Boots on the Ground

Dear awesome familia!

Wow! I don't even know where to start! My companion is Sister Packer and she is from, drum roll please......Rexburg! She knows Devon and Aleesha! Haha! Awesome right!? She is just fantastic! She has only been out for 3 months, so she just got done with her training! I hope I can be this good in 12 weeks! So likelihoods are I will be here in Sun Prairie for at least 2 transfers, maybe more. When she is done training me she will have been here 6 months! Our ward is a family ward and they are awesome! We work a lot with the members and building a good relationship with them! I haven't been able to meet all of them yet because we had Stake Conference! I will get to that in a minute. We live in a really cute, nice little apartment on the second/top floor. It is small but has everything we need. I will send pics next week hopefully! Our area isn't to huge. It is on one side of the highway but we do drive most places. When we go contacting we drive to a neighborhood and park then walk. We have a car with a monthly mile limit which isn't really a hindrance. We will be fine with miles :)

President and Sister Cutler

Dad, your business trip sounds awesome! There are SO many trees here! It like isn't super huge forest-y or anything but tons of them. The cities around Madison are nice because they aren't packed. We got a little tour of Madison on Sunday because that is where our Stake Center is. We are in the Madison Stake. It is such a neat city. Downtown is mostly just University stuff (not sure what university, felt too stupid to ask) but the buildings are gorgeous! There are parks, lakes and mini forests all throughout the city. It is a huge city but that is because things aren't wall to wall. It is really nice. In 2 weeks when the leaves come out on the trees it is going to be gorgeous! It is still pretty cold. Today it is in the 40s and pouring! It has only been sunny once since I have gotten here! I wish I had more tights! It is all good though! It rains a ton! All day it has been raining. It goes between drenching to a mild Idaho rain though throughout the day though ;) My companion though is super awesome and sweet. She doesn't care too much about primping and what not so we can go outside and no complaints :) We love the rain!

Our teaching pool here is rather...small. We have one baptism date but she seems to be dropping out. None of the investigators are really progressing. So we are working hard on finding! Lots of tracting! We finally placed a Book of Mormon on Saturday! And she said we can come back! So hopefully she will be there! We are also teaching an RLDS family! That is crazy! Their beliefs just blow my mind! They don't believe in temples! So they aren't getting baptized! It is so frustrating! But we are praying hard and still working with them. We also teach a muslim lady who is super hard to teach because she only believes Jesus was a prophet and she asks where Muhammad is in the BOM :) She also won't take anything of ours with pictures of Jesus, so we have to cut out a lot of pictures because of the "no en graven images" thing. It is interesting. We do have a 12 year old new convert who is bringing her 10 year old friend to lessons and she wants to get baptized! It is tricky though, this week we have to talk to her parents, so hopefully that goes well!

Anyways! Work is hard here but I am loving it! Something great about Stake Conference was on the Saturday night session they talked a lot about missionary work. It is so cool to be on this side of things. Something cool our ward has done is they made a ward mission plan and made a big poster of it to hang up at the church so everyone can see it and everyone remembers. Then our bishop issued the challenge to make a family mission plan and to do the same. Hang it up in the house so you can see! And it is all about just trying. Not success but trying because that is all we can control. We are getting a CD around the ward called "The Missionary Next Door" maybe you can find it online or something but you should listen to it. It talks about as members it is our duty to do the social conversion while missionaries do spiritual conversion. They teach you how to set it up so missionaries get blamed for all awkwardness :) It's good! Something cool I learned at Stake conference! Elder Bruce Carlton of the seventy came and he told us sometime when you listen to conference talks write down all the invitations! Then do it! So cool. He was great!

You know that for some odd reason I wanted to tract when I came on my mission right? :) Well I get to! It isn't my comps favorite but we have a goal to do at least a half hour a day until we get a big enough teaching pool! People here are so great! I love them! When they reject you it is funny how nice they usually are! They open the door and will talk to you in their cute Wisconsin accent and we usually have about a minute conversation then they say " Oh no thank you, we found Jesus and we are solid! But good luck to you!" The weirdest thing for me to get used to is our lessons. Because most people don't let us into there house we have a technique to still teach them a lesson. We teach a principle (which is easy) we make a commitment (usually visit Mormon.org) then we ask if we can say a prayer with them. People here will pray with you in the middle of the street! I was more freaked out then the person we talked to the first time that happened! But that is how most of our lessons go. Crazy! But I love that people will do that!

I was actually thinking about the dress and leaning more towards black... I don't know. Do whatever you want to! And snacks are fine to send! You can do salty and sweet! Haha my comp eats like a mouse! She throws so many things away! But it is all good :) The only bad thing about her which is perfectly fine :) I love her! No contention yet! Which is great! We actually listened to that talk today while cleaning! He is good! God is good! I love this work! I wish I could be better, I am trying hard though to be the best I can be! Hey if you want to send any of that BYU-I stuff to me ;) haha jk! We have our tornado siren go off every Thursday to test it. Its pretty cool and loud. I'll have to pray extra hard during tornado season! Haha I think back to a kid when I was absolutely terrified of tornadoes and could hardly sleep! But I don't think I will be like that at all! Even with the hard winds and storms we have been having I sleep like a baby at night. I feel good here. It is home and I love it! I love serving the Lord! It is such a great calling and I am grateful for it everyday! I feel the spirit feel me and I feel Christ's love for others. It is hard to be a good missionary. I am trying so hard to be better and have more trust in the Savior and his atonement. That is one thing I take away from the phrase the power of the atonement. It isn't just for healing from sin. It is Christ with us to lift up our burdens, our fears, our doubts and carry us through them. I would not have the power to wake up everyday and do all of this without the Savior, I am nothing without him. I am just a little girl. But with his power and can be a representative of him. Speak his words to his people. Everyday I am in awe that he will let me. It is all up to me in having faith in him and asking!

Sorry if this letter was all over the place! My mind is all over the place! I am doing well! I love it!
Lots and lots and lots of love!!

OoXxOxxoxXOXo!
Sister Trent!

Sister Packer and me

By the way. If you ever want to send me links to really cool talks on lds.org I can print them off. We do service at a senior center so they let us use their computer lab for free! We do lots of service! I don't know if I mentioned that. We serve lunch here at the senior center and play games and what not. We help at a museum. Most of our investigators aren't too interested or the people who gave us refereals don't want us to "preach" We have to respect their wishes so we start off most of our friendships with service, like Ammon. A couple of them are getting interested. There is one and she is like this crazy cat lady, who is super nice btw but I say that because she has 13 cats! She makes us clean everything with vinegar because she can't do chemicals but she finally started reading the BOM! There is also Sally and we are helping her unpack her house. She is really old and can't lift anything. She is also slowly progressing. That is how most of our investigators are. Very slow. But we are touching their hearts so it is all good :)