First of all HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BECCA and
a big thank you to Sister Brownell, Allison, Katie, Annie, Jake, and
everyone else who sent me wonderful dearelders. I LOVE hearing from all
of you and receiving all my missionary friends emails via dear elder.
Annie: Of course you had to camp on the side of the
road and got a ticket. Something adventurous always happens when we go
camping with that group.
Allison: Thanks for the advice! It made me so excited to get out to the country!
Sister Brownell: your letter made me laugh soo hard. Its so good to hear how everyone is doing!
Katie: Expect to receive a long handwritten reply!
Jake:
this is me mentioning your letter in my email. I expect you to keep my
kaka jersey in good shape because I wnat to get it back after my mission
if you want me to buy you a messey one. :)
Mom: Thank you thank you for the shirt! It works and
I will be wearing it tomorrow! Unfortunately, the tarts did not make it
in good shape. It was more of a big fruit and lime ball of tart, but my
companion got a cute package of fun stuff for conference and so we had
delicious cinnamon rolls instead. Perishable food probably isn't a good
thing to send because we have no way to refrigerate it. Also my friend
Kara Henderson came into the MTC so if you could look her up on my
facebook and see if she has a blog or an email list i would love her
emails too! I know thats a lot of missionary emails so if you can't find
it that's fine. I'll probably get to see her around a lot anyway. I
didn't bring my WC shirt with me so its just in one of those big bins in
the garage. I don't know which one though.... Oh and my companion is
kyrst's age and she lived in helaman halls at BYU last year and she will
go there afterwards too
Every week I feel like
there are soo many big and fun things to talk about that I don't even
know where to start. A bit of interesting news, the district that lived
in our room before us did go to Argentina on tourist visas, but another
group of Argentine missionaries in our building that leaves Monday has
been reassigned to all over the states like we expected. They said that
they heard the 'tourist visa trial' might be over so we will just have
to see what happens to us! Really anything could happen but i probably
won't know until the Thursday before I leave. On Monday my companion and
I will be the only sisters in the zone and the only sisters in our
room. Our zone will only have fifteen people until we get a new district
on Wednesday, but we are supposed to get three new sisters then. Also, I
am the newly called sister training leader! I guess its like being the
zone leader for the sisters, but until the new sisters get here, it
basically just means that I get to go to a lot of extra meetings on
Sundays.
The choir has been a HUGE blessing in my life
already. Nothing can bring the spirit stronger and faster than 300
sister missionaries singing a medley of Go Forth in Faith and As Sisters
in Zion. Be prepared to have your socks knocked off tomorrow. Also, by a
miracle my companion was able to sing in the choir too! She is a great
singer, but didn't have any experience in choirs so she didn't get
picked initially, but I encouraged her to ask the director if she could
be on the alternates list. She was 7th in line so we didn't expect
anything, but out of nowhere a group of sisters got their visas and left
so now she gets to sing with me! Its so much fun to be experiencing it
together. There are always two members of the General Relief Society
board at our rehearsals and a couple of times they have taken the chance
to walk through the rows and personally talk to each of us. It has been
so fun getting to know them and feel how much love the leaders of the
church have for us!
Another amazing thing that we found out this week is
that our district is one of twenty districts chosen to pilot the
training course for the church's new policy on missionaries using media
for missionary work. We have been sending emails to our investigators to
remind them of meetings and bear our testimony, and this week we
learned that we actually get to skype members from Argentina twice a
week to practice teaching in spanish! No missionaries in the MTC have
EVER had this opportunity and it is sooo cool! We already skyped with a
guy from Bia Blanca and encourage him to bring a non member friend to
conference. His accent wasn't even hard to understand and he understood
what we were saying to him! We were also told, that soon the members
will start bring real investigators to our skype meetings for us to
teach. I'm a little nervous to not have the safety net of knowing that
if I mess up, its just my teacher pretending to be an investigator, but
it will be exciting! The church also sends us snap shots of spanish
questions they receive on the mormon.org
facebook page and we get to respond to them. We have to fill out all
sorts of surveys about our experience with using media and everything we
do is closely monitored, but it is so amazing that we get the chance to
help the church learn how to best use media training for future
missionaries!
We had an amazing devotional from Elder Clarke from
the seventy. I still think that is awesome that we get to hear from a
general authority twice a week. They have all been members of the
seventy so far, but hopefully we will get an apostle before I leave!
Elder Clarke talked a lot about exact obedience, but he also told a
story about a family that met the missionaries in passing once, and for
years later had waited for the missionaries to knock on their door and
teach them. Whenever they saw the missionaries in the neighborhood, they
would sit at their table with the bible and hope and wait for them to
knock on their door, but for whatever reason, it took the missionaries
THREE YEARS to finally knock on the door. He talked about the importance
of listening to the spirit. Although it didn't have a lot to do with
it, I felt soooo strongly in that moment that there were specific people
waiting especially for me to teach them the gospel. It made me so much
more motivated to work hard while I'm here so that I can be prepared
when I meet those people.
My spanish gets better and better every day! I still
know the most in my district and I spend a lot of time helping the
elders with vocab and conjugations, but I know that the reason spanish
is coming so easily has nothing to do with me. It is 100 percent
Heavenly Father and the spirit. When we teach lessons, we come up with a
general outline in English, study some necessary vocab and then we go
in and teach something completely different. When the investigators ask
questions, answers just pop into my head and when i don't know how to
say them, spanish words just pop into my head. Not understanding spanish
from the beginning has helped us to take time when we speak and listen
for those promptings. Its really amazing to see how it all works! We
also learned through a bad experience that you can NEVER teach the same
exact lesson to two different investigators. We wanted to teach the
restoration of the gospel to both of our investigators, so we went in to
the first lesson and did fantastic! The spirit was sooo strong and we
were able to address all of his concerns. We decided that since it went
so well, we would just do the same thing for the other investigator.
Yeah, rookie mistake. It completely bombed. We left feeling like we just
confused him more, but we learned our lesson and we have completely
personalized lessons planned for both of them now. I also have the
entire first vision in Joseph Smith's words memorized in spanish and it
was so cool to recite it in a lesson and feel the spirit rush into the
room.
Some more random events; I hosted new missionaries
for the first time this week! It was kind of hard to watch them say
goodbye to their families, but once I got them through the doors, it was
a blast. It reminded me how much I really do love the MTC and how
exciting it is to be here. I was hoping to host Sister Henderson (a BYU
roomate of mine going to Denmark), but I did get to see her this
morning! She is the only Danish speaking sister in the entire MTC and so
she doesn't have a companion. Its called being a solo sister. Instead
of having a companion, she just has to be with someone at all times so
she just tags along with other companionships in her zone and she has to
teach her lessons with a companionship of elders in her zone. Wierd.
I'm so glad I have a companion. Also, I hurt my leg playing foursquare
at gym. It wasn't bad, it was just sore and hard to walk on for a day
and then it was fine. I think Jakie asked what we do for exercise time.
We play a little basketball and volleyball, but our zone is really into
foursquare. Its funny how intense the game gets and we get a huge line
of people wanting to play every day. I felt a little dumb when people
asked me what I did to my leg and I had to say that it was playing
foursquare, but esta bien.
Anyway, thats all for today! keep sending dearelders and look for me on tv tomorrow!
Hermana Millett
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