AYYYY

Well to be honest this wasn't a thrilling week haha.  Our day typically consists of language study, the first 12 weeks training program, companionship study, and then loads of finding.  That is what it has been all week for the most part.  We did have a brief discussion with a guy who is studying to be a minister and that was pretty cool, but that's pretty much all that has happened since the last email.  Sorry mom, I don't have any pictures either.  I'll leave you with a great spiritual thought though!

President Nelson said this is in our last General Conference:
"The most important truth the Holy Ghost will ever witness to you is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  He lives!"  I have come to gain a testimony of that and I agree with President Nelson when he says it is the most important witness we can receive.  Coming to know that for myself has influenced me more than anything else in my life.  If you don't know for yourself, then I encourage you to do what you need to in order to gain that knowledge!

Have a wonderful week!

-Elder Lott

Hi Everyone!

We've had a sold couple of weeks out here in England!  Some of the highlights include a special UK broadcast from President Nelson and Elder Holland, which was really cool!  It was nice to see them outside of General Conference in a less formal environment!  We also had Coventry Stake Conference with Area 70 Elder Turnicliffe, which was good as well.  A few exchanges have happened but I've stayed in Hinckley for all of them so my world has been pretty small lately. lol

The weather here has been incredible this week, by far the nicest it has been since I got here.  It got warm enough to actually say it was hot!  Not a cloud in the sky and I even got a little red on my arms!  It was only like 65 degrees but it felt like 85!  It was nice, but I am also ready for it to cool down a little bit.  This week is supposed to be much cooler thank goodness!

All is well with Elder R!  He is really great and it doesn't even feel like I'm training him most of the time.  He has a lot more maturity and experience than I did at the beginning of my mission.  I was expecting to get a Utah kid who was super sheltered or something, but I got a 22 year old Serbian convert who worked in Dubai for a year.  He is pretty awesome!  My District is good as well.  There is only one other companionship, Elder Kelleher (my MTC comp) and Elder Murray.  We get along well and they are some really good guys!

Fun little story for you....I got my hair cut today and the guy who did it was really nice but a little different.  He was telling us about how he died 3 times, believes the earth is flat, and the firmament is a domed structure over the earth that the stars and planets are projected onto.  Also, UFOs are actual evil spirits.  It took him about 50 minutes to cut my hair because he kept stopping to talk to us.  It was only £5 though so I can't complain too much I guess.

Keep being awesome!  Love y'all!

Elder Lott

Exchange with Elder Terry

District Finding in Banbury 

A cool street we found!

A random text we got this week from Rome

15 April 2018

Hello!  Just a heads up - I am out of time so this won't be a long email.

We were able to watch President Nelson's broadcast.  There was a Missionary Only broadcast that we watched in our District Meeting and then we went to the General Membership Broadcast later that night at the Stake Center.  It was an incredible broadcast and it was really cool to see President Nelson and Elder Holland in a less formal atmosphere.  They are incredible men and they gave some outstanding messages.  It was a day to remember!  President Nelson is such a powerful Prophet.  I don't really remember President Hinckley and most of my memories of President Monson are of him with poor health and toward to latter years, but President Nelson seems to have something different going on.  He's pretty impressive.

Elder Raicevic is doing well so far.  He is a really good guy.  I have had to be a little more patient, but that's kind of inevitable.  He's new and foreign so there's a lot for him to get used to.  We get along well and I'm grateful for that!

It makes me happy knowing you still email the Geldenhuys.  Sigmund and Bernadette are some of the best people I've ever met and I miss them a lot!  The whole Branch in the Forest is pretty awesome, and they are definitely up at the top of the list.  Please give them my best.

Believe it or not Dad, I'm sad I can't be there to mow the lawn this year!  I actually really do miss mowing now.  It was a good way to make some money and to have some time alone.  Too bad I'm getting back in the Fall or I would gladly mow it over the summer for you.  Maybe we will be able to squeeze a couple in before the lawn stops growing.

It will be fun for you all to see Grandma and Grandpa this week.  Give them a hug and 3 kisses for me lol.

Love you all and hope this week is stellar!

-Elder Lott

Elder Lott and Elder Raičević

I HAVE A SON!

Hello Hello all friends and family!  This has been, per usual, an exciting week!  We have a little something extra this time around though!  I have my greenie!!!  His name is Elder David Raecivic (pronounced Raychivich) and he is from Belgrade, Serbia!  He is a total stud as well.  He has a super hardcore accent that sounds really Russian so it's pretty intense. It has been interesting having a foreign companion though because I have needed to totally adjust my speaking to fit his vocabulary.  He learned some English in school and then more after he was baptised because he was around American missionaries a lot.  He also worked in Dubai for a little while before his mission in a British hotel so he spoke English there. His English is good enough that they let him out of the MTC 2 weeks early!  His accent is hard to understand sometimes though because Serbian and English are like polar opposites in how things are pronounced and the noises that your mouth makes.  He can't make the "th" noise, for example, and if a word ends with "ed", such as "disguised", he pronounces the "ed" at the end (disguise-ed) so sometimes you need to really focus to understand him.  I can't complain much though because he is willing to be obedient and work hard.  The rest will come with time.  He's a good dude! 

Elder Orr and I trained to the mission home on Tuesday and Elder Orr got Elder Stiggson who is a Swedish stud.  They will be serving in Newport Gwent, which is in the Cardiff Stake in Wales. It was an exciting day!  It is kind of fun being on the other side of a new missionary's training now too  haha.  I can look back and think about how I was there just a few months ago and I remember all the dumb stuff I did so it is good fun!  I don't have a picture with him yet but I will get one for next week!

Elder Raecivic's family's conversion story is pretty cool.  His Father stopped the missionaries on the street about 5 years ago because he thought one of them was his friend.  After realizing that it wasn't him, he still invited them around just to be nice.  When they came by, he listened and he went to church about once a month, but the rest of the family was pretty uninterested.  This went on for a year and then they lost contact because of a transfer.  A year after that, Elder Raicevic's dad had surgery because of some gall stones and minutes after he woke up the missionaries called him.  He took that as a sign because he thought the gall stones were going to kill him.  The missionaries came by on June 21, 2014 and got the entire family (parents and 3 boys) to go to church and then on July 19, 2014, all except their oldest son were baptised.  The church is barely breathing in the Adriatic missions.  In Serbia there are 300 members and in Belgrade there are 45 members compared to 3 million residents.  Elder Raicevic is one of 6 Serbian missionaries in the world.  His brother is serving right now in the Leeds Mission!

We had the rainiest day I have yet seen on Wednesday, and holy cow it was tipping it!  We were soaked all the way through so that was a good first day for Elder Raicevic.  Then the weather got super nice the next couple of days!  We helped the Nuneaton Elders with some service this week too.  We had to help a lady move because she was being evicted and that was an interesting experience. It was pretty stressful because it had been put off for much too long so we needed to haul butt through all of her stuff.    Always good to help somebody out though!

The photos from the trip to California looked great and I am jealous of all the sunshine!  I have nearly finished my conversion to vampire so before long I will start to smoke a little bit if prolonged exposure to the sunshine occurs.  And BTW,  I miss Chick-fil-A with a fiery and burning passion.  It was the perfect meal for Sunset Blvd.

My dominance at the ping pong table has continued, by the way.  Nobody in the District can stop me so that's neat too.

Well, that's about all for this week!  It was good fun and full of exciting stuff!  For a spiritual thought I would like to quote President Monson in his final General Conference address about the Book of Mormon.
   "My dear associates in the work of the Lord, I implore each of us to prayerfully study and ponder the Book of Mormon each day.  As we do so, we will be in a position to hear the voice of the Spirit, to resist temptation, to overcome doubt and fear, and to receive heaven's help in our lives."

I hope you all have an incredible week!  Do something fun!

-Elder Lott

Here you go Mom!

April 3, 2018

Elder Lott and Elder Orr

Picking up our Boys!

BEST WEEK YET!

Hello my dudes!  This week was crazy but so much fun!  I don't have my greenie yet because the MTC transfer line up is weird this time around so this week I was with Elder Orr.  He is a true American through and through!  He is from Oklahoma and he is such a beast!  We have had such a fun week but sadly haven't been able to get too much done because we have just about everywhere except our area this week it feels like!

Elder Orr came to Hickley on Tuesday and then on Wednesday we had to go to Birmingham for our pre-training meeting where President Leppard gave us the run down and what it is we are supposed to be doing and how to do it right.  That was exciting stuff!  We still don't know anything about our greenies but we will find out all about them tomorrow.

On Thursday we were in Coventry for District Meeting and interviews with President and those were good fun as well.  It was just such a busy week and we were all over the place so it went by really quickly.  I will let you all know about the new lad coming into the mission next week.

Mom, you asked about when we watch General Conference over here.  We watched Saturday morning at 5:00 pm Saturday night, Priesthood session on Sunday morning, Saturday afternoon on Sunday at 3:00 pm.  The members home we watched at decided to take a break so we didn't get to watch any of the Sunday sessions yet - we'll watch or read those at another time.  I watched the announcement about Priesthood but missed the Ministering one.  It will be interested to see how it all works out.

I hope you all have fun in California.  Tell the Vandermarks I say hello!  That's really cool about Parker's call - Cebu!  It's crazy to me that he has already gotten his call.  For some reason he seems like he's still another 1 or 2 years off.  It's an exciting time for him for sure!

Have a great week!  Love you guys!

-Elder Lott

with Elder Orr

Conference Naps