Snail Mail - June 28th

Greg’s Snail Mail Letter of June 28, 2009

Dear Family,
I just thought I’d write and let you guys know how my weekend went. The Friday night devotional was AMAZING! We had seven apostles on the stand! Elder L. Tom Perry (presiding), Dallin H. Oaks, Jeffrey R. Holland, David A. Bednar, Quentin L. Cook, D. Todd Christofferson, and Neil P. Anderson all were here. Elder Holland spoke on the spirit and companionships. It was awesome! He answered all the questions I had and it was like he knew what I needed. It was great! Saturday was really good. I got along with McLean and our companion study was really good so that’s looking up. We played softball at gym and I did well. I never struck out and I hit the ball into the outfield. I also played good defense. I always play 3rd base and Saturday I threw a bullet to first off a ground ball but I didn’t get the runner out. It was dead on and really close. I got a lot of compliments on my throw after that. Then the next play I caught a line drive to end the inning and on my way into bat an Elder called me “a beast!” That morning we spoke only Portuguese till noon to gain more experience with the language. It was rough but fun. We’re doing an English Fast on Monday and Wednesday. So those days we will speak NO English all day to prepare for Thursday when we will speak no English in class from then on. It’s going to be hard but it’ll be worth it. Today was really good. We had a combined Sacrament meeting and Priesthood meeting with a bunch of other zones. It was really awesome to see 10 Elders blessing the Sacrament! After lunch (which was amazing, we had Montreal Chicken, mmmm. . . ) we had District meeting where . . . . I TAUGHT! Elder McLean asked me to give a part of the lesson the night before. I thought he said the whole lesson so I prepared a half hour lesson (it was a 50-minute meeting). I was nervous but the Elders in my District said I did really well. The lesson was on section 9 “finding people”, so if you want to look at it you can. I told my Captain Courage story (“Captain Courage” name removed) and talked about my running in the morning. It was really good until the end where for some reason I started crying when I bore my testimony in closing! I never knew I was a crier! I hate criers! But everybody like it and they laughed at parts so it went well. Our Branch President walked in at the beginning so I was even more nervous about speaking. He had been gone for my first 2 weeks here so today was the first time he’d been to our class. He was in Europe on Business and he’s supposed to be really smart. HE know multiple languages (including Portuguese) and is really nice. HE interviewed me after my lesson to get to know me better. He was really nice. HE said that from my lesson he could tell I will be a good teacher. That really made me feel good. And I had people telling me it was good and Elder McLean said it was really good. We also went to the temple and took pictures. I’ll send them later this week. The fireside was really good. The speaker was the guy who’s in charge of all the everyday stuff here in the MTC like food. He was really funny so we enjoyed it a lot. Then afterward we watched the Joseph Smith movie again and it was great. Well it’s about time I head to bed so I better get to bed. Oh! I almost forgot, what happened with Dad’s back? Did anything happen with those tests? Well, tell everyone I love and miss them! Tchau!
Elder Haws