President Nelson is a champ!

What a fantastic week! Every week gets better. Every day gets better.

First off...THANKS for the mail. The mail helps and gets me through the week! WHIT your letters rock, thanks for writing. haha "gapagoll ham".  Pullan family, I don't know your email, but thank you so much for your package! You guys are great. And also the package from Anna, Haley, Mays, Madi, and Syd. Don't know your emails either, but thank you!! Letters of any kind are greatly appreciated. Mom maybe you should thank these people for me ;) OH and speaking of Anna...guess who I saw last week at the temple?? Jaren! Not my brother (I wish), Jaren Hunsaker and his dad. SO GOOD to talk to them for like two minutes. I have seen someone every week so far at the temple, including Amber Ellis, John Ackerson, Mr. Turner, Jaren. Yesterday I talked to Hannah Holmes, who just got a job here at the MTC. Pretty awesome to see people you know. 

We've had some good rain this week. Gave all the Elders a chance to try out their sweaters and stuff. We play a lot of volleyball either in the sand pit outside or inside the gym. Gym time here is so much fun. It's importance is stressed a lot because "a bow string won't stay strong if it is stretched so much, sometimes you have to release the pressure on it." 

Hosting on wednesday was super dooper cool! Brought back memories from what feels like an eternity ago, when we got dropped off. A little awkward though because you have to be excited and greet the family and stuff, but very few families are happy to see you. Mostly it's a huge cry/hug fest and no one is happy to see the host missionary. But the new Elders and Sisters are generally pretty excited. The first few days are great. It's a fun job. 

Haha finally had the first sleep talking incident. Elder Trent sleeps on the top bunk. I guess he got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I was muttering something about the BOM. He decided to ask me about it, and I ANSWERED. I was like "Yeah I love the book of mormon, my favorite book is ammon....and..and.and...and...and...and..." He just left to go, and when he came back I was still muttering "...and...and...and..and.." funny.

Last week I played the piano in sacrament meeting. So far I've played the hymns and a special number (come thou fount). I love music, just wish we had some more of it. We have to resort to singing it and it's not pretty. 

As you can tell from the subject...on tuesday devotional we had an amazing talk given by..Sheri Dew! Just kidding, we had her on sunday. But she did great too. Tuesday was the one and only President Russell M. Nelson. The spirit in that room was very very strong. His talk was very simple and brought some good truth to light. He talked a little about pornography, and how Christ will forgive "as oft as we repent." But it has to be TRUE repentance. He talked about his history as a heart surgeon, and talked about how we missionaries are "epistles of the lord." We are literal messages and testaments of Christ, walking about. I loved that he said how the spirit burns into our hearts and becomes part of us. He said it is written in the "fleshy tables of the hearts". I LOVED that, because on the quote that Uncle Brad gave me, he wrote a little note on the bottom that said "I know you can commit this not only to memory, but write it in the 'fleshy tables of the heart.'" We had a district review of the devotional afterwards, and I talked about that. Our branch president's wife, Sister Swenson, was kinda crying. His wife also gave a good talk about we are a heaven based church and not a utah based church. PS did you know that he remarried like in 2006, when he was in his 80's? He's a cool guy. 

Lessons and spanish continue to improve greatly. I LOVE LOVE LOVE being a missionary. If you try, you can really be happy. 1 nephi 31:20..I think. Wherever it is, it says we must "press forward with a perfect brightness of hope". That is important. Haha me and Elder Trent have this new thing where we read out of the spanish BOM and try to translate to english. The other guy reads english and corrects him. It has some funny outcomes too. 

Well better go. Thank you to everyone who may ever read this, I am so glad for my friends and family. I love this gospel and how I am HAPPY all the time becuase of it. Also just know that is impossible to write everything I want to, so sorry about that. See ya next week!

Elder Wilcox

Ps: "And they traveled forth to the land of building 1M to do laundry, their bags being great with dirty clothes. And they washed their clothes in the washer, and it was well. But when the time came forth to put the clothes in the dryer, the lint thereof was exceedingly gross." The lint in the dryer is NASTY.

MTC shenanigans

Hello from provo to Heber! (that doesn't sound very cool. Eh whatever, it'll sound cool when it's Buenos Aires)

The MTC is sooo great! I can't wait for the field. But was it dad (?) that said if he had to finish his mission just after the time in the MTC he felt it would've been a success. That's totally how I feel. I think that being here you can really sincerely change your life for the better.

Funny stuff: its the most spiritual campus on the planet, but we still have 18 year old boys running around. My district is 10 guys, and the residency rooms are three bunks so room for 6 guys. The room that I'm not in has an extra bunk and they filled it last week with two english speaking elders. We had been there two weeks so we were basically veterans to them right? So we walked in to find them unpacking. Every night we do a district prayer, but that night we had them join us. We had our poker faces on, and said totally serious "Here in the MTC they want us to be friends and have love for each other, so we hold hands when we pray." There were like ummm ok? So we all held hands and said our district prayer. They were super weirded out it was funny. I said it in spanish, so they had no idea what was even going on the whole time. I said "we are grateful for our new elders, Elder joy and elder rogers." But joy in spanish is gozo, so I said that. As soon as I said gozo, the whole district busted up laughing. I think they think we're really weird haha. That night laying in bed the guys staged a loud conversation about the last elders that were in those bunk beds the new guys were in. The new guys don't have pillow cases. They said "That would be terrible to get sent home just for getting pink eye." "Wasn't it just because they didn't have pillow cases?" "Yeah that's the only reason." HAHAHA they woke up to find Elder Rogers had wrapped a t shirt around his pillow. But it's okay we told them we were just joking.

Language problems: pez is fish and paz is peace. We've told investigators a couple times that if you pray often you can have fish. Things like that.

We are continuing to teach Jose. What a great guy! We taught him tuesday and thursday. On tues he hardly even let us teach. He had a marathon shirt on and said nice shirt i am a runner too! But then he just went on and on about how life is like a marathon. It was nice what he said, but we didn't really get a chance to get to our lesson. On thursday we taught him about faith and repentance. Plan of salvation and stuff. He listened hard and asked good questions. It was so easy to talk to him, I could just feel the spanish flowing! I think that's where the gift of tongues kicks in, when we really care. We also did member lessons this week. That is where actual members come in and we just give a little lesson. It was HARD though, because we didn't know them at all, and they talked really fast. I couldn't understand almost all of what they were saying. But with Jose, we have gotten to know him and really love him. On thursday he started crying and told us how him and his wife have had financial problems. His daughter is handicapped and life is hard a lot. But I just bore testimony that with faith and diligent prayer, we can overcome our challenges. Not get rid of them, or make them easier, just overcome them. I told him I thought he was a really loving guy, which is important because we need to have charity, the pure love of christ. I wasn't planning on saying that, but I think it was the spirit. he was so nice. He said "thank you so much for your beautiful words and message." The learning the language is going slow but good.

We got a TON of heber missionaries this week! SOO awesome. haha heber gets a lot of hype becuase there are so many of us here. People really think heber is a small cowboy town. Funny. I saw Elders Ritchie, Lindsey, Root, Strong, Harmon and Roney are companions (isn't that CRAZY?), and others. It's so happy here.

The sunday and tuesday devos are so good. One great part is the MTC choir. I LOVE singing in the choir. It is so great. We sang "A child's prayer" this week and I took a break from tenor to do base. HA it really was so fun. The director, Bro Egett, is so cool. Really really cool. He's spiritual and funny.

Thanks for all the letters. love everyone! make sure and pray daily. Read the scrips. I love everyone at home! Until later.

Elder (Ooh-wee-de-cock-oo-soo)