Letter Four...12 days left in CCM

Hola! Wow! Thank you all for your emails :) I got the most this week than I ever have before and it´s really great to hear from all of you! This week felt extra long for some reason but it was really good. I went to the doctors last Friday and found out I have a sinus infection and so that´s why I have been so sick but I got some medicine and I am almost completely over it now. That night my companion and I had 3 race walks and 2 of them were at least half a mile each so the next morning we woke up way sore in the most random places haha we are kind of crazy and weird. Friday I was also able to give this kid in my district a blessing because he was really struggling. He has a lot of self esteem issues and I worry about him a lot because his companion isn´t very nice to him and won´t really talk to him so we have been trying to fix their relationship still because they haven´t gotten along ever. The blessing went really well and later that night we gave all the hermanas blessings because yet again they were struggling with a lot of different things. Every Friday I feel like everyone goes crazy around here! Anyways it was good to help and we let some other elders in our district have the opportunity to help out with those blessings. Also Friday night we got to study chapter 17 of ¨Jesus The Christ¨ and we talked about REAL HAPPINESS versus FALSE HAPPINESS. There are so many things in this world that can ¨make us happy¨ but we need to find the things that really make us happy eternally and help others to find that for themselves. Saturday was filled with helping our districts companionship's and getting some study in. Sunday we had a branch leadership meeting mainly about my district and the one companionship that is really struggling. Then we had a priesthood lesson on the oath and covenant of the priesthood and it was really good. Then my companion and I had to teach our district a 40min lesson about commandments and we totally forgot to prepare for it so we were a little worried and right before the lesson started the presidency told my companion that they needed him to help plan the next couple weeks because he is the branch executive secretary and so I was left alone to teach the lesson. I know the only way I was able to teach that lesson was because of the Spirit, I couldn´t believe where I were getting the things I was saying and it ended up being a really good lesson. In sacrament meeting my district was in charge of the special musical number and we sang a cool rendition of Asombro Me Da (which is I stand all amazed for those of you that didn´t know). I really liked it even though I probably didn´t sound very good because I was so stuffed up. I heard Kelsee and Derek did great on their talks, I´m so proud of those two :) haha That means Kelsee spoke on her birthday right? welcome to the club Kelsee and I hope you had a great birthday! The beginning of this week was really hard to stay focused and study because my sickness was making me exhausted and giving me really bad headaches but I made it through it and towards the end of the week had some of my best studying and I can even roll my R´s sometimes which is crazy because I used to never even be close to doing that. We have heard some amazing talks this week and I really loved this one from Elder Bednar and he said that as missionaries we need to stop worrying about whether it is the Spirit telling us to do something or our own thoughts and we just need to have faith and just do it. We also heard an amazing one from Richard G. Scott about prayer and another by Elder Bednar about listening to conference and gave us a guideline to help us take better notes. He said 1. write the doctrine they are teaching, 2. write their invitation to us, and 3. write the promised blessing from doing what they invite us to. Then he went deeper into it saying don´t write the words they say, write the words you FEEL. He also told us not to write down exactly their doctrine, invitation, and promised blessing. But to write down what doctrine we need, what action we are going to do because of their invitation, and how we personally will be blessed. Be personal and specific in your note taking and it will make it easier to remember and you will be more likely to actually do something after conference is over. This week my companion got the opportunity to teach a member that lives in Mexico City and came inside the wall for us to teach her. It was an amazing experience and I really felt like a missionary during our lesson. I was amazed with how much I could understand and the Spirit was really strong. I didn´t realize it but I tend to say more things in a southern accent than I realized, like twelve, left, yes, well, and many many other words for some reason and it is really funny because it is rubbing off onto my companion. We now say a lot of things in a southern accent and we even try to talk is español in a southern accent which is pretty hard. My companion and I get along really well and I can´t believe I´m going to have a new one in a week and a half, I´m gonna miss elder Golding a bunch, we are way similar and we love the same things and the only big difference is that he is way into World of Warcraft so I might have to get into that when I get home ;) haha Congrats to Nick for getting his mission call and it´s crazy he is going to the same mission as trevor and I can´t believe he leaves so soon! I hope you all have a wonderful week, things are going great! I got to have a good chat with Elder Vierkant yesterday and it was great to catch up with everything that is going on at home. Way to go Utes!! I´m glad they were able to win, I heard it was an intense game and it was really funny because Sunday morning in our sacrament meeting the presidency member that was conducting is a huge BYU fan and he got up to do announcements and told us who won and he said, ¨Last night Utah beat Byu 20-14, but don´t worry the church is still true!¨ It made me laugh :) Well I love you all so much and I am thinking about you all(not too much because I´m focusing on the work) and praying for you all, have a wonderful week! Love, Elder Hyde

Elder Matt Vierkant and Elder Nathan Hyde in the CCM

Third Letter from the CCM...more than half way...

Hola Familia y Amigos! I can´t believe it has already been a week since I last emailed! Time is going a lot faster now that we have gotten into a routine and that we know what is going on now. My companion and I are getting a lot better at teaching in español :) Our first few lessons we had to have either preach my gospel or a full page of notes to teach our lesson but now we just go in with a Libro de Mormon and the Spirit and we can teach for over 30 minutes about something. The Spirit is the most important thing in our lessons and so we always sing a hymno and say an oracion before we teach and to begin our lessons. Our mission presidente told us "The Spirit doesn´t withdraw from us, we withdraw from the Spirit." I know that to be true. Sometimes it can be hard to always feel the Spirit but I just have to stop and think of what I´m doing wrong that had made the Spirit withdraw from me. Everyone that is baptized has the gift of the Holy Ghost to be with us ALWAYS, as long as they are following God´s commandments, so I have been trying to remember that especially when I take the sacrament. So I guess I should tell you about my week. Well last Friday I weighed myself and I´m 152 pounds which means I´m almost back to normal yay :) We had an amazing lesson with our district that night. Our teacher told us we were going to find something that we could do better as a district and she told us to get down on our knees and pray with a sincere heart to find out what we needed. After we prayed the Spirit told me to go to Christ like attributes in preach my gospel and Patience stuck out like crazy. The teacher then said we were all going to share, starting with me and so I talked about patience for a minute and my companion was just looking at me with him jaw down because the only thing he could think of was patience. (my companion and I have a saying throughout our district that we are of one heart, one mind, one foot, and one tie because we always think the same things, feel the same way, and we have the same shoe size and so the hemana´s said they want to buy us matching ties) Anyways, as we continued throughout the class almost everyone was directed to a scripture or a thought about patience and wow it was amazing how strong the Spirit was and how true it was that we needed patience. This week we have all been trying to work on our patience and wow I have needed it this week because I have been pretty sick all week, a companionship isn´t going very well in our district because this elder is a jerk to his companion and won´t treat him well at all, an elder locked my companion and I´s room as a joke but neither of our keys could open it and he had to try and kick the door down and eventually broke the handle enough that the door opened and many other wonderful things. Back to Friday, after our amazing lesson, all 4 hermana´s needed a blessing and so my companion and I gave them blessings and it was another great experience with blessings. We then felt prompted to go to the companionship that is struggling and challenged them to stay with each other and try and find common interests and just help each other. We promised them that if they would do that they would be blessed and would become a close companionship. They both agreed but the next day they were right back to not trying :( They frustrate me a lot haha This weekend we celebrated Mexico´s Independence Day and it was crazy! They have a tradition in Mexico to go outside and shoot your gun into the air and yell "Vive Mexico"!! So the nights were way loud and pretty crazy. On Saturday we got to watch a big celebration with a lot of performers dancing and singing and going crazy! Too bad missionaries can´t dance because we all wanted to haha On Sunday night we all gathered in the gym to watch live TV of the celebration of Mexico´s Independence, which started at 11pm and was just the President of Mexico saying vive and then a persons name and then we woull repeat it back and then he ended with vive Mexico three times. It was interesting, and it was manditory to be there so we all broke mission rules that night and we didn´t get to bed until midnight. When we left they told us to get to out rooms as quick as possible so we wouldn´t get hit by falling bullets. Yes falling bullets from all of the crazy people shooting into the air that night especially because of the live thing we watched on TV, that made us feel safe haha The rest of Sunday was amazing of course, we had a really good leadership meeting and got to talk about the companionship that is struggling in my district and the President had to meet with them twice that day for at least an hour each time and they seem like they kind of get along now....kind of. Also on Sunday my companion and I taught a lesson on the plan of salvation which went really well, We had a devotional that night which was Elder Hollands 2011 January devotional. Elder Holland is amazing and his talks to missionaries are amazing just like his conference talks are. Monday started off a little late for me because my alarm clock changed time in the middle of the night and my comp woke up at 6:30 and went right into his prayer and didn´t realize I was awake until he ended his prayer at 7:22. So I slept in until then, which was nice because I was sick but I felt way bad for not getting up on time, and he said a nice prayer for 52min. His prayers are getting longer almost every day, I can´t believe it haha The rest of the week has been pretty hard to study and teach because I have felt crappy but we have had some of our best lessons. One of our investigators is our teacher and usually our teachers play an investigator that they had on their mission or someone they know, but this time she is being herself. They don´t tell us who we are teaching so we went into the lesson asking what she knew and were figuring out she knew everything and then she told us she had been baptized in the LDS church. So we thought, oh a less active member and asked her to come to church and she was like yes I love church I go every week. So we were stumped, she was a member, went to church every week, she told us she was going to be married in the temple in December and we realized that she was playing herself. So our second lesson we had no clue what to teach her. What are you supposed to teach the person that teaches you??At first we felt like she wasn´t a missionaries responsibility and didn´t know what to do but we just planned a lesson anyways. So we had this lesson planned and then 2min before we were supposed to teach I felt like we needed to change our whole lesson so that´s what we did, we decided we needed to talk about temples and then what she was gonna do after she got married and we found the problem. She really wants to go to medical school but she also wants to have kids and she doesn´t know what to do. We had a way emotional lesson and we were all almost crying by the end and when we ended we asked her to pray but she couldn´t speak so we had to say it. Wow I love the CCM and the many experiences I have had here already! We went to the temple today and I understood so much more than the first time and I was able to do so much more by myself it was a great feeling. Today I finally feel like I´m getting over my sickness and this morning I got to see Elder Vierkant at breakfast and that was fantastic!! I´m glad he made it and I can´t wait to catch up with him soon but I´m not sure how often we will see each other because while Elder Kimball and I had similar schedules, Elder Vierkant and I don´t :/ Well I hope Blake had a wonderful birthday! Happy Birthday this week Kelsee! I love you all and love your emails! adios :) Love, Elder Hyde

CCM pictures...

Elder Hyde & Elder Kimball the night before Spencer when back to the states...

Elder Knight, Elder Hyde, Elder Smith, Elder Kimball - CCM

Second letter at CCM....

Hola! Well thank you all for your wonderful emails, it really makes me happy to hear everything that is going on! Congrats mom and alan! :) I can´t believe that I´m going to have another lil bro/sis when I get home and I´m really excited for you guys. Well my week was really good and it went by so much faster than my first week :) It has been kind of a crazy week and I guess I better start with last friday becasue so many great things happened that day. It started off with some service, which means of course it´s going to be a good day, and then I got to go on a run :) it was only a little over a mile and it was on the worst pebble track I have ever run on in my life but it felt way good to run a little bit and I ran it in 6:15 and it didn´t even feel too hard but the elevation pretty much killed me haha it started raining like crazy so we had to go inside but I got to do core and a biking workout so that made me really happy too. We got a new teacher so now we have one in the mornings and a different one at night and I really like how they teach so different and it´s really helping me with the language. But I did find out this week that I´m not here in Mexico to learn español, there is a way bigger reason and I´m just starting to figure it all out. Anyways back to friday, so my companion (Elder Golding) and I had been feeling all day that someone really needed a blessing in our district but we couldn´t figure out who it was. So at the end of our evening study we reminded everyone that if they needed a blessing we would be more than happy to give them one, but nobody would say they needed one. We waited for the elders to leave our class and then we asked one hermana if she needed a blessing and she told us she really did need one and so it was really cool that we knew she needed one. But what we found out is that all of the hermanas in our district needed a blessing and so we gave all 4 of them a blessing. Wow, blessing are such an amazing thing. It was the first time I have given a blessing and I wasn´t sure what I was gonna say and when I started the blessing my mind went so clear and I thought I wasn´t going to have anything to say but the Spirit was so strong and my mind was filled with exactly what I needed to say. One of the coolest experiences of my life and I doubt I will ever be able to forget it. When my companion and I got back to our dorm we were asked by 2 elders for a blessing and man I am so glad to have the preisthood in my life and be able to give these blessings and do so much more. I then knew our promptings had been right because we gave 6 blessings on friday night and I loved it! Saturday was a really interesting day. Two elders in our district have not been getting along with each other and anytime we are with them you can feel the bad feelings they have for each other and it´s impossible to have the Spirit around them. We tried to talk with them and then we had our zone leaders talk to them and then the president of the CCM, president Prat, but nothing would help them. I also got to play some volleyball with elder kimball and his district one last time and that was great! Sunday was an amazing day! The Holy Ghost is way more present on the sabath. Started the day off right with breakfast with elder kimball and then right to a leadership meeting which was really good. Elder golding and I taught a 40min lesson to our district about the restoration. We really needed the Spirit because we hadn´t prepared very much but the lesson went really good. President Prat talked to us about the gift of the Holy Ghost and then we had our Sunday devotional. Which was Elder Holland and I wish I could write his entire talk because it was so amazing but if you wanna look it up it was his jan. or feb. address to missionaries and he talks about how we must convert ourselves before we can ever hope of converting others. He said whatever we want for our investigators we must first do ourselves. He told us ¨Convert yourself, obey the rules, adn teach with the Spirit and you will know you have had a successful mission¨. After that I got to go to elder kimballs casa and talk with him while he kind of packed and we had to say goodbye which was kind of hard but I´m so excited for him and I´m glad I´m really close with my companion or else it probably would have been a lot harder. The rest of my week was a lot of study and prayer and just trying to focus of preparing for those people I will need to teach once I get to Cali. In my personal study I went through chapter 4 of preach my gospel and it is really amazing and has helped make my prayers a lot better and helped me to know how to bring the spirit into my life more. The past two days I have been reading a lot. I read ¨Our search for Happiness¨ and started ¨Jesus the Christ¨. I love our search for happiness so much and I wish all my investigators could read it becasue it really is so good and teaches the basic doctrines and beliefs of our church. Jesus the Chirst is a little hard to understand sometimes but so far it has made me think a lot about Christ and how much there is to know about Him. We get new Zone leaders this week and since our district will be the oldest in our branch our district leaders are thinking my comp and I will be the next zone leaders but we will have to wait until Sunday to find out. I love you all so much and love hearing from you all :) and I´m really sorry this email is so long! Love, Elder Hyde

First week pictures at CCM...

Mexico City, Mexico

Elder Hyde and Elder Kimball together at the CCM

Elder Hyde & Elder Golding - Mexico City Temple

Nathan and his companion Elder Golding were made District Leaders there first week.

First Week at the CCM...

Hola! Well the last 9 days were probably the longest days of my life but I really loved almost every moment. I guess I should start with the first day. So the flight here went really well, it was crazy to see Mexico City from an airplane! It´s huge!! There were just buildings as far as you could see and as tightly packed in as you can get. At the airport they checked my bags when I got to Mexico and when they saw all of the food I had they gave me a really funny look but I just told them that I was a hungry growing boy and they laughed and let me keep it. I flew in with about 35 other missionaries and I am the only one that is going to Anaheim, even now I haven´t found another person going to Anaheim but I hear rumors that someone else going to be serving there as well. So when I finally got here President Prat was waiting to welcome us and it was super exciting. They gave us a big packet, let us send a quick email and then we were on our own. I found my companion and we found our apartment and room. My companion is Elder Golding, he is from Washington and will be serving in the Richmond Virginia mission. He is way cool and I am super glad that he is my companion. So after we found our room we hurry and got to a live broadcast devotional and when I walked in I saw Quincy, Spencer, Parker, and Logan right away and it was so great to see all of them. The first day I realized missionaries aren´t perfect. Actually not even close haha I was suprized that they were pretty crazy and some things I saw were suprizing. For example right when I got there and was looking for my companion these girls were trying to flirt with me and it caught me by suprize that here the girls flirt way more than the guys. The next couple of days they had us in a room with an español teacher and right away she was only speaking español and I feel like all I did the first few days was learn spanish, eat, sleep, repeat. Especially since we didn´t get gym time until Thursday. Learning a new language is really hard and I have been struggling a lot with it but I think a lot more has been starting to stick the past few days. My companion is the only one in our district that hasn´t taken a spanish class before and we had to teach a 30min lesson on our first Friday there. It was really broken spanish and was pretty rough but we made it through it. By the time Sunday came we could pray, bear our testimonies, and had taught 2 lessons to our investigator, Ignacion. Yes ignacion. AKA nacho :) As for the food, the first few days I loved it! But then it met my stomach and had other plans because it has made me really sick most days but it still tastes good so it´s a really interesting love/hate realationship. I´m really glad I brought so much food because it has helped out a lot. The second night we were here they told my district they were going to interview everyone and then choose a distrct leader, and they picked me. I was way shocked and already felt way overwhelmed by learning the language but I accepted and now have the responsibilities of picking up the mail everyday(thanks for the early letter mom), leading our study times and providing a 45min district meeting lesson every Sunday, and well as many other random little things. I really love my district and companion and I am enjoying the CCM a lot. So a normal day goes like this. Wake up at 6:30am, pray and then get ready for the day. My companion prays for at least 30min morning but he usually falls asleep during them so it´s pretty funny. We have breakfast at 7:15am and then personal study time, language study, coaching, and more study until 12:15pm. Lunch at 12:15, which ALWAYS includes rice and beans, which taste amazing, but make you pretty sick if you eat them a few days in a row. TALL for an hour from 1:15-2:15, TALL is a language program on the computer that makes you really tired. Then we have more personal and language study until 4pm when we have gym. I have played tennis, ulitmate frisbee, basketball, and most of the time my companion and I join Elder Kimball and his district for some volleyball. We have gym for 45min and then we have time to shower and do our daily planning until 5:45pm when we get to have dinner. After dinner we either teach our investigator, Ignacion, or we have some sort of devotional. we have taught Ignacion 4 lessons now and they keep getting better each time and we even committed him to baptism last night but now we have to teach him about commandments and see what he thinks about that. He will be our new teacher in a few days, so no he isn´t a real investigator, and so he likes to really try and mess with us. Especially my companion and I because our español is very limited. Last night after he asked why baptism is impotant and we told him it would wash away his sins and help him to return with his Heavenly Father, his family, and our favior Jesus Christ, he told us he didn´t have any sin and that he was already baptized when he was a baby. So he tries to make it difficult and real and he is a really cool dude. So after that we just have personal time and companionship prayer and go to bed. Thank you all for the support, Sunday was a little tough because it finally hit me I was really gone, but knowing you are all there for me and for all the reasons I came our here I have been doing great ever since. I have also been able to see Elder Smith and if you know of anyone else coming down here let me know so I can look for them :) I love you all so much! LOVE, Elder Hyde

The SLC Airport....and Elder Nathanael Clark Hyde is off to serve the Lord ***

So I was dreading the airport farewell...but my sweet boy was ready to go. His confidence gave me strength to know with out a doubt he will be watched over and protected for his obedience and choice. He glanced back briefly to flash that awesome Nathan smile. We were so excited to receive his first email in the CCM (mexico mtc). He told us he met one of the sisters from the previous day at the temple on his flight. He also had his luggage searched in Mexico. They asked him,"Why do you have all this food?" and he replied, "I am a growing hungry boy." He said they laughed and let him keep all the food we had packed for him and his best friend Elder Spencer Kimball who was waiting for him in the CCM. So he is already having a great start to the mission. I love being a missionary mom already!

A day to always remember....August 26, 2013

We shared a wonderful day with Nathan at the Salt Lake Temple. We arrived five minutes late to the session so we wanted to make the best use of our time. We chose to do sealings. We were inspired. It was a wonderful experience and there were 2 sisters preparing to leave the next day for their missions too which made it fun. We then enjoyed our time in the temple. Afterwards we ate at the Lion House, we ate too much food but enjoyed our time together. Nathan then made the trip to see his "girl" friends before he was set apart. His emotions were full when he returned home and we then witnessed him be set a part as a missionary. The spirit was strong and as his mother I knew he would be watched over and protected as he serves the Lord. We will miss his presence in our home but we know his decision will bring forth blessing for all of us.

Farewell...

It was a beautiful day for a farewell. Nathan and one of his best friends, since 4 years old, Garrett Nielson were able to share the day together. Garrett will be serving in Tokyo, Japan. We had a house filled with family and friends to wish him well. Everyone was so generous and kind. We will miss Nathan but know his mission will be filled with wonderful experiences that we look forward to hearing about.

Last Bro 5k before the missions...