Hello family,
Things are still going good at the MTC. We had
another very long week, but I guess it was long in a good way. After a
while, all the days just started blending together so this might seem
like a very unorganized letter. Last Tuesday we saw L. Tom Perry, he was
speaking to us because of the huge mission president training thing
that happened last week here. There were 10 apostles in the room,
everyone except Boyd K. Packer and Robert D. Hales (for health reasons). The
talk was a lot of statistics about the church and then a testimony.
Sister Stay (our Polish teacher, and our new
"investigator", Ola) has been doing a great job at teaching us. I feel
like the progression is slow, at least for me, and for some reason
whenever I can't think of a word in Polish I tend to use Spanish. She
did say something reassuring though, she says that in Poland they pride
themselves in how difficult their language is and they have a lot of
respect for someone who is honestly trying to learn it so they really
try to listen and help you out when you speak broken Polish to them. She
said they are not afraid of correcting you, but they are generally very
patient and just want to help you speak it correctly. That's good
because I don't know how much Polish I will honestly know when we leave
the MTC.
Our time as zone leaders has been interesting. We got a
new district on Wednesday and are getting a new one this Thursday, so
we have to miss a lot of class time and study time for orientations and
leadership training meetings. Luckily we were only assigned as zone
leaders for three weeks, so we have just 2 to go.
Our branch presidency is awesome. President Jones is
the most loving man in the whole world. Then Brother Stice (look him up,
he is a high up at the BYU business school), he is really intense but
loving in his own special way. It took our district a while to warm up
to Stice, but I liked him from the start.
Yesterday was amazing. We had a great fast and
testimony meeting in the morning, the spirit was so strong there. Then
for our evening devotional we had a man named Ted Gibons come and tell
us the Joseph Smith story through the eyes of Dr. Willard Richards. He
is an author and storyteller and gave an amazing, descriptive, and
heartfelt version of the story from the time that they were chased out
of Kirtland to the martyrdom in Carthage. When he finished, our closing
hymn was Praise to the Man. Everyone spontaneously rose out of their
seats to sing without any direction (which I have been told by some 12
weekers that they have never seen that before), it was so powerful, it
felt like angels were singing with us. Seriously, that moment was
indescribable.
The food is still mediocre... The chocolate milk is
still good. I have not lost or gained much weight from what I can tell.
Today we tried the "tower challenge" where your district is supposed to
eat an entire tower of cereal, until we were told that the cereal was
too expensive to be doing that.
Something that is funny
is that the solo sister in our district is like an exact replica of
Hannah. Same height, same build, totally athletic, and addicted to
chocolate milk and ice cream... It's weird.
My companion's name is Benjamin Clark Tingey (Ben
Tingey). Our room mates are Alex Cieslak, and John Weir (he gets dear
Johned almost every day).
I still need to send
you my memory card, I will probably do that today or tomorrow since I
have extras with me. Some of the people in our district thought it would
be a good idea if you shared our pictures on the missionary mom
site. We can't listen to music here at the MTC, but I was wondering if
the Sister Hazel christmas album and other Christmas music would be
mission appropriate, maybe I can send the micro SD card home and you
could put some of that on.
I am anxiously looking forward to Poland, and hope that I get this language down better.
I
am out of time, sorry. I love you all, I pray for you everyday, and I
am doing great here. How are things at home? Are the animals ok? Erik
still doing ok? Did the Welles ever come back? Can't wait to hear from
you.
No comments:
Post a Comment