it?) and will then fly for 2 more hours over Wisconsin to Cleveland!!!! Yippeia! I am so so so so so excited and just want it to be here! But it will come soon enough and in the mean time I am freaking out at how little time I have left to learn how to be a missionary!!!! AHHHHHH! Seriously, I pretty much have Saturday, Monday and Tuesday left of normal classes and then we start our Visitors Center Training for 1 week then I am outa here! Whew... I will survive though don't worry. Actually the worst day so far was yesterday! I mean it still was really awesome but just SOOOO long! We had In Field Orientation so it was a huge long class from 8am to 530pm then dinner then we went to our evening class for 3 more hours till 930 and then to bed....ohh boy...We pretty much just collapsed into bed and all wrote in our journals "we survived......." haha it really was awesome though but by the end Sis. Smith and I were seriously praying every hour together " please help us stay awake and alert... please please please!" I know that will probably be every day out in the mission field though so I guess I better just love it! Which I do:)

Okay lets see....Time for some funny moments I think...um Well I think I already mentioned Elder Harris (He is this Black 18 year old from Arizona) Anyways, He is so my favorite. He seriously makes me laugh every minute! So we have this one teacher who is dreamy, and just so super Spiritual, Bro. Morris and We all love him to death. He is the best teacher here, He is actually a teacher resource, which means he is so good all the classe have to share him. So the first few classes he had this habit of looking intentently at you when you were sharing a though smiling really big and saying a "I love that" after you said your thought. Anyways it is so sweet and he is so sincere but it just has become the funniest thing because he really did say it all the time and then Elder Harris started mimicing him and now we all just give eachother that look and say "I love that" all the time and it makes us laugh so hard! There was also this one time that Elder Harris and I were taking turns teaching eachother and I was asking him some question about if he has ever heard God refered to as Heavenly Father and he says something (he is pretending to be an investigator of course) like "well my dads name is Ryan, but he's not god." I just looked at him for a second and somehow what he had said just didn't even make sense so I just looked at him at said "what?" and he just busted up laughing and then we tried so hard to focus again and made it through a few more practices but we just kept laughing and we finally just gave up and called it a complete fail because we seriously could not control ourselves....We really are two of the most focused people in the room so don't think this is normal for us to goof of but once and awhile we all just need to relieve some pent up energy you know?! haha yah it was funny. So now we all say that to eachother too....."What?" ( you have to of course have the proper tone for it to be funny just fyi)

Lets what else happened this week! Um....Pretty much classes are awesome and we are learning so much about the Doctrine of Christ and Faith and The Gospel but mostly what we do is Learn learn learn, study study study and then practice practice practice so that we can explain it simply. Which has been The Hardest Thing here...cutting it all down to the bare fundamentals of the gospel and trying to cut out all the mormon lingo and everything is sooo much harder then you would think! My favorite thing in class is when we learn a principle, then two of the teachers will do a role play demonstration and then we get to practice it in a role play too. Its so helpful to just over and over and over again find ways to explain things simply. Its so great though I feel like my knowledge, testimony and faith has expanded so much here in just one week! I can't even believe I could have ever made a choice NOT to serve a mission. It already has blessed me in more ways then I can even tell! And I know the Next 18months are just going to get better and better. I hope you all are not expecting the same person to come home because this is deffinatly changing me. And its simply Incredible! Well I love you all! Thank you so so so so SOOOOOOOOOOO much for all the letters and for your package Katie and Jake! You are all so sweet and it makes me SO happy to hear from you! I seriously am not homesick until I sit down and read a letter and then I almost feel like crying but Its because I love it so much so dont stop! And I really am completly happy so don't even worry about me! I hope you are all doing well! I seem to be able to find more time to write letters so I will try to get back to some of you later! Love you and have a fabulous day!

Love,

Sis. Newren