Elder Troy Hicks: 1 month out! Way too fast!

This month has felt like the slowest month of my life as well as the fastest i have no idea how to explain that except by saying "with a great sense of purpose comes an altered sense of time!" my purpose is awesome and this past month has flown by! i love, and i mean love getting letters! so this week as a zone we set a goal to be exactly obedient. i am zone leader right now and we went to each district in our zone and we talked to them about the rules of quiet time and the time to be in bed! and the past 2 nights we were all in our rooms with our doors closed at 10 15 and also everybody was in bed by 10 30! it was awesome! these simple acts of obedience brought us revelation. each night we do this we always recieve more revelation! As a zone we started talking about the time we go to bed. and the effect of going to bed at the right time. one elder told me, the difference between going to bed at 10 30 and 10 36 is night and day! when we go to bed at 10 30 the lord is bound to give us our needed rest! it is so cool to see the lord follow thourgh with those promises! we love being obedient, even if it is hard sometimes! also a new district came in yesterday and we welcomed them into their room and into our zone. i remember when i first got here and how it felt and i remembered to treat them with real and absolute love. i still look up to our zone leaders that led us the day i came into the MTC! i even remeber their names, i hope i can have that impact on our new elders and Hermanas in our district!
about a week until i figure out where i will be reassigned and if i am reassigned i will be able to call you and tell you where i am going so we will see what happens! This is super fun and if i apply myself i can feel the spirit all the time! it is so cool and such an awesome feeling! I love this gospel and i love being in the MTC! it is so fun in here!
In this life it is so hard to keep your mind focused on the right thing all the time.. do you ever ask yourself how do i combat each and every bad thought? well even if you don't... i do! and elder Clawson told me a good way to combat this.. he told a story by Elder Packer.. in this story Elder Packer had dug a side path off of a bigger stream, and when he did this the stream would alway get to high and one part of it would break... and when it would break he would go run over there and fill back in that part and build it back up with dirt... but then another part would break and he would fill it back in with dirt and then anouther part broke! he was so confused.. no matter how many times he fixed the dirt it would keep breaking until his dad told him to continue digging and have the path go back into the stream and tflow would be constant and not overflow!
this is just like how abd thoughts work.. instead of trying to combat each and every bad thought and while you combat one bad thought another one comes up.. replace that bad thought with a good thought and no matter how hard satan tries to put in bad thoughts he won't be able to because you replaced it with a good thought. this helped me a lot to keep my mind on my purpose each and every day! and even when i tjhink something bad about somebopdy i can replace that thought with a good thought immediatly!

i am so glad the house is looking good, and i am glad that you guys are happpy each day!

Also dad asked me how the Elder Holland talk changed my life... He said in the talk " I hate it when missionaries say 'i can't wait to get back to real life'. they have no clue what they are talking about" and then he got very serious and said" this is as real as life is going to get" and with that it hit me that this is the most important thing i can do righ tnow and no matter how hard i work... no matter how much I try my mission is still going to tick away at the same constant speed! it is going to be gone at the same time! so how much harder should io work! i only have 23 mnths left. i love you so much! and i want to hear more of what is going on at home!
con amor!!!, Elder Hicks!