Elder Colton Craig: Home Life Has Prepared Me For Mission Life

Elder Ross "studying" during our P-Day at the churc

**All the pictures in this email are from my time at the MTC, except for the first one. Mom just got them developed for me.**

So much stuff happened that I don't even know what to title this email, I guess I'll find out at the end of the email.

Monday: Nothing. It was a very nice and relaxing day and we taught an investigator and finally were able to contact another one we have been trying.

Tuesday: We got to see Sister Wiebe and helped her vacuum and sweep the floors. She told us about a bombing in Belgium and I was quite worried about everyone over there. We tried seeing that Imajean lady and she dropped us like flies. So we visited Humpy and helped him hook up some things to his 5 lawn mowers. We saw the Lyons and had to leave because Mary had to look at a house, so we had dinner at the Abney's and then went back to their house to teach them. We warned Mary about teaching the Word of Wisdom before we left.

Wednesday: We went shopping with Sister Wiebe and read some scriptures with her. Then we went to district meeting and had interviews with President Andersen. He taught me a lot during the interview and Sister Andersen was able to teach us a lot during her training too! We went to branch council and had Book of Mormon class after that. Nothing else.

Thursday: We started out the day by helping Brother Stockton move some things around, clean his garage, and drain his hot tub. He bought us McDonalds for all the hard work we did. Then we went to the church and while I was in the bathroom, Elder Ross screams and says "Elder! There's a spider in here come and kill it!" Elder Ross has a big fear of spiders so I thought, "oh it's just a tiny one I'm sure." Nope. It was a big Brown Recluse Spider. It was huge and I was even freaking out a little bit. It was about the size of a half dollar. Luckily, my training back home of the ancient art of killing spiders came in
handy. We tried taking pictures but it looks small in pictures. Anyway it took us an hour to kill it because I got distracted reading a book and also I wanted to find something better than a broom to kill it with. So that was fun. More fun things happened when we saw the Lyons. They live in an upstairs apartment and Mary came out in the shortest and most revealing dress I've ever seen. So it was awkward because I
had to look down while I was climbing the stairs. She changed, thankfully, halfway through the lesson. She said she was going to wear that dress to church and we were praying and praying so hard that
everything will work out that it didn't happen, more on that later. We saw Humpy and he actually read the Book of Mormon this time. He doesn't really understand it very well so we read it and explained it
with him. Also apparently he thought the Book of Mormon was just a couple of stories chosen from he Bible. So we ended up teaching him about the Book of Mormon again.

Friday: Happy Birthday Sarah! I hope that you got my letter. But anyway, what we did was we went to see Fran and on the way there, we saw a guy on his bike in front of us who decided to not pull his pants
up all the way. So we got mooned. We also had weekly planning and Elder Ross was freaking out because there was that spider in the church and now he was paranoid, so we ended up doing the planning in the foyer. We saw Humpy leaving his house so we followed him around town and then we went to his house and invited him to the priesthood breakfast that we were having the next morning. He laughed that we were following him around.

ELDER CRAIG at the Provo Temple

Saturday: We had the priesthood breakfast and Humpy came! Oh my gosh it was awesome! We had pancakes and eggs and bacon and sausage and everyone was really friendly to Humpy. It was awesome! We helped Fran do her laundry at the laundromat and we thought we were just going to
put them in the washer for her, but no, she wanted us to stay for about 2-3 hours to do that and also to find some medicine for her. It was good though. We went to Sister Wiebe's afterwards and mowed her
lawn and yes if you all are wondering, I mowed the lawn. It was awful, kinda. When I was practicing the ancient art of mowing lawns back home, it was awful, but it was quite relaxing at Sister Wiebe's, even
though she had a huge yard. We checked on Humpy to see if he was doing well then went back to Sister Wiebe's to watch the women's session of General Conference with her while Elder Ross wrote his talk for tomorrow. It was a good session.

Sunday: Happy Easter everyone! Elder Ross gave a talk on Jesus Christ. I know it's a very vague topic but that's what they asked him to give it on. It was good. I gave every kid Easter eggs in the church. I
ended up giving the rest of the box to the Coots. It was just full of Easter eggs. Then we went to the Owens house for dinner. Brother Owens and I had an awkward conversation. He told me that his son died and that he lost his testimony because of it and I just tried to console him and he just responded with "we are done with his conversation." Man it was awkward. He doesn't hate me though because we continued talking. Afterwards we had a lesson with the Carrs and went home.

So that was my week. I hope you enjoyed it. It was pretty fun. Remember that God never gives up on you. He loves you everyday and he will make sure that you will become the very best that you can be. I
love you all! Have a good week!

Elder Craig

(If you click on the pictures you can see the larger view).