Elder Christopher Hines: Hooray for Pictures!

August 7, 2014

Dear Family,

Thank you so much for the package! It was really exciting to get, thanks! Thanks for the letters, it's been great to hear from you.

We have nine elders in our district. No sisters. It's nine since we have one group of three. All of the missionaries who came in the same day as me are either going to Busan or Daejong. My companion and I, along with one other companionship in my district, are going to Busan, and all the others in my district are going to Daejong. I think there are three districts total who came in the same day as me, and one of those districts has three sister missionaries. I sleep in the top bunk. The Provo Temple is very beautiful, I didn't notice any blue carpet, I'll look for it today.

Sundays are nice, we can either go to choir practice or go on a "temple walk," where we just walk up to the temple and walk around the temple grounds. Since it was fast Sunday last week we didn't have choir, so I went on the temple walk. You can see some of the pictures from that on PhotoBucket. I actually got it to work! Anyway, most of Sundays are just spent relaxing. We have a lot of personal study time, and that is really nice. I have been reading Jesus the Christ a lot during my personal study, it is quite spectacular. We have priesthood meeting in the morning, Sacrament meeting in the afternoon, choir practice at 5:15, and a devotional in the evening that is combined with all the missionaries here. Sacrament meeting is only the missionaries in my branch, which is all those going to South Korea. We have about 85 missionaries in our branch. For speakers in sacrament, there is just a topic for each Sunday, and two missionaries are selected randomly at the beginning of the meeting to give a 3-5 minute talk about the topic. And it has to be completely in Korean. It's pretty scary, so everyone pretty much prepares a talk every week and hopes they don't get picked.

Choir practice is also on Tuesdays at the same time, and it's Tuesday devotionals that we perform. This last Tuesday we sang Sweet Hour of Prayer. It was the best arrangement I've ever hear of it, it actually made me think about the lyrics. It's actually a pretty amazing song that most people take for granted. And it helped that the music was full of cool minor chords and it had a really cool deceptive cadence towards the end :)

Have a great week, I love you all!

Elder Hines