Pictures from MTC and Virginia January 2012

Elder Baldwin and the Sisters in his District in the MTC

Provo Temple

Elders Burg and Baldwin on plane heading for Virginia

Mission Home--ate Lasagna for dinner first night

Elders Baldwin and Hulbert--Transfer Day  Jan. 26th

Elder Baldwin, Bro. Alderson, Elder Buckley--Transfer Day Jan. 26th

First Apartment in first area-- Lawrenceville, VA

First Apt in first area--Lawrenceville, VA

Sister M's Farm--Service Project

Email #4 January 30, 2012 First Area-- Lawrencville, VA

Oh Boy!

The sent me to Lawrenceville, VA! This place is so awesome. its the ghetto country! haha. i dont even know how to explain it other than that the population is about 2000 people and the size of the branch is 150 but only 60-70 come each week. the branch is super cool and everyone is giving me grief for being a city boy because im from california. I dont tell them im from AZ, CA sounds better and even my mission pres said that! i told him that i moved to az a few months before i went into the mtc and he said that he'll tell everyone that im from Cali because that sounds cooler haha. President Perry is awesome. he is so laid back and is super easy to talk to! He interviewed me on Wednesday night and told me that there is something about me that he cant put his finger on and told me that i will be an excellent missionary. he has a lot of respect for catchers in baseball and when he found out that i was in the Fire dept, he ate that up. it was a super cool interview and from what i saw, i gave him a really good first impression. He is strictly to the white handbook and doesnt have any other rules. we can even have iPod touches here, he just has to disable the internet. NO BIGGY! send me one of those :) haha. Because i was a catcher, he asked about my knees and i told him that i had some problems with them in the past, so he preretty much told me that ill be in a car my whole mission. They have a little gym here in Lawrenceville that is $20 a month for the membership so i might do that to strengthen my knees hoping to eventually be in a biking area. we will see though. we have a little toyota corolla and get 1350 miles a month. our area covers 3 towns. Lawrenceville, Emporia, and South Hills. all about 20 miles from eachother. Saturdays we go to Emporia and have dinner with the King family every week. Super cool family. they have the oldest house in emporia, the light switches are buttons. very nice family. they fed us tater-tot casserole on saturday night! first time having that! haha. sister king knows how to sew really well so i gave her my pants to fix because the button hole on the inside started to seperate from the pants.

church yesterday was awesome. i got up and introduced myself. forgot to say where i was from! oh well, they will just have to have us over for dinner to find that out. we sent around the missionary meal calendar during church, so we have like 5 dinner apts. this month. the evans are feeding us on wednesday.  bro evans is in the stake presidency and sis evans is just beyond nice. they have 11 kids!!!!!! he is a dentist and from what my companion says, he does missionary dental work for free!

My companion, Elder Buckley is from Bancroft, Idaho and is awesome! He will be training me for 12 weeks and we get along very well. He showed me around to some of the members houses on thursday when i got here and had a dinner apt. that night at the Tetto's.  bro tetto is the 2nd counselor in the branch presidency and is in his mid 30's. sis tetto is nice, they both met on their misions serving in italy.

we have 3 recent converts that we are teaching the new member lessons to. one of them being marcus. he got baptized a few weeks ago and is awesome. he is so funny and has a wife that is investigating as well. we are going to try and get her to be baptized on the 25th of this month. we are starting the lessons with her this week. 

Woody is a recent convert who got baptized last week.  i met him at church yesterday and he is super cool. he is in his 40's and we are going to start teaching him the new member lessons this week. we confirmed him a member of the church yesterday before sacrament. that was pretty cool.

james is another recent convert. we set up an appt. over the phone last night with him for 7pm yesterday and when we got to the house, the lights were on but nobody came to the door. i guess he has been sick lately, so he might have just fallen asleep. after we knocked on his door, we went a couple doors down to a less-active members house, he came to the door and only showed his face  and saw it was us. he said "aww man! not a good time bro, not a good time bro!!" so we set up an appt. with him tonight......elder buckley and i just looked at each other and laughed....

OH shoot!!! so the first time i met James was on my first day here, thursday. and we went up to the door and when we knocked, he heard a gunshot come from the back of another house!! we were like uhhhhh...... what do we do? so james came to the door and invited us in and when we were sitting on the couch teaching him, we heard another gunshot! it reminded me of back home. haha i was happy for a little bit. the ghetto is so fun here. marcus doesnt like to have friends though. idk why, but he said friends are stupid, so he calls us brothas from otha mothas. haha. it was so funny.

it rained here on friday and saturday, we went over to a less active members house to do service on her farm. it was cool, we just have to get her to church! idk what else to tell you...

so the apt has air conditioning. there is mold all over the bathroom. we are going to talk to the landlord about it. we got a new shower curtain for the shower, got a sunset with palm trees. had to bring the beach to lawrenceville! we are going to take some funny pics today to make as thank you cards to the members who feed us.

 

that is good that ian is pumpnig the iron and getting big! take pics to show him his progress. and kennady is going to play softball? thats super good too! sorry to hear that your shoulder is shot dad :( 

    this place is awesome though. the people here are very nice.  idk what else to say other than that i am safe and having a blast! hard work though, and it is definitely hard sometimes when appointments fall through, along with the back up plans to those appointments. oh well. hopefully this week will be full of lessons and baptism dates! have a safe week and i love and miss you all!!!!

love, Elder Baldwin

Email #3 January 24, 2012 Last one in the MTC

So tomorrow is the big day! Here I come Virginia!! i cannot wait. it is going to be so much fun, and meeting the mission president and my new trainer is going to be awesome. This week in the MTC, nothing special happened. Just more class time and study time. I dont know if you remember Ryan Kleinman from freshman year baseball at higley, but i saw him here and talked to him. we see each other pretty much every day now so that is cool. I still see JT every day and he is jealous that i am already leaving. haha. I see April Jones' sister here every once in a while too, i dont know her first name other than "Sister Jones." Thank you so much for the package! how did you know i needed q-tips? i was so excited when i saw those in there, along with all of the food and candy! I dont know if you could tell in the pictures but i definitely have gained some weight here...its stupid. when i get to Virginia, im making it a goal to utilize the half hour in the morning to work out as much as i can even if its just running around the block a couple times. gym time here isnt enough. i started playing basketball when i first got here, but elders were getting hurt, so i switched to volleyball. i can serve up a good serve now. The sport is actually really fun if you know what youre doing and if youre playing with people who are somewhat decent.

 anyways....about the investigators...george (the leg amputee) likes to talk a lot, so any lesson we prepared didnt get taught because he talked the whole time and we ran out of time.. we got 2 new referrals which were students from UVU that came down. I dont know what the deal is with this program they have. some elders say its fake, the trainers here that work here say some are real members that are actors, and some are real investigators. i cant tell the difference. the investigators we had must have been pretty darn good actors if they were members becuase they had a lot of good questions and were involved with the lesson a lot. i dont know. i just play it as its real because when you go in with the mind set that its legit, it is easier to invite the spirit and really start to love the person youre teaching.

Oh shoot...... the most exciting thing in the MTC was.............. so you know how i was having those sleeping problems? well the dr gave me a card that allowed me to take food out of the cafeteria, but in order to keep the food cold, They gave me a FRIDGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so we had a fridge in the room for the last week!! you know i stuffed my pockets with popsicles every night and put them in the ice box! everybody was so jealous of us on our floor. and we would trade ties for popsicles haha.. so every night we would have a ham sandwich, a ice cold lemonade and a popsicle before bed. I LOVE THE MTC! haha that was pretty exciting!

I got my haircut yesterday and guess who cut it!!!!!! Christina Andreasen! we were talking about the good ol days when we lived right behind each other and we caught up on the families and stuff. she said that benjamin is now bigger that her and bigger than ricky and he is like 10 yrs old!!!  i saw eliza too, she was carrying my fridge to the room when i was walking down the hall one day haha.. i took it from her and said thank you ma'am :) neither of them recognized me, i had to be the one to tell them who i was and where i know them from. haha so that was fun. it definitely makes if easier here when you see people you know and you have people to talk to.

So Joe Paterno died? what the heck?! he went through all that  with him getting fired and then he died a few months later? that is too bad.

Everything is well here, next weeks email will be a lot better describing the area im in, the people of the ward, the investigators, my companion, etc!  I love you all, and i will be sending my memory card home with the MTC pics on it. Enjoy and everyone should write me :)

LOVE,

Elder Baldwin

MTC Pictures January 4-25, 2012

Elder Baldwin-"pondering"

                                                            

Elder Baldwin-Provo Temple

Elders Baldwin, Neumeyer & Durrant

MTC Room- bottom right bunk (It's clean!!!)

Elders Hurt and Baldwin (friends from Los Alamitos, Ca Ward)

Elder Baldwin titled this "AMAZING"

Email #2 January 17, 2012

Hey all!!!!

 

The mtc is still going great! I'm so gald to hear that things are still well at home. and thanks for the sports update! everyone here always asks the non-missionaries on temple grounds who won the big games and all...pretty funny. they just laugh when we ask and then give us a little update. I also hear Mitt Romney is doing well? maybe that will spark an interest in the church for the non members! a great missionary opportunity is arising! So my second week started off with a big bang!!!!!! last sunday, Russell M. Nelson came and spoke to us! i was sitting like 50 feet away from him...no biggy!  we all thought he would talk to us on how to be better missionaries and how to teach investigators and all, but no. he talked all doctrine which was amazing. The gathering of israel and how we as missionaries make all of that possible. it was so awesome having a general authority there to speak to us. the spirit that was in the room as he walked in with all 2000 missionaries standing up singing called to serve was amazing!

so the investigator that we taught for the first time didnt show up the second time...but did show up for the third appt. he just talked to the whole time about his amputation and himself growing closer to the savior. he cried the whole time, so we didnt really get to teach him anything. i think it was just a good therapy session for him to let it out. the only invite we were able to commit him to was to read and pray every day. next visit we will invite him to be baptized, he is so ready. he already has such a strong testimony and he has been reading and praying so much. he knows that the book is true i can see it in his eyes.

so this whole past week, well since i got here ive been having trouble sleeping. It would take me a few hours to fall asleep and then i would wake up in the middle of the night a couple times and it was effecting my studies and class time because i couldnt concentrate. my teacher told me to go see the doctor here on campus, and he prescribed me some sleeping meds. so since then, ive been sleeping great and my studies and class are back to normal! thank goodness!!! ive been learning so much here. it isnt the missionaries that do the converting, it is the spirit. we can tell our investigators that what we are teaching them is true, but we dont want them to just take our word for it. they have to read and pray for themselves to know these things are true and as they read and pray, their faith grows and their testimony grows, and then they want to be baptized, it is such an amazing thing to see investigators grow. ya, they may not be real, but it is still cool to experience it. im glad to hear you updated the blog!!! atta beezies.

i didnt get to send out any thank you's to the people who sent me stuff, but thank you Ryan and Tenneal for the package and the letters! you guys are awesome and the candy was great! i will try to get letters out today, but forgive me if i dont. my time on pday is shortened because we have devotional on our pday...

thank you jeff and michelle for the package also!! i have to figure out what im going to do with the silly string :) and thank you for the rice krispie treats! they were delicioius!

thank you steve for the $20, i got myself some altoids and jolly ranchers, and will be back to the store to get some more today! :)

Thank you janna and troy sills for the banana nut bread!!! oh my goodness was that delicious!!!!!!!! my companions were so jealous of them, but i was a good missionary and shared :)

i feel like im forgetting someone! :(

i will try my best to get letters out today to everyone who wrote me. keep writing me, and sending packages!! i love them! haha and mom and dad, dont be afraid to write me a letter also. its always a good happy feeling when i look in the mailbox and see letters there for me, and package slips.

at this time next week, i will only have one more day in the MTC! whoo whoo! im so excited, we already got our travel iteneraries and we have to be at the travel office at 4am on the 25th! eeeeek. itll be fun though. im going to place a Book of Mormon in the airport :) chu know!

my camera is acting dumb..... all of the pictures i take are blurry. i always have to take like 3 pictures and out of those 3 pics, 1 is decent. so we gotta figure that out.  i cant have a camera that doesnt take good pics. write me a letter with a suggestion with what i should do :)

I will be sending pictures out today of some of the things i have been doing here in the mtc. so be expecting those later in the week!

I cant think of anything else to say, so i guess this is it til next week. wish me luck on my last week here. maybe ill be able to call you at the airport, idk though.....

hows ian doing? what has he been up to these days with his group of friends? whats kennady been up to? is ian still playing volleyball or what is going on with that? kennady needs to play a sport too. she is too athletic to not be playing anything. im sure i will get their letters today, so ill try to respond to them asap! well, ill caht with you later!!! love you all!!!

love, Elder Baldwin

Call to be a District Leader in the MTC

Elder Baldwin was called to serve as a District Leader his first few days in the MTC.
  He has responsibility over 4 Elders and 4 Sisters.  Here is the letter of congratulations on this call from his Branch President.

First Email January 10, 2012

oh ya, and i see JT every day!!! hahahaa ill send pics this week! :)

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Zachary Baldwin> wrote:

Hello all!!!!

The mtc is so great! loving every second of it.....well, trying to atleast. My schedule is so busy and sometimes it gets overwhelming. i am definitely learning how to pray a lot. it helps so much! I have already learned so much during my first week here. i have the first lesson down which is the restoration of the gospel and gods love for all of us. i am working on the second lesson which is the plan of salvation, there is so much to learn! lesson three i have kind of skimmed over, but definitely trying to learn as much as i can while i am here. Our first day in class we had a little questioneere? if thats how you spell it..idk haha. but anyways, it was about our comprehension with the BofM and i qualified for the tutoring!!! i am so stoked about that. i already had my first tutoring session and my tutor, sis. mccloskey, pretty much just taught me how to really get deep in the scriptures to really try hard to get what they are trying to say. it is amazing the great detail that is in each scripture as you read it. so i meet with her twice a week during study time and i can already see the difference as i am reading. so ya, the food is not too bad. my companions are great. elder n and elder d are very easy to get along with. it is just us three in the room. so after the first crazy 3 days came the sabbath. sundays in the mtc are so awesome. it gives us a break from the long vigorous hours in the classroom and it is much needed! we spend on average about 11 hours in the classroom each day and sometimes it can be a bit frustrating. personal study time is very hard to stay focused, but im getting off track...back to sunday. we had priesthood with our zone and then had sacrament meeting. all of us missionaries in the zone have to prepare a talk each week depending on the topic given and then are picked at random by a member of the branch presidency at the pulpet. luckily, this week i didnt have to speak, but i feel like i am going to be picked this week. the district going to hong kong left on monday and they were pretty awesome. elder c and elder e, our zone leaders, were very cool cats and taught me alot on leadership type stuff. e is from england and c is from yorba linda. i have the opportunity to be a district leader while i am in the mtc. i really try hard to focus on how we can strengthen our district and set goals that will help us come together and really gain a good friendship with each other. one of the goals was to exclude the words hate and pissed from our vocabulary and each time someone says those words, they get a strike and if they get 3 strikes, they have to tach the district lesson on sunday. so hopefully that will help get rid of some of the negativity within our district. i can thank jackie for that goal haha. the members in my district are very fun. ill list them off right now... elder h, elder b, elder n, elder d, sister m, sister b, sister s, and sister w. sister s is from tokyo japan and i had her write "elder baldwin" in japanese characters in my scriptures with silver sharpie and on the back of my name tags in regular sharpie...i thought it looked pretty cool. thank you everyone for all of the letters and postcards! i got so much mail this week and it helps so much, so keep sending stuff! 6 postcards, 8 letters and 2 packages! i felt kind of bad though because i was the only one that got that much mail in the district. everyone else only got a couple of letters if that.

sounds like everything is busy at home! tha is so awesome that you read out of dads journal for fhe. i am trying really hard to write in my journal every night and so far, im doing well. i pray every night for you and the rest of the family. prayers help so much! so please, keep me in them because i definitely need them as i am trying to learn all of this stuff in the mtc. one last thing before i go... we actually got to teach a real investigator yesterday. his name was george and from orem, ut. about 6 months ago he went through a leg amputation due to a blood clot in his femoral artery. that experince really brought him closer to god becuase it made him pray and ask why god had done this to him. he received a direct answer and it happened to him to bring him closer to christ. due to this experience he was able to meet a lady named tammy who was also a leg amputee, she is a member and became really close to george as he struggled through the difficult times he was going through.. tammy and his family prayed also on why god had done this to george and got the same answer as george did word for word. as he was telling us his story i immediately thought of ether12:27. we went on with the lesson we had for him and it was the most spiritual experience i have ever had. as i was bearing my testimony about how god loves each and every one of his children and how he gives us trials and weaknesses so that me may become strong, i started to tear up and george started to tear up. the spirit was so stong and i am so glad i am able to teach george. he wants to learn more about life after death so we are preparing the plan of salvation lesson for him. amazing!

tonight a general authority will be here! possibly a member of the 1st presidency! it is the mtc presidents all of the world training this week so i am stoked for that! i will have to tell you about it next week. well, my time is up! love you all, have an amazing week!!!!!

love, Elder Baldwin

THE BIG DAY!!! Entering the MTC January 4, 2012

Elder Baldwin's new mission bike!

Outside of Provo Temple waiting to go check in at the MTC

Elder Baldwin's new mission bike!  What a sweet ride!!!!

Meeting his MTC hosts

Where's Elder Baldwin?  It was amazing watching him disappear into the sea of missionaries!

Trip to MTC Dec. 31, 2011

New Year's Eve in St. George, Utah

Salt Lake Temple

Salt Lake Temple Christmas lights

Tour of LDS Church Conference Center

Elder Baldwin out on balcony of Church Conference Center

At Texas Roadhouse Steakhouse. 
The staff and customers gave Elder Baldwin a big "YEE-HAW" the night before he entered the MTC!

Packing for the MTC December 30, 2011