Three weeks in the MTC and off to Missouri

It has been 1 month since Alex left to serve the Lord as a missionary in the Independence Missouri Mission. He spend exactly 3 weeks in the MTC and finally left for Missouri on Nov. 11th. He was able to call us from the airport on the morning that he left the MTC. It was really great talking to him and we spent a half an hour with him on the phone. He filled us in on all of his MTC antics like dressing up in his Kansas wrestling singlet and going trick-or-treating in the dorms on Halloween. You might wonder why he had a Kansas wrestling singlet in the MTC, but that is another story. Nevertheless, since most of his mission is actually in Kansas and all of the missionaries in this MTC district were going to the same mission, the singlet kind of became their rallying flag and spent the whole 3 weeks pinned up on the wall of their dorm room.

Anyway, the letters that we received from him while he was in the MTC, all said that he was having a great time. He mentioned many times how spiritual the MTC experience was and how great it was to hear from the various General Authorities at their devotionals. Alex was called to be the district leader over 9 other Elders who were all going to the same Missouri mission. He told us many times just how wonderful all of the Elders where in his district and how he enjoyed having Elder Shepherd (from American Fork) as his companion. But at the same time, he was very excited to get out of the MTC and get to work in Missouri. On the day that they all left the MTC, Alex described it has finally getting out of jail, which is probably too strong a word, but he did say that the MTC experience was like a 3 week EFY on steriods. I guess there is nothing wrong with that. ;)


Alex has been in Missouri for about a week and a half now. Actually he isn't in Missouri at all. After spending the first day at the mission home for orientations, his first assignment took him to Kansas. The interesting thing about that is that he is actually in a small town just outside of Manhattan Kansas. For anybody reading this who is familiar with Alex's senior year at P.G. High School and everything that went into becoming a 5A Utah state wrestling champion, will remember the coaching and mentoring he received from his (actually Susan's) cousins during his senior year. The ironic thing is that his cousins all grew up in Manhattan Kansas and spent their high school years on the wrestling team there. It has only been in the last year or so that their parents moved back to Utah from Kansas. So in a sense, Alex has returned to where some of his wrestling roots came from. I mentioned the Kansas singlet earlier that became a rallying flag for Alex's MTC district. Well the whole reason why he even has that singlet in the first place was in honor of his cousins and their wrestling heritage. Funny how what goes around, comes around. To go even further with this story, in the last email that we got from Alex (which was also the first email from Kansas), Alex said that he had received permission from his mission president to go to the local high school and volunteer some of his time working with the high school wrestling team. It will be really interesting to see where that goes.

Obviously there is a lot that has happened with Alex over the last month and will be a lot more happening over the next 2 years. To put it all into a blog just isn't going to happen. But we will try to update this blog as often as possible as well as include some pictures and video clips as we get them from Alex. We have tried to tie this blog to Alex's Facebook page so that anybody that is linked to him there, will see the updates as they are posted here. I'm sure that there will also be a lot of experiences that we will not even hear about until he gets home in 2 years. But that is all OK because Alex has been called to serve a mission and that is where is focus should be. We will have the rest of our lives to catch up on everything else. If you would like more details about how Alex is doing, just give us a call or write us an email. If you would like to write to Alex, his mailing address is on his Facebook page. Feel free to write. We know he would love to hear from you.