Nicholas's second email received on New Year's Day 2013

Oh how my God loves me!! Earlier this week I was feeling really down on myself because the language wasn't coming as fast as I wanted it to and I was just put into a bad mood and such. Not twenty four hours after writing that all in a letter to you everything suddenly turned toward what I needed to hear to make me feel better. From a talk I watched Sunday be David A. Bednar to a spiritual thought in class where I started to highlight the wrong scripture. The wrong scripture I started to highlight was Doctrine and Covenants 29:5 which is about being happy. It just helped me so much and it just amazes me that with the billions of people in the world that have much larger problems than me He still has time to pay attention to me and to what I need. So since Sunday I've been in the best of moods. We're teaching two people at the same time now and then also one of my favorite teachers here (who's not technically our teacher but he comes when we have time to ourselves to help us out) helped us for door approaches. So last night was the first time that I experienced a door being slammed in my face halfway through a sentence. It was fun though and I learn a lot from him. Have you been getting the letters that I've sent by mail? There's been a few and I hope they are going through. Christmas in the MTC was great. Greg Olsen the painter came and talked about some of his paintings which was neat. I was given some advice by a man in my branch presidency for big obsticals that I have to overcome. He said to never look more than a day ahead and never look less than a week behind. He told me that for the language so to create goals to achieve but then make sure to look back and see how far I've come. Just another one of the things that helped me more than that person knows. How's everything at home? I had a dream about Penny last night which was kind of interesting. Nothing really happened except that I came back and she wasn't afraid of me. I finally met someone here that served in Lyon and I'm excited to talk to him about the people and the work. I like my district. We've turned into a close group and it's weird that that happened in only a couple weeks. Friday I have to make an appearance at the French Consolate in order to pick up my Visa and hopefully my passport too. The class next to mine was here a few weeks ahead of me and the advice they gave me is to not smile and wave at the people behind the glass because they think that you're a terrorist or something. Oh well. They're also paying for lunch for us which is going to beat the food they serve here, that's for sure. One of the other Elders is leaving today for Washington DC who has had lots of fun with my district. He's speaking French and got here nine weeks ago so he spoke pretty fluently but the rest of his district already left so during class it was only him and the teacher which must help a ton. It's also really funny to see how the guys here (teachers and elders) try not to flirt with the sisters but they just can't help it. All the teachers do it because most of the sisters are their age and share something in common with them and the elders do it probably mostly due to the fact that they're nineteen year old boys. I think I've done pretty good but to someone who is trying not to only someone on the outside could tell me if I was or if I wasn't. Well my time's up and I've got to get back to my laundry. I love you guys and miss seeing you. I'll send home my memory card soon because I can't figure out how to put them on the 

email because the computers here are weird. Till next week.

-Nicholas