Week 6

Whhhhooooooaaaaaaahhhhh Nelly!!!!! Wait a second......18 days? What?!?! You mean to say that I get to go to Deutschland in 18 days? Cool....No really....that's AWESOME!!!!! We are so excited to be the oldest missionaries now and will be getting ready to leave soon enough. On Wednesday, we got to be hosts. Elder Clark and I (still companions) got to do traffic control. I got to see every car as it pulled in and left. It's interesting seeing the other side of the drop off and different reactions of the parents and siblings. I even saw my old RA and his family dropping off his younger brother. I had my audition today. It went pretty well. I sang This Is The Christ and they told me that I should check my mailbox for an invitation to sing at a meeting some time in the future. I'm glad to have the opportunity to sing at some point in the MTC. I don't really care which meeting I get, it will be fun. I'm excited to get those cookies. That will be awesome. The only other thing I can think of that you could get me is my text book from Bro. Marsh's class that I took last semester. It's Harmony of the 4 Gospels and the Joseph Smith Translation. It would be soooo helpful in cross referencing things. I'm soooo excited for these next couple of weeks. I hope everything is great at home and that everything is sunshine and rainbows. Have a good week.

Week 5

Yo! Guten TAAAAAAAAG!!!!!!!!!! Pretty good week. There's not a lot of things to say though. Everything is going as normal. We are going to be the oldest missionaries in the Zone next week. I've switched over to being the senior companion, but it's not a really big deal. As always we're just chugging along doing our thing with missionary studying. I got to go to a broadcast of Music and the Spoken Word on Sunday. It was great. I keep getting more and more excited to go to Germany as the days/weeks go by. I'm going to be singing This Is The Christ for my devotional audition. Hopefully they will like it. I tried out the higher ending while practicing. It came out pretty well, but I'm not feeling good enough about it to put it in for the audition. I'm excited though. I don't really have much else to say. I hope everything is going good at home. Anyone is welcome to send me a letter if they would like, I will write them back.

Alles Liebe,

Elder Neumayer

Week 4

Oh boy! These weeks just keep on flying by. I can't believe that we're already back to P-tag (as they say). We've been speaking a lot of Deutsch in the past few days (weeks). We keep getting awesome people at our evening devotionals and I love going to every one of them and learning so much. Everytime I go I want to be a better missionary and study harder and just to be the best I can be. We have been having a lot of fun with the new Elders and Sisters in our zone. They are all pretty cool. There's even a Sister who was a vocal performance major at a college on the East Coast. We talked a little about music. I enjoyed it very much. Some time soon I'll be auditioning for a solo at one of the devotionals. I am thinking about doing either an arrangement of "The Morning Breaks and Hark All Ye Nations" or and arrangement of "O Home Beloved" or "This Is The Christ". Just as I was starting this letter, I happened to meet Sister Huntington (as in John's daughter). It was really interesting to meet her, she seems pretty cool. German is always getting better. I have so much fun with it. I am memorizing a lot of scriptures in German and that is interesting. I hope that all is well at home. All is well here and I'm growing a lot every day. Have a great week!

Week 3

Hello!!! I really don't like this whole 30 minutes thing. It really puts a damper on my creative writing ability. Just kidding. This week has been crazy fast. It seems like just yesterday we were having our first P-day. Now I'm nearly a whole month into my mission. It's craaaaaaazzy!!!! I'm learning all kinds of wonderful things. My teachers have decided to change our class a little bit and we have now moved over to them speaking nothing but Deutsch with us. Surprisingly, it actually is helping us learn better than we did in English. It's weird. Thanks for the pie. I had some and so did some of the other Elders. I can't access any other sites like Facebook but you can go ahead and sign me up I guess. Tell Nathan Brown that he's pretty much the most awesome person ever. It's pretty much been the same temperature the whole time I've been here and it hasn't been too cold. It actually rained a couple of the days. It's just moving along. We got a bunch of new Elders and Sisters but none for Alpine. The other Alpiners left this week and we miss them but we'll be seeing them really soon anyway. I hope everything is going well. Tell everyone I say hi back at home (especially grandma). Have a great week!

Week 2

Sooooooo much to do. But there's also so many awesome things to do. Elder Holland came and spoke to us Tuesday evening!!!!!!!!!!!! He is probably the most awesome speaker to listen to live. He made me want to be the best missionary that I can be. He brought up the fact that Preach My Gospel was created to replace the memorized lessons, not for the benefit of the investigators but for the benefit of the missionaries. We are supposed to convert ourselves before we can go convert the people of the world. That's why we are here at the MTC. I'm so glad to be here and that I got to hear that message by one of the finest speakers in the church. The German work is going well and I'm having so much fun learning how to preach the gospel auf Deutsch. I'm still trying to find ways to sing here since it is so music-less. I'm probably going to be singing "Im Abendrot" by Franz Schubert in a few weeks for Sacrament meeting. I hope it works out. I also want to try out for a special musical number at one of the devotionals or group meetings. That would be fun. I love the MTC!

My companion is Elder Clark from Brigham City. He is pretty cool. Our whole district has a whole lot of fun together. Please keep sending me letters. Also, tell Karen to write to me, I haven't heard from her yet. Ich weiss dass, das Evangelium Jesu Christi wahr ist. Ich weiss dass, Joseph Smith ein Prophet war und dass das Buch Mormon wahr ist. Ich bin soooo glucklich hier zu sein. Have a great week.

Week 1

Everything is so awesome at the Missionary Training Center. I have been having so much fun learning about the gospel and especially learning all of it in German. The district that I am in is all "Alpiners", there are five of us; one sister and four elders. We are also very close to the other Alpine district which has two elders and one sister. Our zone is all Deutschers and we have a lot of fun together. There are a lot of things to learn and there isn't any downtime in our schedule. It makes for being pretty tired at the end of each day. On the second day they already had us out bearing our testimonies to random Elders and Sisters, auf Deutsch. It was awesome. It's freezing here but it's just getting us ready for Deutschland. Sunday is the best in the M.T.C. because you get to go to meetings instead of going to class and doing personal study. It is also the only day that you get to watch movies (church movies but still...). There is much to do! My address here is:

Elder Andrew Neumayer
MTC Mailbox #133
ALP-GER 0228
2005 North 900 East
Provo, UT 84604-1793

Please let everyone know that you can send letters to that address. I have only 30 minutes per week on the computer so written letters would be great! I'm having so much fun here!

The End of a Few Things and Life Lessons From Sarastro

As this new semester begins, I look toward the future and how I will very likely not be at BYU and will be off serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That is one of the most exciting things to think about. This is also going to be the last time that I will sing in a BYU choir for two years, which I'm sure I will miss terribly. This semester, BYU will also see something that has never and likely will never again be seen, namely me singing a role typically associated with a basso profundo. With plenty of low Fs, the role of Sarastro has plenty of pitfalls for someone who is really a baritone, like me. However, I seem to do it well enough at the moment that no one is particularly afraid for me. I do get the feeling though, that the second I step off the stage at my last performance, I will magically turn into a baritone. It's like God has been holding my voice in the basement for just long enough to do this role and as soon as it's over, it's over. I'm plenty thankful for this role though. It's certainly not a role that any other opera company in the world would give me and I get to experience something that many baritones don't come across very often: a role that's neither comic relief nor the villain. There's a lot to be learned from the benevolent leader Sarastro. He rules with absolute power and yet he lets truth (Wahrheit), charity (Wohltätigkeit), and goodness (Tugend) guide his actions. All people and especially leaders should try to be like this great leader. Could I have have hoped for a better role to be my last before serving my mission? I don't think so.