Week #8

Buenas Dias!

        This morning has been good thus far! We had the opportunity to go to the temple which is always nice. I hadn't been in two weeks because Hermana Cottrell was sick last week. When I was in the dressing room I saw a friend from BYU, Dillon! She is a Physical Science Teaching major, so we had a lot of education classes together. She, apparently, has her mission call to New York! So that was so fun to see a friend. She doesn't come into the MTC until way after I leave, so I probably won't see her again, but it was fun nonetheless!

         This week has been a little weird in that we are now the oldest district in our zone. I still have two and half weeks left here... but the rest of my district only has a week and half left! (because they don't have visitor's center training!) So it's just been weird realizing how fast it's coming! At first it was really freaking me out... I'm not ready to be thrown into the real world! ha ha   But then during one of our lessons this week nuestro maestro told us some fun stories about his mission and it just got me really excited to get out there! Which is good... but kind of bad as well because I still have a couple of weeks here...

        Last week we got a new district that had  three  hermanas. It was fun to have new hermanas... but we could pretty soon see that their companionship was pretty difficult and something wasn't right. One of the Hermanas threatened suicide a couple of times...  she got sent home. The mission is not the place to be dealing with issues that serious... but it was still really sad to see her get sent home.

         I got my language results back... they weren't absolutely fantastic, but I'm already past the point that you have to be at to go out to the field, so that was exciting. We baptized both of our investigators this week which was exciting. Now we are working on door approaches and that kind of thing.

         Relief Society here is totally the best! We always have a fantastic speaker come and talk to us. This week it was Mary N. Cook, the First Counselor in the Young Women's General Presidency. She shared the Mutual theme this year, " Arise and Shine Forth," from  D&C 115:5. She talked about the enabling power of the atonement. At the very end of her talk she shared the Mormon message "When Lightening Strikes." It is absolutely fantastic and you should all go watch it. Also if you watch it, you will understand why what I'm about to tell you is so intense. The lights were dimmed because we were watching this on the projector, and in the middle of the clip a sister fell to the ground and had a seizure. (The Mormon Message is about being worthy to use the priesthood at all times so that you can help when you need to.) Sister Cook's husband and a security guard gave the girl  a blessing while the ambulance was on the way. It was just really interesting the whole timing of it. It was a neat/scary experience.

      The Sunday night fireside was given by Richard I. Heaton who is the Administrative Director of the MTC. He had the newest converted missionaries form a panel and just asked them questions about how church attendance played a role in their conversion. It was so incredible to see how people that were baptized 13 months ago are already serving missions. How cool.

      The Tuesday night devotional was by Don R. Clark of the Seventy. He talked about tons of things, but my favorite was talking about being happy on the mission. He said that the moment you begin to love the people in the area you are serving more than you love yourself... that is when you will be happy on your mission. I'm so excited to get out to Mesa!

       Yesterday we got to "host" new missionaries, where you greet them as they get dropped off, get them checked in, to their dorm, their textbooks and meet their companion. All that kind of stuff. It was so fun to see all of these new missionaries and to just tell them about how awesome the MTC is. So fun.

       Our Valentine's Day here at the MTC was actually seriously fun. We (my threesome) made goodie bags for the eight Elders in our district, and then we decorated an envelope for each of them, and wrote notes to each of them and put talks and quotes in them and gave them to them. They of course didn't do anything for us (we didn't expect them to! haha) but they felt so bad... when we got back from gym they had crazy decorated our desks. It was fun. I'll send pictures! We were like okay that was cute of them... but like we knew they had done it because they felt bad that they hadn't done anything. But then later that night as we were heading back to our dorms they gave us each a t-shirt. The second week that we were here all of our Elders had gotten matching t-shirts from the bookstore and wore them to gym time. So it was like our whole district... except the hermanas... So we had kind of given them a hard time, but we were kidding. Anyway, they had bought us the matching shirts and all of them signed the back of it. It was pretty cute and actually thoughtful. We were surprised. hahah. But we have good elders! It'll be sad to leave them!!

     Anyway, I am doing really well! Missing you all. I am happy to be here. I said that one day to Hermana Cottrell... and really meant it. I'm happy to be here. It's incredibly difficult. But I'm learning tons.

 

Love Love Love

Hermana Holly Larson